Pope Leo XIV Tells Tech Giants to 'Disarm' AI in Historic First Encyclical With Anthropic Co-Founder at His Side

Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on Monday, calling for artificial intelligence to be 'disarmed,' but it was the man standing beside him who delivered the real warning.

Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, told an audience at the Vatican's Synod Hall that developers like him are driven by 'incentives' they can't escape. Ambition, financial pressure, and competition all shape how AI companies build their products, and no amount of good intention can override those forces.

'We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing,' Olah said on 25 May. 'We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.'

The admission came during the formal presentation of 'Magnifica Humanitas,' an 82-page encyclical in which the Pope declared AI must be 'freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.' Pope Leo signed the document on 15 May, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII signed 'Rerum Novarum,' the landmark encyclical on workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution.

An Industry Insider Breaks Ranks

Olah, who is not religious, said computer scientists alone can't determine the ethical limits of AI. He warned that the technology carries massive risks, notably that it could displace human labour 'at very large scale' and highlighted the urgent need to understand opaque, complex system behaviours.

He urged civil society to push the industry toward accountability. 'Today is just the beginning,' he said, 'the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.'

Workers Bear the Brunt

The encyclical arrives as AI-driven job losses accelerate. Mercer's 2026 Global Talent Trends report found that 99% of C-suite executives expect AI to trigger layoffs within two years. Only 32% said their workforce can effectively combine human and machine capabilities.

The toll is already visible. Tech sector layoffs in early 2026 have surpassed 100,000 according to industry tracker TrueUp, with AI cited as a factor in nearly half of all cuts. Mercer found that just 44% of workers said they were thriving in 2026, down from 66% two years earlier.

Pope Leo directly addressed those anxieties. He warned of 'increasingly autonomous weapons systems' beyond human control and algorithms that block access to 'healthcare, employment and security' based on 'data tainted by prejudice and injustice.'

Power in Few Hands

The encyclical also took aim at the concentration of tech power. Anna Rowlands, professor of political theology at Durham University, said the document challenges the belief that AI can 'save' humanity and asks how society can 'resist such distorting concentrations of power in the hands of the few.'

Pope Leo compared AI governance to nuclear arms control. 'Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all and of the common good,' he said.

Why a Tech Insider Went to the Vatican

Olah didn't speak as a critic from outside the industry. He helped build one of the world's most powerful AI systems and still chose to stand beside the leader of the Catholic Church and say his industry can't police itself.

'Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,' he said. It was a rare concession from a figure at the heart of the AI race, delivered not at a tech conference but from the world's most influential religious institution.

For the millions of workers watching their industries transform, the message was clear. If the people building AI don't trust themselves to get it right, nobody else should either.