‘Not the cold robots we were promised’: Anthropic co-founder tells Pope AI is ‘made from us’
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has warned about “large-scale” job displacement owing to artificial intelligence in the coming years. The remarks by Olah came at a
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has warned about “large-scale” job displacement owing to artificial intelligence in the coming years. The remarks by Olah came at a gathering at the Vatican where Pope Leo XIV officially released his first encyclical on AI, titled Magnifica Humanitas, and urged for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” to protect humanity from its unchecked dangers. Olah warns of large-scale job loss due to AI During the event at the Vatican, Olah said frontier AI labs like Anthropic operate under commercial and geopolitical pressures that can sometimes conflict with public safety. “Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Olah said during his speech. The senior Anthropic executive also warned that there is a “real possibility” that AI systems could begin replacing humans at a large scale.
“There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale,” Olah warned. “If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.” Olah compared modern AI tools to fictional characters being brought to life. Olah also argued that modern AI systems are fundamentally different from the “cold, calculating robots” imagined in science fiction because they are trained on human language and behaviour. “They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words,” Olah said. “If it helps, one way I sometimes describe this is that it's a little bit like bringing a fictional character to life,” he said. “And now we're entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, have jobs.” During his speech, Olah also once again talked about the mysterious nature in which these AI systems work, noting that researchers keep discovering behaviours inside models that even developers struggle to fully explain.
“I will be honest, we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. The comments by Olah come at a time when there has been growing anxiety around AI replacing white-collar jobs, with frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google among others developing sophisticated AI systems capable of coding, research and handling tasks on behalf of users. Notably, this is not the first time Anthropic has warned about the risks of artificial intelligence. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously predicted that AI could lead to 50% of white-collar jobs being cut over the next one to five years. Pope Leo on the risks of AI Pope Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas on 15 May 2026, exactly 135 years after his namesake Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the foundational 1891 encyclical on labour rights during the Industrial Revolution.
During the address on Monday, Leo warned against the homogenising tendencies of artificial intelligence, including the concentration of power in a few hands, the erosion of cultural diversity and the hubris of believing that human-made systems can substitute deeper moral and spiritual truth. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,” the Pope wrote.
The BriefWire