Chris Olah stood in Vatican City on Monday for the press conference launching Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence, "Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence." The document runs 42,000 words across 245 paragraphs. (National Catholic Reporter) Anthropic published Olah's full remarks the same day. (anthropic.com)

The invitation is the actual story. Not Anthropic's CEO, not its policy team. The co-founder who invented mechanistic interpretability. A person whose public work is about understanding what neural networks are actually doing, internally, before they do something you cannot walk back. That the Vatican wanted that particular person at that particular lectern says something about what the encyclical is actually arguing. Pope Leo XIV is the first pope to personally present an encyclical to the world. He picked AI as the subject.