GoKawiilOn Monday May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical on the topic of AI: "Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence." Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the presentation of the encyclical in the Vatican City, doing so as part of Anthropic’s initiative to widen the conversation on the important questions raised by AI. Below are his full remarks.
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Holy Father,
Your Eminences,
Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Speakers,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good morning to all of you. It’s an honor to be here today.
I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company—and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humankind.
Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing—and I believe many of us do—we will always be influenced by those incentives.
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