Indian-origin billionaire Vinod Khosla was vocal about his stance against Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s take on artificial intelligence regulation as he participated in the reading of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on Monday.
The Catholic leader, for his part, consciously chose to warn humanity about artificial intelligence and mass automation, among other things, while illustrating an apocalyptic vision of the world. However, the founder of capital firm Khosla Ventures took issue with how things unfolded on the day of the unlikely church-tech partnership upon the ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ release.
Billionaire Vinod Khosla slams Anthropic co-founder’s AI argument at the pope’s encyclical presentation
An enraged Khosla took to his social media profile to call out the Anthropic co-founder for his “very elitist” stand on AI’s interaction with the world and its eventual regulation.
“Very elitist: ‘How AI ought to interact with the world’ is a question for ‘the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large,'” Vinod Khosla wrote on X. Humans were not born with humanities or religion or philosophers or elitist institutions with their view of superiority. The question is for humans to answer without the pretense of elitism!”
Very elitist: "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large" . Humans were not born with humanities or religion or philosophers or elitist institutions with their view of superiority. The question… https://t.co/BoBq1TYH6z
— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) May 25, 2026
Church and tech collide: Why Anthropic’s exec was at Vatican
Upon the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on the topic of AI: “Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence,” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the presentation of the text in the Vatican City. The tech startup has since confirmed that Olah’s unprecedented collaboration with the Catholic leader was part of Anthropic’s initiative expand the conversation on the questions raised by AI.
During his opening remarks at the event, Olah admitted that if we want advanced technology to “go well,” it is “enormously important” that people who are not exposed to the incentives offered by frontier AI labs behind the tech collaborate with them.
“It is through dialogue and mutual effort, through the push and pull, that humanity will achieve great things,” the Anthropic leader explained his thought process. “That is what I see in Magnifica Humanitas, and it is why I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment.”
Further explaining his rationale, Olah said at the presentation, “Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself. They are mistaken: the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature.”
Noting that while AI models are “grown on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech,” Olah acknowledged that such advancements largely remain mysterious to those working on them as well.
Taking his own position as a scientist into account, he added, “I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
Before closing his arguments, Olah urged religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and “people of good will” to follow the Pope’s example and take the issue seriously, as looking closely could help push “events in a better direction.”
These larger debates on AI have now taken over mainstream communication channels as numerous companies continue to announce sweeping layoffs while adopting an “AI-first” approach in their day-to-day operations. On a concerning note, tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon aren’t the only ones to be hit by these “AI casualties.” News agencies, such as The Washington Post, have also been devastated by the artificial intelligence boom killing their presence on search giants.
According to Goldman Sachs economists’ research released earlier this year, AI trimmed US monthly payroll growth by approximately 16,000 jobs over the past year, pushing the unemployment rate up by 0.1%.
As more and more tech executives try their best to grasp the new world order with a focus on AI, Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, also told Axios in April, “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”
A 2024 MIT study echoed this understanding, noting that automation was financially viable in just 23% of roles heavily reliant on visual tasks. For the other 77% majority, aligning with the human workforce was more cost-effective. Morgan Stanley’s findings further highlighted that tech companies have already reserved about $740 billion for AI-related expenses this year, marking a 69% surge from last year.
McKinsey’s numbers painted an even more shocking reality for the future, estimating that AI spending could reach $5.2 trillion by 2033, including about $1.6 trillion for data centres and $3.3 trillion for IT hardware.