When Silicon Valley and the Holy See agree, it is worth asking what they know that governments do not.
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calling for AI to be disarmed and regulated in the service of humanity. Standing beside him at the Vatican was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” Separately, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has stated that “the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves” — and that AI leaders, including himself, should not be the ones deciding the technology’s future.
