Why the Vatican Invited Anthropic to the Pope's AI Encyclical Presentation

When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic's founding. Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: Artificial intelligence models were becoming too powerful to be developed exclusively according to the logic of competition and speed.