{"id":64115,"date":"2026-06-05T22:36:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T22:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/64115\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T22:36:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T22:36:36","slug":"anthropic-urges-pause-or-slowdown-of-ai-development-after-leos-encyclical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/64115\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic urges \u2018pause\u2019 or \u2018slowdown\u2019 of AI development after Leo\u2019s encyclical"},"content":{"rendered":"

Less than two weeks after Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical<\/a> warning artificial intelligence (AI) companies against constructing \u201ca new Tower of Babel,\u201d the multibillion-dollar AI company Anthropic is calling for a global pause or slowdown in development.<\/p>\n

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Anthropic Institute head Marina Favaro published a blog on June 4<\/a> warning about a risk of \u201chumans losing control over AI systems\u201d as its own system Claude is reaching the potential to autonomously design its own successor without any human contributions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is called recursive self-improvement,\u201d they wrote. \u201cWe are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blog post did not mention the encyclical, but a separate Anthropic co-founder, Chris Olah, met with Leo and sat alongside the pope when the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was revealed on May 25. Anthropic has engaged in outreach to the Vatican and other religious leaders to help address ethical questions related to AI development.<\/p>\n

In the blog post, Anthropic leaders explained that its AI system is taking over a large portion of writing code that designs AI \u2014 with its workload growing eightfold every quarter. AI will \u201cbecome much more capable in coming years,\u201d they wrote, and \u201cthese trends have huge implications.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n

Although Clark and Favaro acknowledged AI has not reached this level yet and they cannot say for certain it will, they wrote: \u201cWe do not have good intuitions for what this world would look like\u201d if this occurs, and AI capabilities \u201ceclipse those of humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s leaders wrote that AI companies should come together to either pause or slow down development \u201cto give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications.\u201d However, this would require global international cooperation among countries and AI companies because \u201cif a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,\u201d they added.<\/p>\n

Anthropic intends to engage with policymakers, researchers, and other members of the public to discuss these concerns. The company will publish a document based on what comes out of the conversations.<\/p>\n

\u2018Disarming\u2019 AI<\/p>\n

Charles Camosy, a moral theologian at The Catholic University of America who has worked with Anthropic on ethical questions, told EWTN News that Anthropic\u2019s statements appear in line with Leo\u2019s desire to \u201cdisarm\u201d AI, which the pontiff explained as not halting innovation but \u201cpreventing it from dominating humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Anthropic recognizes the speed of development as \u201csuch a problem we all need to slow down here.\u201d Such a pause would allow society to \u201cthink about what AI should or should not do in the culture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Camosy pointed to concerns about \u201coutsourcing\u201d teaching, tutoring, parenting, care for the sick, and other human interactions to AI, possibly \u201cundermining the things that \u2026 make our humanity magnificent.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recognized that fierce AI competition among nations and companies \u201ccreates a significant roadblock\u201d to global cooperation for slowing everything down, but said: \u201cI\u2019ve been astonished by how many different kinds of people are interested in this encyclical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people were kind of waiting for someone to fill the moral space,\u201d Camosy said and suggested the Church help lead a global movement that demands ethical AI, and he encouraged the Holy Father to consider a trip to Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo many people that sounds hopefully naive,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t see another choice here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Less than two weeks after Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical warning artificial intelligence (AI) companies against constructing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,25,2757,24566,24776,134],"class_list":["post-64115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-catholic-news","tag-human-dignity","tag-magnifica-humanitas","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}