No, Pope Leo XIV \u2014 the 267th Bishop of Rome, who leads over 1.4 billion Catholics \u2014 isn’t joining Anthropic.<\/p>\n
After the Vatican invited Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah to help unveil the pope’s big letter warning about AI<\/a>\u2014 and he publicly thanked Olah \u2014 the internet started joking that one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups had recruited the head of the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n Breaking: Pope Leo just announced he\u2019s leaving papacy and will join Anthropic as a member of technical staff. https:\/\/t.co\/4BLW1X1S7P<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Mike Sapiton \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@sapitonmix) May 25, 2026<\/a> <\/p>\n During his speech, the pope thanked Olah \u2014 who was sitting a few seats down \u2014 for coming, and pledged to work together to “find a way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.”<\/p>\n The San Francisco AI startup does have an in-house philosopher<\/a> tasked with teaching its chatbot to be moral. Anthropic has also gained a reputation for hiring high-profile people, recently bringing on AI star Andrej Karpathy<\/a> and the chief technical officers of Stripe and Workday.<\/a><\/p>\n However, the memes are just jokes. (Business Insider did reach out to Anthropic just to make sure, but it didn’t immediately respond.)<\/p>\n Tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, are all\u00a0lobbying the Vatican<\/a>\u00a0to work more closely on AI. Anthropic’s longtime focus on AI safety brings it closest to the Vatican’s view that AI needs to be “disarmed.”<\/p>\n An ominous warning<\/p>\n In his speech, Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, said there were three areas where the Vatican’s voice was needed.<\/p>\n One is supporting the poor if AI displaces human labor on a very large scale. Second is making sure that humans who use AI can “flourish” \u2014 like making sure chatbots don’t ruin kids’ minds.<\/a><\/p>\n Olah’s third point was the most mysterious. He said humanity needs to closely examine what is happening inside AI models, and hinted that they may be showing signs of consciousness.<\/a><\/p>\n “We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection,” Olah said.<\/p>\n “I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”<\/p>\n