Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah's remarks on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica humanitas"
On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued the encyclical "Magnifica humanitas" on AI. Anthropic co‑founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican presentation, urging broader societal engagement and moral oversight of AI. Olah highlighted the need for global equity, human flourishing, and deeper understanding of AI models’ internal states. Anthropic also announced safety collaborations with METR, Hugging Face, and a new Singapore office.
The Core Development
On Monday May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical on the topic of AI: "Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence." Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the presentation of the encyclical in the Vatican City, doing so as part of Anthropic’s initiative to widen the conversation on the important questions raised by AI. Below are his full remarks.
I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company—and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humankind.
Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing—and I believe many of us do—we will always be influenced by those incentives.
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics. It is through dialogue and mutual effort, through the push and pull, that humanity will achieve great things. That is what I see in Magnifica Humanitas, and it is why I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment.
We dwell so often on what divides us, but humanity, full of dignity and conscience, has so much common ground. In conversations we at Anthropic have had with leaders across faith and cultural traditions, we found one shared and deeply held conviction: if this technology is coming, it must go well—for our common home, and for the children to come.
Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself. They are mistaken: the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature.
Why it matters
The remarks link AI development to ethical, societal, and global justice concerns, underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary oversight in the industry.