No, Pope Leo XIV — the 267th Bishop of Rome, who leads over 1.4 billion Catholics — isn’t joining Anthropic.
After the Vatican invited Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah to help unveil the pope’s big letter warning about AI— and he publicly thanked Olah — the internet started joking that one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups had recruited the head of the Catholic Church.
During his speech, the pope thanked Olah — who was sitting a few seats down — for coming, and pledged to work together to “find a way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.”
The San Francisco AI startup does have an in-house philosopher tasked with teaching its chatbot to be moral. Anthropic has also gained a reputation for hiring high-profile people, recently bringing on AI star Andrej Karpathy and the chief technical officers of Stripe and Workday.
However, the memes are just jokes. (Business Insider did reach out to Anthropic just to make sure, but it didn’t immediately respond.)
Tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, are all lobbying the Vatican to work more closely on AI. Anthropic’s longtime focus on AI safety brings it closest to the Vatican’s view that AI needs to be “disarmed.”
An ominous warning
In his speech, Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, said there were three areas where the Vatican’s voice was needed.
One is supporting the poor if AI displaces human labor on a very large scale. Second is making sure that humans who use AI can “flourish” — like making sure chatbots don’t ruin kids’ minds.
Olah’s third point was the most mysterious. He said humanity needs to closely examine what is happening inside AI models, and hinted that they may be showing signs of consciousness.
“We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection,” Olah said.
“I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
