Vatican Invites Anthropic Co-Founder to Pope's Historic AI Encyclical

Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab driven by the conviction that AI models were becoming too powerful to be developed solely on competition and speed. The company built its public image around AI safety, aiming for controllable models guided by ethical principles. Its Constitutional AI approach trains systems using a constitution of rules rather than manual corrections of risky responses—a philosophy that resonated deeply with the Vatican's concerns about technology embodying a particular worldview.

The convergence began with the 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics, an initiative by the Pontifical Academy for Life with Microsoft and IBM to establish ethical principles like transparency and accountability. As ChatGPT's rise and US-China tech rivalry intensified, the Holy See recognized the issue transcended bioethics into humanity's future. Anthropic emerged as a particularly important interlocutor because it publicly acknowledged that the AI problem cannot be solved by industry alone. Christopher Olah, known for his work on model interpretability—understanding what happens inside neural networks—represented the theoretical side of AI research perfectly aligned with the encyclical's reflection on technologies becoming too powerful to understand or govern. His presence at the May 25, 2026 presentation was the result of long-term, deliberate efforts, with contacts intensifying during global AI safety summits.