Anthropic Billionaire Cofounder Joins Pope Leo, Warns AI Job Losses Will Spark "Moral Imperative Of Historic Proportions"

BreakingBusinessAnthropic Billionaire Cofounder Joins Pope Leo, Warns AI Job Losses Will Spark "Moral Imperative Of Historic Proportions"ByAlicia Park,Reporter. I cover markets and tech.Follow AuthorMay 25, 2026, 11:00am EDTToplineBillionaire Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah told an audience inside the Vatican on Monday that mass job losses from artificial intelligence are "a real possibility" and supporting displaced workers will be "a moral imperative of historic proportions," delivering the warning alongside Pope Leo XIV at the unveiling of the Catholic Church’s first major address on AI. Cofounder of Anthropic Christopher Olah attends the presentation of Pope Leo XIV first Encyclical Letter "Magnifica Humanitas" in The Vatican on May 25, 2026. (Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesKey FactsOlah, who leads research at Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot and one of the world's most valuable AI startups, conceded that every leading AI lab, his own included, operates inside commercial, geopolitical and personal pressures that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing."He argued outside scrutiny from religious leaders, governments and civil society is essential because no researcher, however well-intentioned, can escape those incentives, telling the room AI decisions "should not be left to people in the industry."Olah said AI development is concentrated in "a handful of wealthy nations" with no existing mechanism to share its benefits with poorer countries, calling that the harder and less-discussed half of the job displacement problem.He urged the Church to apply its "moral imagination" to questions of human flourishing that “a lab can't answer.”Olah, whose team studies what is actually happening inside AI systems—a young field known as interpretability—said researchers "keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,&...