Why anthropological?
Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. He did so with obvious conviction: artificial intelligence models were becoming so powerful that they could no longer 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’s goal is to create not only powerful models, but models 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 made up of principles and rules, rather than manually fine-tuning the most risky and dangerous responses.
Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first encyclical, Magnifica HumanitasThe Vatican on May 25, 2026 focused on the rise of artificial intelligence.Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images
How did the rapprochement with the Vatican begin?
Hail’s appearance at the Vatican was clearly not accidental, nor the result of a symbolic sign of the end times. This was the result of a deliberate, long-term effort in which the Vatican has sought to progressively transform itself from an ethical overseer of technology to a direct interlocutor with the AI industry.
The first major step forward 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 AI development, including transparency, inclusion, and accountability.
At the time, the Vatican appeared to be working primarily in the area of bioethics and moral questions. However, in the years that followed, 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 is no longer just about technological ethics, but about the 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 development, Anthropic has made AI security a core part of its identity.
In recent years, the Vatican has paid particular attention to a specific aspect of the technology debate: the alignment of AI models.
role of hail
That’s where Christopher Ola comes in. Unlike the Amodei siblings, who are more exposed to the media, Ola represents a more theoretical and almost philosophical side of AI research. He is one of the world’s most renowned researchers on the subject of model interpretation, or the effort to understand what actually happens inside increasingly complex neural networks.
On his personal website, Christopher Olah describes himself as someone trying to “turn neural networks into understandable algorithms for humans.” And it is difficult to imagine a figure more aligned with the core of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical: a reflection focused on the risk of building technologies that become too powerful to understand, control or control.
According to various journalistic sources, contacts between circles close to the Holy See and Anthropic may have intensified during the global summit on AI security. The Vatican saw in Anthropic a company that was willing to at least publicly acknowledge that the problem of artificial intelligence cannot be solved by the technology industry alone.
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