Exclusive | Vatican taps atheist Anthropic cofounder to speak at AI event as tensions with Trump White House rise

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence is slated for a Vatican event next week that will include Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah – a self-described “atheist” who has written snarky blog posts that criticized religions including Catholicism, The Post has learned.Olah, a 33-year-old AI researcher who is on the team crafting the Claude chatbot’s “soul document”,” is one of a handful of secular officials tapped to speak at a Monday event.The pope’s missive, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” will focus on protecting human dignity during the rise of artificial intelligence.But Olah’s worldview looks like an awkward fit for the Vatican.

In August 2010, he shared a link to a website that urged UK residents to protest a visit by Pope Benedict XVI on his personal Twitter account.In February 2011, he shared a link to an Irish Times article with the headline “Charges initiated against Pope for crimes against humanity.”Olah has also expressed critical views about religion – and specifically Catholicism – in a blog that he maintained as a teenager, which is still viewable online.

In one post, Olah described getting into a debate with a group of “evangelists” who “wanted me to know that Jesus loves me.”“I responded by asking if the Bible was the word of God, and when they said yes, I started asking about how their loving God could have committed genocide and infanticide (Exodus 11), promoted slavery (Leviticus 25), and ordered rape (Judges 21),” Olah wrote in a 2010 post.“Finally one said that God must exist because he made the World and that any scientist would tell me so (!!!),” he added.“To which I responded that they wouldn’t and that the teleological argument runs into problems with its assumption that the world couldn’t exist forever and, by the way, where did god come from?”In another post that same year, Olah drew parallels between the story of Jesus and that of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who he...