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Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. In a May 19, 2026, media release, Anthropic said it had "over the past several months" been "organizing dialogues with groups whose work and traditions bear on the questions raised by AI." (OSV Newsillustration/Dado Ruvic, Reuters)

What is Anthropic? A look at the company joining Pope Leo for AI encyclical release


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OSV News Filed Under: AI, Feature, News, Vatican, World News

(OSV News) — When he releases his highly anticipated first encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” May 25, Pope Leo XIV will be present at the press conference — something atypical for such announcements, which are usually handled by senior Vatican officials.

And in another first, Pope Leo will be joined by, among others, an AI tech executive: Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the artificial intelligence research and development firm behind the Claude AI assistant.

In a May 19 media release, Anthropic said it had “over the past several months” been “organizing dialogues with groups whose work and traditions bear on the questions raised by AI.”

The company said its “first round of discussions has been with wisdom traditions — including scholars, clergy, philosophers, and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups — and we look forward to engaging with a broader range of people going forward.”

— ‘Safety at the frontier’ —

Anthropic’s rise from an OpenAI breakaway startup in 2021 to a possible valuation of $950 billion (pending the outcome of ongoing investor talks) has been swift.

But what has set the company apart from its Silicon Valley peers is, as Anthropic’s website notes, a stated and oft-repeated commitment to “put safety at the frontier” in its research and products.

That commitment — about which Anthropic founder Dario Amodei has long been insistent, even departing his high-level position at OpenAI due to clashes over his emphasis on safety and restraint — may be a key reason for Olah being on the stage when Pope Leo presents his encyclical to the world.

Some analysts have described Anthropic’s presence at the document’s official release as a savvy business move, with the company — currently at odds with the Trump administration — seeking to gain both moral and market share footholds, particularly in European nations.

Yet the alliance between Anthropic and the Vatican sits within the context of an ongoing, multiyear conversation predating Pope Leo’s election, in which Church officials, tech professionals, theologians and ethicists have wrestled with the ascent of AI technology in a world where human rights and dignity have come under increasing threat.

— Minerva Dialogues —

Under Pope Francis, the Vatican in 2016 initiated the Minerva Dialogues — named for Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Roman basilica where they were inaugurated — which became annual discussions between Church officials and tech leaders on AI ethics.

In 2020, the Vatican-based Pontifical Academy for Life held a congress on AI titled “RenAIssance: For a Human-centric Artificial Intelligence.” The gathering led to the signing of the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a document listing six core principles — transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, as well as security and privacy — by which AI should be governed. Signing the document were the pontifical academy, Microsoft, IBM, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Italy’s Ministry of Innovation.

The same year saw the establishment of the North American AI Research Group, assembled by Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. In 2023, the group published “Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations.”

Elected in May 2025, Pope Leo has signaled that AI is a priority issue of his pontificate.

— Technical revolution —

Anthropic’s very name — an adjective for that which is human-related — is an affirmation of its priorities in AI development, which significantly align with those expressed by the Vatican. On its website, the company declares that its purpose is “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

“We take seriously the task of safely guiding the world through a technological revolution that has the potential to change the course of human history, and are committed to helping make this transition go well,” the company notes.

The San Francisco-based Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a type of for-profit entity that balances the bottom line against a beneficial mission to stakeholders and communities. (In May 2025, the nonprofit OpenAI, an Anthropic competitor, transitioned its subordinate for-profit limited liability company to a PBC entity.)

Anthropic has crafted a “foundational document” for its AI assistant, Claude (named, according to some reports, for the 20th-century American mathematician Claude Shannon, often called the “father of information theory).”

Claude’s Constitution, as the text is titled, “both expresses and shapes” the AI assistant, which Anthropic aims to make “helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines.”

–Catholic influence–

The constitution reflects the input of Catholic experts — including Father Brendan McGuire, a former Silicon Valley executive — and other religious leaders.

In a March interview with the Observer, Father McGuire — whose Los Altos, California, parish is home to several tech professionals — recounted how Olah had contacted him about developing AI ethics.

Father McGuire told the Observer the Anthropic team members “basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road.”

The priest had helped to establish the Institute for Technology, Ethics and Culture at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, a collaboration between the Markkula Center and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. The institute provided support for the North American AI Research Group’s book on AI ethics and anthropology.

According to the Observer, Bishop Tighe also weighed in on Claude’s Constitution, along with Santa Clara technology ethics director Brian Patrick Green.

Green joined several Catholic scholars in filing a friend of the court brief on Anthropic’s behalf, after the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies in February to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology, arguing it presented a supply chain risk to national security.

–Government-use feud–

Anthropic countered that it had been banned for its refusal to allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance or in autonomous weapons. In the months since, the feud has resulted in ongoing litigation between the Pentagon and Anthropic, with the former asserting in court filings this month that Anthropic’s ethical concerns were “ideological.”

The company responded that the Pentagon’s reasoning for its supply chain risk designation, one typically reserved for foreign adversaries, has shifted.

Anthropic founder Amodei’s passion for ensuring AI remains a force for good stretches back years — and runs deep, according to an extensive July 2025 interview he gave to tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz.

–‘A strong sense of responsibility’–

Amodei, a biophysicist by training, noted in the interview he seeks to mold the AI industry itself. Most of Anthropic’s revenue comes not from Claude, but from the sale of its application programming interface, or API, to companies who then use the AI models for their products.

He recalled to Kantrowitz (whose article was the product of more than two dozen interviews with Amodei plus several personal and professional associates) being raised by his parents with “a sense of right and wrong and what was important in the world,” one that imparted “a strong sense of responsibility.”

The loss of his father to a rare disease — one for which a medical breakthrough was found just a few years later — galvanized Amodei to see science save lives, according to Kantrowitz’s interview.

While he has been accused of “doomerism” about AI, said Kantrowitz, Amodei’s plan “is to accelerate.”

“The reason I’m warning about the risk is so that we don’t have to slow down,” Amodei said in the interview. “I have such an incredible understanding of the stakes. In terms of the benefits, in terms of what it can do, the lives that it can save. I’ve seen that personally.”

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