Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah stood beside Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican press hall on Monday and welcomed the pontiff’s roughly 42,300-word warning about artificial intelligence. Every frontier AI lab, including his own, “operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Olah told the room, calling for “informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing.”
Almost every other name in the AI boom stayed quiet. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta did not weigh in publicly, and corporate communications desks at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Anthropic’s larger competitors did not return Tuesday requests for comment on the day the encyclical landed.
The Vatican Stage Had One Lab Co-Founder On It
Olah’s appearance was not a courtesy spot. Anthropic, the four-year-old San Francisco lab behind the Claude family of models, has spent the past 18 months building a different policy posture from its peers. Chief executive Dario Amodei has publicly pressed for export controls on advanced chips, federal evaluations of frontier systems, and outside red-team access to models before deployment.
The Vatican appearance fits that arc. Olah, who runs the company’s interpretability research, told the press hall that questions surrounding AI “are more clearly questions for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy, for society at large.” He described AI models as “grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech,” language that lands closer to the encyclical’s anthropological framing than to the engineering vocabulary the rest of the industry prefers.
Leo thanked him from the dais. “What a great sign of hope it is that with our differences we can listen to one another,” the pontiff said, according to the Vatican’s official press transcript of the encyclical launch.
The optics carry weight. The lab is currently suing the Trump administration after the Pentagon ordered federal agencies in February to stop using its technology over restrictions the company placed on military and surveillance use. Standing on a Vatican stage on the day the Pope warned about “autonomous weapons systems” is a positioning play, whether or not the company says so out loud.
We need more of the world, religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will, to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing.
Olah delivered those lines in the Vatican press hall on Monday, May 25, in remarks later published in full by his employer.
Big Tech’s Quietest Day in Years
The American AI industry sat on its hands. The three executives who most reliably set the public tone on a frontier policy moment, Altman, Musk and Zuckerberg, posted nothing across their X accounts on Monday. Communications desks at Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI did not return inquiries by Tuesday, according to reporting on the encyclical’s reception.
That silence has a context. The Trump White House has run a deregulatory AI agenda since January, and most major US labs have aligned their public messaging with the administration’s “win the race” framing. A papal call for tighter rules on the private companies powering the AI boom lands awkwardly on that posture, regardless of how Catholic any given executive happens to be.
| Lab | Response on Monday | Public stance on regulation |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Co-founder appeared with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican launch | Backs federal evaluations and export controls |
| OpenAI | No statement, no Altman post | Has softened earlier safety language since 2024 |
| xAI | No statement, no Musk post | Has pushed back against state and federal AI rules |
| Meta | No statement, no Zuckerberg post | Defends open-weight model releases against regulation |
| Microsoft, Google, Nvidia | No statements from leadership | Mix of voluntary commitments and lobbying on chip export rules |
The pattern is consistent. Labs that have spent two years quietly walking back earlier safety commitments are the labs that did not respond. The lab that has spent that same period publicly arguing for outside oversight sent its co-founder to Rome.
The Loudest Pushback Came From Venture Row
The few tech-industry voices that did speak came almost entirely from the pro-acceleration wing of Silicon Valley. David Sacks, the White House’s former AI and crypto czar and a longtime venture capitalist, wrote on X that government oversight could become exactly the Orwellian threat the encyclical was trying to prevent.
Sacks posted: “The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion. But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens, as Orwell foretold in 1984.” He closed with “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians?”
Two further industry figures pushed back, each in a different register:
- Eddy Lazzarin, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called the document “light on the theology of artificial intelligence, and thick in reiterating Catholic social doctrine.” He wrote that the encyclical “protects human dignity by saying intelligence was never the point, without really explaining what that means.”
- Pedro Domingos, an emeritus computer-science professor at the University of Washington, posted: “The Pope is infallible, and on AI he’s infallibly wrong.” He told NBC News by email that the document rested on “a series of ignorant and wrong-headed things about AI.”
- On Leo’s claim that AI will concentrate power, Domingos argued the opposite: the technology “will spread it more widely than ever, just like the Internet before it.”
Standing on the other side of the same conversation, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, often called one of the godfathers of modern AI, posted: “I agree with this sentiment by @Pontifex.” He added that the Vatican “and other global institutions can and must play a role in the global dialogue on AI to raise public awareness and mobilize society for the challenges ahead.” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey responded to a passage on power concentration with a single word: “yes.”
What Magnifica Humanitas Asks For
Stripped of its theological framing, the encyclical (the first since Leo’s May 2025 election) makes four concrete policy asks. The full text was signed on May 15 and released publicly on May 25, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII’s labor encyclical Rerum Novarum.
Regulation of Private AI Firms
Leo calls for tighter rules on the companies building frontier systems, in language that overlaps with the EU AI Act framework but goes further on who controls model-development decisions. The passage that drew Jack Dorsey’s “yes” was the warning that technological tools have become concentrated “in the hands of a few.” That phrasing maps onto the encyclical’s broader critique of “those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them,” gaining “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity.”
Worker Protections and Job Displacement
The document treats labor displacement as a dignity issue, not an efficiency calculation. “The various kinds of job insecurity, fragmented career paths and automation must not be evaluated solely in terms of efficiency, but in relation to the dignity of the worker, the right to sufficient remuneration and the genuine possibility of participating in society,” Leo wrote. The Catholic social-teaching lineage runs directly back to the 1891 Rerum Novarum, which Pope Leo XIII used to define the Church’s response to industrial labor conditions.
Autonomous Weapons and Synthetic Media
The strongest single policy line is on weapons. Leo criticized “the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed” and argued that “the ‘just war’ theory which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” Alongside that, the encyclical calls for measures protecting people from AI-generated false information, the strand that hits hardest on political deepfakes and synthetic media. A separate thread picks up the tech-ethics work Father Paolo Benanti led under Pope Francis, but Leo’s document runs denser, more technical and more pointed.
A Public That Already Distrusts the Tools
The encyclical lands in an American electorate that has already turned skeptical. A March NBC News poll found that 57% of voters believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, against 34% who said the opposite. A plurality of those polled viewed the technology negatively overall.
Will Jones, who heads faith outreach at the Future of Life Institute, called the document a “rallying cry for the world to reassert unashamedly the primacy of humanity, in all its flawed glory, over our tools.” Vice President JD Vance, a practicing Catholic and former Mithril Capital staffer, told NBC News he had read “bits and pieces” of the message. “What I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church,” Vance said.
The polling and the Vance comments matter because they sketch where Republican constituencies sit. The administration has stayed firmly on the deregulatory side of AI policy, but the Catholic voting base and rural communities with the deepest job-displacement anxieties have meaningful overlap. An encyclical framing labor protections and weapons limits as moral imperatives complicates the politics of running a hands-off AI policy through 2028. That tension also surfaces in the broader contest between state authority and frontier AI firms, where Washington’s posture is increasingly being shaped less by US labs than by the race with Beijing.
The Fault Line Anthropic Just Drew
The image that will outlast this news cycle is from the Vatican press hall on Monday. One AI lab sent a co-founder. The others sent nothing. That asymmetry tells investors, regulators and engineers something the labs have not been explicit about: there is no longer a unified “AI industry position” on external oversight.
The safety-aligned camp now has a moral coalition that includes the Catholic Church (1.4 billion adherents), Bengio (the most-cited living AI researcher), the Future of Life Institute, the AI-risk-skeptic wing of European regulators, and a growing roster of aligned academics. The acceleration camp has venture capital, much of the White House, and the implicit alignment of the bigger US labs whose silence on Monday read as its own statement.
What happens next runs on policy, not rhetoric. The lab’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over Pentagon use restrictions is the most concrete near-term test. So is the European Commission’s review of general-purpose AI rules and a still-pending California AI safety bill. Each of those fights now carries a moral-authority overlay it did not carry on Sunday.
At the Vatican press hall on Monday, the pontiff thanked an AI executive for crossing the aisle. The aisle, it turns out, is wider than the industry’s quiet communications desks let on.
