Why the Vatican Invited Anthropic to the Pope’s AI Encyclical Presentation
Key takeaways
- Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab.
- Since then, Anthropic has built its public image around the concept of AI safety.
- 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.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Pope Leo at the presentation of his first encyclical in the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas.Photograph: Elisabetta Trevisan/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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.
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.