Anthropic Co-founder Chris Olah Calls for Catholic Church Oversight of AI Industry at Vatican Event With Pope Leo XIV

Chris Olah, cofounder and interpretability research lead at Anthropic, spoke at the Vatican last week alongside Pope Leo XIV during the delivery of the Pope’s first encyclical on the dangers of AI. Olah opened his remarks by noting the unusual nature of his presence. “I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company,” he said.

Olah stated that AI companies must ensure they are “doing the right thing” while remaining profitable and leading research amid geopolitical pressures. He added that incentives would always influence decisions regardless of intent. “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,” Olah said.

Olah called for outside supervision of the AI industry by the Catholic Church, scholars, and governments to maintain focus on moral obligations. “Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself,” he said. ” Olah was raised in Toronto, Canada, as a devout evangelical Christian before becoming an atheist at age 15.

He attended the University of Toronto to study math but dropped out after about one year. In 2012 he received $100,000 through the Thiel Fellowship. Olah joined Google Brain in 2015 as an intern and later became a research scientist.

Google Brain became part of Google DeepMind in 2023. While at Google he contributed to the paper The Building Blocks of Interpretability. From 2018 to 2020 Olah led OpenAI’s interpretability team. He worked on the Circuits project and on the discovery of multimodal neurons in CLIP.

In 2020 he was one of seven OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei, who left over AI safety concerns. Olah cofounded Anthropic, which was valued at $965 billion after a recent funding round. The company confidentially filed for an initial public offering this week.

Olah’s net worth stands at just under $8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In 2024 Time named Olah to its TIME100 AI list. He told Time that deeper understanding of AI systems could determine whether models are actually safe or only appear safe.

Pope Leo XIV delivered the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which calls for a measured and vigilant approach to AI development and places humans above machines. Fortune reported the event and Olah’s remarks.