Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah is scheduled to speak.
Verena Rieser#1323
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.html
Positive users thank the Pope for urging protection of human dignity amid AI advances, while negative users attack the Vatican's ties to Anthropic and dismiss the encyclical as misguided or anti-progress.
this meeting happened already. what came of this?
The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was released and presented May 25 at the Vatican, with Chris Olah as one speaker among cardinals and theologians. ¹
It urges AI regulation, "disarming" the tech from military/commercial dominance, worker protections, and global equity, while Olah called for external moral voices beyond lab incentives; no formal Anthropic partnership or further actions have followed yet.
Are there other times in History when the Vatican or Pope has endorsed or commented on emergent technologies?
Yes. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical *Rerum Novarum* addressed the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution’s factories, mechanization, and labor technologies. ¹² Pope Pius XII repeatedly condemned atomic weapons in the 1940s, calling the bomb “the most terrible weapon that the human mind has ever conceived” and urging bans on its use. ³⁴
Pope Francis and earlier pontiffs also issued statements on computers, automation, and AI ethics.
NOW - Pope XIV says the church and Anthropic, will work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence."
In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
the pope and anthropic's co-founder just stood together at the vatican to release "magnifica humanitas," the first ever catholic teaching on AI
yes, you read that right. the full ceremony was 2 hours.
here's the most interesting things for you to know:
1. this is the biggest religious response to AI in history. popes only put out a handful of these huge official letters in their entire time as pope. the fact that one of them is about AI tells you how seriously the church is taking what's coming.
2. small detail with massive meaning: this pope picked the name "leo XIV" on purpose. the last pope named leo was leo XIII back in 1891, and his most famous act was writing the church's response to the industrial revolution. picking the same name is a deliberate signal. this pope sees AI as the new industrial revolution.
3. the catholic church does this every time a major technology reshapes humanity. they wrote "rerum novarum" in 1891 to respond to the industrial revolution. when nuclear weapons threatened the world in the 1960s, they wrote "pacem in terris." climate change and runaway tech got "laudato si" in 2015. now AI gets "magnifica humanitas." they don't issue these often.
4. the pope's main line: "AI needs to be disarmed." he literally compared AI to nuclear weapons. he said the church spent decades pushing for nuclear disarmament because the technology was too dangerous to leave in the hands of a few. he says AI is now in that same category.
5. anthropic co-founder christopher olah told the pope, on stage at the vatican, that anthropic's own research team keeps finding things inside their AI models that "mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."
6. olah's reframe of what AI actually is: these things are grown. they're trained on a structure roughly modeled after the human brain and fed everything humans have ever written. in his own words: "they are made from us, from our words." he said even the people building them don't fully understand what's happening inside.
7. olah publicly admitted that every AI lab, including his own, faces pressure that can conflict with doing the right thing. commercial pressure to keep shipping, competitive pressure from other labs, plus the older pressures of pride and ambition. his solution: we desperately need outside critics with no skin in the game who will tell the labs when they're failing.
8. olah says there are 3 giant questions the AI labs cannot answer alone and the world needs religion and philosophy to step in on:
> how do we make sure poor countries actually benefit from AI? > what does human flourishing even look like in this new world? > and what are these things we're actually building?
9. one of the sharpest lines in the whole encyclical: "the promise of automatic general prosperity often proves illusory." translation: the idea that AI will just make everyone rich on its own is a fantasy. someone has to actually design the system so the benefits get shared.
10. the pope also pulled out a 100-year-old quote: "contemporary man has not been trained to use power well." said by a theologian back in the 1920s. the whole encyclical is basically a long argument that we need to learn how to use this kind of power before it uses us.
11. the pope kept stressing that he doesn't have the technical answers. but he says the church has thousands of years of wisdom on what it means to be human, and that wisdom is exactly what's missing from how we're building AI right now. his closing line: this technology should serve "human flourishing and human dignity, not control consciences."
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at today's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica humanitas."
Read the full text of his remarks: https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical
http://x.com/i/article/2058890887506108416
NOW - Pope XIV says the church and Anthropic, will work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence."
I feel like I'm eating crazy pills when I read the countless bad takes around how the Vatican would have virtually anointed Anthropic.
When if you read the Pope's encyclical it's actually a COMPLETE repudiation of everything Anthropic - and U.S. AI generally - stands for.
Read this part of the encyclical for instance (paragraph 110: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence):
"Finally, I would like to employ the expression 'to disarm,' which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life."
In a nutshell what the Pope is saying is:
1) The "AI race" mentality itself is the disease: there is no "winning it responsibly", we need to stop seeing AI as a way "to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance"
2) Technical dominance and being the most powerful does not give you the right to set the rules
3) AI must be "freed from monopolistic control", opened to scrutiny, and "restored to the plurality of human cultures"
Now compared and contrast it with what Anthropic is officially saying - namely Dario Amodei in his famous essay "Machines of Loving Grace" (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace):
1) Where the Pope says stop the AI race. Dario says win it: "A coalition of democracies [should seek] to gain a clear advantage on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment."
2) Where the Pope says technical power doesn't confer the right to govern. Dario says it does: "This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition's strategy."
3) Where the Pope says free AI from monopolistic control and restore it to the plurality of human cultures. Dario says concentrate it and use it to impose one model: "If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991.'"
These aren't cherry-picked gotchas. This is the central thesis of Dario's essay.
And Anthropic keeps repeating this over and over. On May 14, just days ago, Anthropic published a 5,000-word policy essay titled "2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership" (https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership) urging the US to "lock in a 12-24 month lead" over China by blocking chips, cutting off model access, and ensuring that "democracies, not authoritarian regimes" control AI. They warn that "a lead in frontier AI will enable a widening lead across the full national security technology stack" and urge America not to "squander our advantage."
This is, almost word for word, everything the Pope is condemning in his encyclical.
I'll grant Anthropic one thing: they have an excellent PR team. Turning what's an obvious repudiation into a perceived endorsement is pretty masterful.
But it doesn't mean you have to fall for it...
> … [W]e keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.
> We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will … to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at today's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica humanitas."
Read the full text of his remarks: https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical
This is the biggest PR coup Anthropic could ever have imagined. And I mean that seriously.
Let me explain.
Aside from the fact that Anthropic is very good at presenting itself as a corporation, the recent hiring of Andrej Karpathy marked a new high point. Anthropic is showing the world that it not only employs the best researchers, but also, and especially, those who are popular within the community.
However, Anthropic also thrives on its self-imposed moral standards, some of which literally come at a price that Anthropic has repeatedly paid. As is well known, Anthropic recently had serious problems with the Department of War regarding the use of Claude for autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused, and OpenAI and Google were awarded the contract; Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk.
This moral standing, however, is something Anthropic has always emphasized. Whether it's Dario Amodei repeatedly warning of the dangers of the massive wave of unemployment (which they themselves are causing), or the potential for AI to be instrumentalized for wars.
This moral stance is now paying off handsomely. The head of the Catholic Church, with its 1.4 billion members, has thanked Anthropic and announced an ethical collaboration. Church members are, by definition, moral people who live according to the ethical principles of their faith. The Pope has now consecrated a single AI company as ethically legitimate, thus essentially granting his followers sacred legitimacy to use Claude as the only morally correct model.
I mean this seriously; let this thought sink in. The Pope says Anthropic is ethically and morally on the right side and is working with them. Who do you think the billions of Catholic believers now prefer? OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic? The answer is clear.
Therefore, today was the biggest victory Anthropic could have hoped for. And I believe that their moral stance will literally pay off.
Forget Claude Code. Christ Claude it is.
Joke aside: In this regard, the benefit for Anthropic is virtually incalculable in monetary terms - and I mean that quite literally.
The Catholic Church has 1.4 billion members worldwide. The fact that its Supreme Head has personally thanked Anthropic for their excellent collaboration generates countless new customers.
It is the best form of external publicity imaginable, essentially endorsed by His Holiness himself. I believe this is something that many people simply do not grasp.
This is utterly ridiculous clickbait.
What actually happened: the Pope released a 235-page encyclical saying AI needs to be "disarmed" and should NOT be used to "secure geopolitical or commercial dominance" (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence).
Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei explicitly advocates using AI to establish "robust military superiority" of the West and publicly dreams of an "eternal 1991" of Western dominance enabled by AI (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace). Anthropic also has $200M in Pentagon contracts in partnership with Palantir, and Claude AI was notably used by the Pentagon to kidnap Maduro (https://www.axios.com/2026/02/13/anthropic-claude-maduro-raid-pentagon).
In other words, Anthropic is doing the exact opposite of what the Pope advocates.
Furthermore, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah - who wasn't there as a partner but as one of six speakers alongside cardinals and theologians - told the room that AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry," and that even well-intentioned researchers operate inside incentives that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing" (https://aleteia.org/2026/05/25/what-did-anthropic-cofounder-say-at-the-encyclical-presentation/)
So he too is saying, essentially, "don't trust us on finding the way." Which is the exact opposite of "working together to find the way for humanity."
In other words this is the perfect example of taking a quote out of context to make it say the exact opposite of what was meant. The Pope said AI companies like Anthropic are going the wrong way. Anthropic's own co-founder said "don't let us define the way." http://Disclose.tv says: "they're announcing they're working together to find the way for humanity." 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
NOW - Pope XIV says the church and Anthropic, will work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence."
Anthropic’s Chris Olah at the Vatican press conference to present Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI: “There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.”
Pope Leo wrote in the encyclical, “The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good.”
JUST IN: Vatican announces that Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical — titled Magnifica Humanitas, on the safeguarding of the human person in the age of AI — will be presented at 11:30am on Monday, May 25, in the Vaticanʼs Synod Hall, in the presence of the Holy Father.
Speakers at the presentation will include:
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith;
Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development;
Professor Anna Rowlands, Political Theology, including Catholic Social Teaching, and theological ethics of human migration, Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, United Kingdom;
Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic (USA) and head of interpretability research for artificial intelligence;
Dr. Leocadie Lushombo, Political Theology and Catholic Social Thought, Jesuit School of Theology / Santa Clara University, California.
Concluding remarks will be delivered by thel Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
The presentation will also include an address by Pope Leo XIV.
Magnifica Humanitas was signed and dated on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum.
The questions posed by AI are bigger than the AI community. We urgently need the world – religions, civil society, academics, governments – to participate in creating a positive outcome.
I'm glad the Catholic Church is engaging, and honored to speak at the presentation.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.html
HOLY SHIT NEW MODEL INCOMING??
CLAUDE ALMIGHTY
Hold on, so Anthropic now has the cathloic church and god on their side as well? I thought Andrej Karpathy was already the highlight.
From the remarks this morning of Christopher Olah, head of interpretability research and co-founder of Anthropic AI. This is the point that has been the most difficult one to get across to the public; the models are not designed, they are grown.
The link to the Encyclical is here: http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html The PDF in English is here for people that prefer a download: https://assets.ewtnnews.com/en/Magnifica_Humanitas_Full_English.pdf
I have strong feelings about this, but not for a short post. The link to the video is in the thread, and I'll post it again below.
Forget Claude Code. Christ Claude it is.
Joke aside: In this regard, the benefit for Anthropic is virtually incalculable in monetary terms - and I mean that quite literally.
The Catholic Church has 1.4 billion members worldwide. The fact that its Supreme Head has personally thanked Anthropic for their excellent collaboration generates countless new customers.
It is the best form of external publicity imaginable, essentially endorsed by His Holiness himself. I believe this is something that many people simply do not grasp.
Hold on, so Anthropic now has the cathloic church and god on their side as well? I thought Andrej Karpathy was already the highlight.
i did really appreciate this framing of what ai is
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at today's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica humanitas."
Read the full text of his remarks: https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical
@deanwball This is like being mad at John Paul II for writing about peace during the Cold War instead of writing about how humanity should adapt to the nuclear apocalypse
In case you thought religious leaders were gonna advocate for your rights & not the dudes about to make billions with their IPO.
I guess it was only a matter of time when the religion of effective altruism, worshipping so-called artificial general intelligence, merged with entrenched religious institutions.
NOW - Pope XIV says the church and Anthropic, will work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence."
