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The internet spent a full day joking that Pope Leo XIV had joined Anthropic after the Vatican invited Anthropic co founder Chris Olah to speak about AI. Social media users posted fake announcements, edited images and mock recruitment headlines after the Pope publicly thanked Olah during a Vatican gathering.

Business Insider published an article explaining that the Pope was not secretly joining the San Francisco startup. The confusion started after the Vatican selected Olah to help present 鈥淢agnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence鈥�, a new encyclical about AI from Pope Leo XIV.

During the event, Pope Leo XIV thanked Olah for attending and promised to work together to 鈥渇ind a way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence鈥�, according to Business Insider. That sentence alone gave the internet enough material for an entire day of jokes.

Behind the memes there鈥檚 a more serious discussion about AI and ethics. Anthropic has spent years positioning itself as one of the AI companies most interested in safety and ethics, and as Business Insider reported, the startup even employs a philosopher to help guide the behaviour of its Claude chatbot.

The Vatican invitation gave Anthropic something tech companies rarely receive, direct engagement with one of the world鈥檚 oldest moral authorities. That relationship makes sense because both sides keep talking about human dignity, labour and the social effects of AI systems.

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Why Does Anthropic Want Moral Guidance?

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Chris Olah spoke unusually openly about the problems facing AI companies. 鈥淓very frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition.鈥�

Technology executives rarely admit publicly that competition and commercial demands influence decisions about safety. Olah told the Vatican that AI companies need criticism from people outside Silicon Valley. 鈥淲e need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,鈥� he said.

Olah also explained that AI questions belong to philosophers, religious leaders and society as much as computer scientists. 鈥淭he questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature,鈥� he said.

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Anthropic has already built much of its public identity around 鈥渃onstitutional AI鈥�, where chatbots learn from written principles designed to guide behaviour. Amanda Askell, a philosopher working at Anthropic, helped create the constitution for Claude.

The Vatican gathering gave Anthropic a chance to present itself as an AI company willing to discuss morality in public instead of limiting conversations to software engineering. Business Insider reported that Amazon, Google and Meta have also tried to build relationships with the Vatican over AI questions.

Olah spent much of his speech discussing labour and inequality. 鈥淭here is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.鈥�

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Can Ethical AI Actually Work?

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That question has become much harder the more that AI systems grow advanced. Vasily Mazin, co founder and chief research officer at Mind Simulation Lab, believes tech companies are turning to religion and philosophy because they fear the consequences of their own products.

鈥淐ompanies increasingly feel that the risks and unintended consequences of AI are only growing, and that the problem could eventually become existential,鈥� Mazin said. 鈥淎s a result, they鈥檙e turning to philosophers and religious institutions for support, both to feel more confident in the direction they鈥檙e taking and, to some extent, to distribute responsibility beyond the tech industry itself.鈥�

Mazin believes ethical documents alone cannot solve the deeper technical problems within AI systems. 鈥淭hese systems respond to linguistic patterns, not meaning,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey hallucinate not because the safety filter failed but because the architecture is designed to always produce an answer, even when it doesn鈥檛 have one.鈥�

That criticism goes directly at systems like constitutional AI. Anthropic may teach Claude ethical principles, but Mazin believes the technology underneath still lacks genuine understanding.

鈥淭he vulnerabilities we keep seeing, prompt injections, jailbreaks, confident confabulations, 鈥榚vil intentions鈥�, aren鈥檛 ethics or policy problems, they鈥檙e structural ones,鈥� he said.

Mazin thinks true ethical AI would require a different foundation altogether. 鈥淭he ethical core has to be embedded into the foundation of the model itself and remain stable through any future retraining, rather than existing as a last minute layer of rules added on top,鈥� he said.

Olah himself admitted that AI researchers keep discovering behaviour they cannot fully explain. 鈥淲e keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection,鈥� he said.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.鈥�

That uncertainty explains why Anthropic went to the Vatican in the first place. The company knows software engineers alone cannot answer questions about morality, labour or human behaviour.