At the epicenter of AI, Pope Leo’s warnings are dismissed

When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading AI companies.

As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of AI, he included Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday’s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that AI was fundamentally not human, Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area’s frenetic AI scene, argued that Olah’s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.

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