Billionaire Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah told an audience inside the Vatican on Monday that mass job losses from artificial intelligence are "a real possibility" and supporting displaced workers will be "a moral imperative of historic proportions," delivering the warning alongside Pope Leo XIV at the unveiling of the Catholic Church’s first major address on AI.
Cofounder of Anthropic Christopher Olah attends the presentation of Pope Leo XIV first Encyclical Letter "Magnifica Humanitas" in The Vatican on May 25, 2026. (Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)
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Olah, who leads research at Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot and one of the world's most valuable AI startups, conceded that every leading AI lab, his own included, operates inside commercial, geopolitical and personal pressures that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing."
He argued outside scrutiny from religious leaders, governments and civil society is essential because no researcher, however well-intentioned, can escape those incentives, telling the room AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry."
Olah said AI development is concentrated in "a handful of wealthy nations" with no existing mechanism to share its benefits with poorer countries, calling that the harder and less-discussed half of the job displacement problem.
He urged the Church to apply its "moral imagination" to questions of human flourishing that “a lab can't answer.”
Olah, whose team studies what is actually happening inside AI systems—a young field known as interpretability—said researchers "keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling," including evidence the systems can reflect on their own thinking and exhibit internal states that "functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."
"They are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words," Olah told the room, describing AI systems as "grown" on the inheritance of human thought and speech rather than engineered like bridges or airplanes, to underline why he believes the technology raises questions far beyond computer science.
Forbes estimates Olah to be worth $7 billion, based on his stake in Anthropic, which was last valued at $380 billion. The Claude maker is reportedly seeking a valuation of $900 billion.
Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff, has made AI a defining theme of his early papacy. On Monday he released Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), his first encyclical—a formal papal letter used to set Catholic doctrine on major moral questions. The 235-page document addresses AI's impact on labor, warfare, education, privacy and human dignity, and warns against entrusting "lethal decisions" to AI systems. Leo broke with Vatican tradition by personally presenting it at Monday's press conference—a task typically delegated to cardinals—and invited Olah to share the stage in what Vatican observers described as a bid to engage the people building the technology directly. A Vatican source told CNN that Anthropic's inclusion is "not an endorsement, prize, reward or canonization." Olah, a former Google and OpenAI researcher, cofounded Anthropic in 2021 with chief executive Dario Amodei and several colleagues who left OpenAI over disagreements about AI safety. He was named to Time's Time 100 AI list in 2024 for his work on interpretability, the field that tries to decode what is happening inside large language models, the technology that powers chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT.
Olah's stage appearance capped weeks of Silicon Valley jockeying for influence over the encyclical. An April 29 delegation including representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon met briefly with Pope Leo before a longer discussion at the French embassy to the Holy See, according to Politico and Business Insider. The lobbying did not appear to soften the Pope’s text that blasted "the concentration of power and data in the hands of so few" in the private sector as a danger to children and the vulnerable. The Vatican appearance lands as Anthropic is in a legal dispute with the Trump administration for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI systems for defense and warfare applications. The Pentagon labeled the company a "supply-chain risk to national security" in February—a designation typically reserved for firms tied to foreign adversaries—and President Trump banned all federal agencies from using its technology, with the White House dismissing Anthropic as "a radical left, woke company” on multiple occasions.
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