When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic's founding.

Why Anthropic?

Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: Artificial intelligence models were becoming too powerful to be developed exclusively according to the logic of competition and speed.

Since then, Anthropic has built its public image around the concept of AI safety. The company aims to build not just powerful models, but ones that are controllable and guided by ethical principles. This is where the concept of Constitutional AI comes from: the idea of training systems using a kind of constitution composed of principles and rules, instead of just manually correcting the most risky and dangerous responses.

How the Convergence With the Vatican Began

Olah's presence at the Vatican was obviously not accidental, nor the result of a last-minute symbolic gesture. It was the outcome of a deliberate, long-term effort in which the Vatican has progressively sought to transform itself from a moral observer of technology into a direct interlocutor with the AI industry.

The first major step came in 2020 with the Rome Call for AI Ethics, an initiative promoted by the Pontifical Academy for Life together with Microsoft, IBM, and other international organizations. The goal was to establish a shared foundation of ethical principles for the development of AI, including transparency, inclusion, and accountability.

At the time, the Vatican appeared to be operating primarily in the realm of bioethics and moral questions. In the years that followed, however, the context changed dramatically. The rise of ChatGPT, the struggle for technological leadership between the United States and China, and the growing power of Big Tech gradually convinced the Holy See that the issue was no longer just about tech ethics, but about the very future of humanity.

In this sense, Anthropic has come to be seen by the Vatican as a particularly important interlocutor. Unlike other Silicon Valley companies that have built their reputations primarily around innovation and growth, Anthropic has made AI safety a core part of its identity.

In recent years, the Vatican has followed one specific strand of the technology debate with particular attention: the alignment of AI models.

Olah’s Role

This is where Christopher Olah comes in. Unlike the Amodei siblings, who are more exposed to the media, Olah represents the more theoretical and almost philosophical side of AI research. He is one of the world's best-known researchers on the topic of model interpretability, or the effort to understand what really happens inside increasingly complex neural networks.

On his personal website, Christopher Olah describes himself as someone trying to “transform neural networks into algorithms understandable to human beings.” And it is difficult to imagine a figure more aligned with the core of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical: a reflection centered on the risk of building technologies that become too powerful to be understood, controlled, or governed.

According to various journalistic sources, the contacts between circles close to the Holy See and Anthropic may have intensified right during the global summits on AI safety. The Vatican saw in Anthropic a company at least willing to publicly acknowledge that the problem of artificial intelligence cannot be solved by the technology industry alone.