VATICAN CITY — Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, spoke at a Vatican ceremony honoring the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical 'Magnifica Humanitas,' which addresses ethical concerns about artificial intelligence. The encyclical warns that AI threatens to replace workers, accelerate warfare, and exploit natural resources.

Olah acknowledged structural pressures within the AI industry, stating: 'Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.' He added: '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.' Pope Leo XIV wrote that AI can 'lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to “collateral damage.”' The Pope also wrote: 'Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources.'

Anthropic has taken some steps aligning with the encyclical’s concerns. Earlier this year, CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the U.S. government to use the company’s AI models in fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. In March, Anthropic released a labor market analysis identifying coders, customer service representatives, and data-entry workers as especially vulnerable to AI-driven automation.

Critics questioned the partnership between Anthropic and the Vatican. Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, wrote in a LinkedIn post that the collaboration amounted to 'Vatican-washing' and argued the church should have partnered with exploited data workers or communities affected by datacenter pollution. Anthropic did not offer comment on the criticism.

A survey by Epoch AI found that 20% of full-time workers in the U.S. reported that AI has taken over parts of their job. Amodei has separately warned of white-collar job losses due to AI in the coming years.