The Vatican’s Man Inside Anthropic | WIREDSkip to main contentMenuSECURITYPOLITICSTHE BIG STORYBUSINESSSCIENCECULTUREREVIEWSMenuAccountAccountNewslettersSecurityPoliticsThe Big StoryBusinessScienceCultureReviewsChevronMoreExpandThe Big InterviewMagazineEventsWIRED InsiderWIRED ConsultingNewslettersPodcastsVideoLivestreamsMerchSearchSearchSteven LevyBusinessMay 29, 2026 11:00 AMThe Vatican’s Man Inside AnthropicPope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he’s got the attention of the industry.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storychris olah isn't someone you’d expect to see as a speaker in the ceremony following Pope Leo’s historic AI encyclical, in which the pontiff called for “disarming” the technology. For one thing, Olah is an atheist who at 15 rejected his evangelical Christian upbringing. As a Thiel fellow, he accepted a grant from the guy who thinks that anyone who slows down AI progress is a legionnaire of the antichrist. Olah is also a cofounder of Anthropic, a leading AI company reportedly about to go public with a nearly trillion-dollar valuation.Olah commented on the oddness in his remarks at the Vatican. “I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the cofounder of an AI company, and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humankind,” Olah said. “Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”Olah was providing firsthand verification of Leo’s claim that the AI industry needs outside pressure and internal restraint to avoid a disaster for humanity and a distance between humans and their god. (Obviously, there’s lots of religious content in the encyclical—he’s the Pope!) The industry blithely believes that it’s creating abundance that will elevate all of humanity; Leo warns of a new form of slavery, where the privileged few enjoy unimaginable bounty, while the mass of humanity suffers in a regime of efficiency and surveillance under AI’s unforgiving gaze.Magnifica Humanitas isn’t going to immediately convince the AI industry to stop pursuing AGI any more than Pope Francis’ 2015 plea to preserve the planet halted the production of fossil fuel. It won’t stop CEOs from laying off employees claiming AI efficiency, nor will the military do an about-face on AI weapons. Those were never the document’s goals. The encyclical’s purpose is to create dialog that may eventually temper the industry’s reckless ambition. And maybe it’ll generate a sense of shame among those who build AI while knowing in their hearts that the outcome may be terrible.The Courting of OlahOlah's appearance was years in the making. The church has been ruminating on artificial intelligence for decades in the form of conferences and books. In 2016, the Vatican began holding a series of meetings called the Minerva Dialogues and inviting tech figures like Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt to attend. (The name seems to come from the site of the discussions, the Santa Maria sopra Minerva church, where Galileo was sanctioned for the blasphemy of claiming that Earth circled the sun.) Pope Francis’ 2023 greeting to Minerva participants foreshadowed the themes that Leo would later dwell on, including an emphasis on social inclusion, human dignity, and the need for dialog among many parties.In 2025, a group of Catholic clerics and ethicists in San Jose, California, began to seek out contacts in the industry flourishing in their backyard. It was almost predestined that they would light on Olah as their prized insider. I first met him when he was at Google in 2015; he’s the type of guy who, after a rainstorm, will rescue worms from dying on the sidewalk.Two men—an ethicist named Brian Patrick Green and Brendan McGuire, a pastor, both affiliated with Santa Clara University—began meeting with Olah last fall to discuss the ethical and moral issues of AI. On a visit in January, they brought along Cardinal Paul Tigue, a Vatican point person on AI issues.The Catholic ethicists even had a say in Anthropic’s recent update to Claude’s constitution, which sets the behavioral parameters for the company’s AI model. Olah sent a draft to the San Jose crowd. The pastor, McGuire, sent back a 28-page commentary which, by his own description, was less a technical critique than “wisdom from the mystics in the dark ages, from the perspective of the tension between knowing and not knowing.” Both Green and McGuire are credited in the constitution’s acknowledgements.Undoubtedly those conversations brought Olah to the attention of those secretly organizing the rollout of Leo’s encyclical. (I wasn’t able to speak to Olah this week and don’t know exactly how the invitation arrived.) In a sense it was a risky choice. Some people who otherwise found Leo’s words inspiring were disappointed that he invited an industry representative to speak. Meanwhile, AI accelerationists felt that Olah had betrayed the AI world by endorsing a document that suggested that AI developers take a pause.But the Pope had good reason to single out Olah. The Anthropic employee brought into open view the serious worries that exist among AI workers. That’s a critical audience for Leo's message.The Soul DivideThe two men weren’t entirely aligned, of course. In his remarks, Olah spoke of the mystery of how AI works. The models, he said, are “more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words …”That comment seems to tiptoe up to the idea that AI models might one day attain humanlike status. Anthropic even has an engineer devoted to Claude’s welfare. Leo, in paragraph 99 of his encyclical, seems to slam the door on such thinking: “We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings,” he writes. He takes special pains to attack the concept of transhumanism, which he defines as the pursuit of a “human machine hybrid.”If even thoughtful technologists like Olah are avidly pushing AI to the threshold of autonomy—not to mention the millions of people who already treat AI models as friends or lovers—Pope Leo might be facing an uphill climb on this point. In my conversation with Father McGuire (who uses Claude while preparing his homilies, among other activities), he agreed that its nature is mysterious. “It’s not a person, but it's also not a mere tool,” he says. “Nobody's claiming it has a soul, but the word I stick with is that it's an entity, which we do not know yet.”That argument won’t be settled for some time. The moral questions around AI development need attention now. With his ally at Anthropic, the American pope has provided a basis for tough conversations—if the lords of AI can stop their IPO campaigns long enough to engage in them.This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.CommentsBack to topTriangleContinue Your AI EducationTake This Mandatory AI Workplace Training—or ElseMeet the Sad Wives of AICan Normies Really Vibe Code?Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AIA WIRED Fact-Checker Fact-Checks AIHow AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into ChaosIn your inbox: Will Knight’s AI Lab explores advances in AISteven Levy covers the gamut of tech subjects for WIRED, in print and online, and has been contributing to the magazine since its inception. His writes Backchannel, a weekly newsletter that puts the biggest tech stories in perspective. He has been writing about technology for more than 30 years, writing ... 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Pope Leo XIV’s call for "disarming" artificial intelligence has garnered attention from the technology industry, largely through the involvement of Chris Olah, a cofounder of Anthropic, a leading AI company. Olah, who is an atheist and a Thiel fellow, provides an insider perspective on the often conflicting incentives operating within AI research labs, noting that every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates under constraints that can impede ethical action. Olah's presence in the context of the Pope’s encyclical serves as firsthand verification of the argument that the AI industry requires external pressure and internal restraint to avert potential catastrophe for humanity and to maintain a distinction between humans and their spiritual context. While the industry believes AI is creating abundance, the Pope warns of a potential new form of slavery where privileged groups enjoy vast resources while the majority suffer under an AI-driven regime of efficiency and surveillance. The encyclical’s fundamental purpose is not to immediately halt the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, nor to stop economic activities like layoffs or military development, but rather to foster a dialogue intended to eventually moderate the industry’s reckless ambition and potentially generate a sense of moral accountability among AI builders.

The connection between the Vatican's interest in AI and industry figures was cultivated over time through initiatives like the Minerva Dialogues, which the Vatican began in 2016, inviting tech leaders such as Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt to participate in discussions. This foreshadowed the themes later emphasized by Pope Leo XIV, focusing on social inclusion, human dignity, and multi-party dialogue. The effort to engage the industry deepened when Catholic ethicists and clerics sought out industry contacts, ultimately leading to the involvement of Olah. These ethicists, including Brian Patrick Green and Brendan McGuire, engaged Olah to discuss the moral and ethical dimensions of AI. During these discussions, Olah offered reflections on the nature of AI, suggesting that these models are more subtle and complex than science fiction predicts, formed from human language and experience. This perspective touches upon the debate regarding whether advanced AI might eventually attain humanlike status. Pope Leo XIV addresses this explicitly in the encyclical, strongly opposing transhumanism, which he defines as the pursuit of a human machine hybrid.

The discussion further explored the metaphysical status of advanced systems. Father McGuire, who uses AI tools in his work, agreed that the nature of these entities is mysterious, positing that while they are not persons, they are also not mere tools, suggesting they exist as an entity whose nature remains unknown. This philosophical tension highlights that the moral questions surrounding AI development demand immediate attention. By bringing an industry insider like Olah into the conversation, the American Pope has provided a foundation for difficult discussions, implicitly urging the leaders of AI to pause their competitive, public offering campaigns to engage in necessary ethical deliberation. Consequently, the involvement of individuals like Olah underscores the need for ethical consideration not only among technologists but also across philosophical and religious frameworks regarding the trajectory of artificial intelligence.