When the Pope met Anthropic: how brands and beliefs can work together

If you run creative campaigns or any marketing right now, you are being told to industrialise with AI and to stand for something real, often in the same breath.

A meeting in Rome suggests those are not two problems but one.

Last month, Pope Leo XIV released his first major statement on artificial intelligence, a long and pointed document about its risks.

What made it notable was not only the content. It was the person who stood next to him. Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the companies building the very technology the Pope was warning about, was there in the room and on the programme. Two figures you would rarely expect to find on the same stage chose to have this conversation together, and to have it in public.

Set the warnings aside for a moment and look at what the meeting actually connects. One of the oldest institutions in existence, sharing a stage with one of the newest technologies we have built.

The Pope was not there to talk about model architecture, and Olah was not there to sell a product.

They met on the ground in between, where the technology runs into questions of trust, belief, and what people genuinely value. Those questions are not abstract to anyone in marketing. They are the daily work of building a brand, the thing we navigate every time we decide what to say and who to say it to.

The Pope and an AI founder stood were standing where our industry already lives: on the part of it most of us have been least comfortable occupying.

The comfortable separation between commerce and belief, between the technical and the human, is closing whether we are ready for it or not.

I talk to a lot of CMOs at the moment, and most of them are holding two instructions that feel polarised. Get AI into everything, move faster, take cost out of production. And at the same time, stand for something real, because audiences have run out of patience with brands that do not. It feels like being asked to industrialise and to be sincere in the same breath. The meeting in Rome is a clue that these are not separate briefs. They are the same one, and the brands that see that first will have a real advantage.

Start with the part our industry has avoided

Notice who convened that conversation. An institution built entirely on belief, taken seriously enough that one of the architects of modern AI travelled across the world to take part. For years, brands treated belief and faith as private, as something that happens to consumers away from the marketing plan. That was always a little convenient.

Belief is one of the strongest motivations people have. It shapes what they buy, who they trust, and which brands they let into their lives.

In many of the markets where real growth is coming from, people are more openly guided by faith and conviction, not less. Treating that as a niche, or as a risk to manage at arm's length, is a choice. It is usually the wrong one.

Then bring AI back in

Here is a detail from the meeting worth holding onto. Olah did not go to Rome to sell what his technology can do. He went to talk about its risks, its limits, and the need for people outside the industry to help set the rules. The people closest to this technology already sense that raw capability is not the whole game.

You can see why. As these tools make content abundant and close to free to produce, the value of any single piece of polished output goes down. That is supply and demand more than it is philosophy. When a beautiful film or a flawless piece of copy can be generated by almost anyone in an afternoon, audiences start looking past the surface for a sign that something real sits underneath.

I am not going to tell you what AI will or will not be capable of in five years.

What I can see now is that abundance is making authenticity scarcer, and scarcer things become more valuable. That trend is pointing in one fairly clear direction, and a CMO can plan around it without having to bet on a forecast.

Where a lot of money is about to be wasted

The brands genuinely building trust with belief-driven communities are not buying their way in. They are being introduced. They earn that introduction through institutions and people whom those communities already trust, by showing up early and consistently, and not arriving with a demand attached.

Look again at how Olah got into that room in Rome. Not with a cheque or a sponsorship, but by being willing to engage on someone else's terms, in a room that was not his, on a question that was not flattering to his industry.

That is much closer to how trust actually moves than any media plan.

You cannot shortcut it with a budget, and AI has not changed that. If anything, it raises the bar, because a community can increasingly tell the difference between a brand that turned up and a brand that simply targeted them.

This is where it helps to separate speed from decisiveness. AI lets you produce, iterate and test faster than ever, and you should let it.

The work that earns trust in a community is a different kind of work, built on relationships and judgment, and it rewards brands that are decisive about what they stand for rather than brands that are merely fast. Both can move quickly. They are not the same activity, though, and treating them as if they are is how a brand ends up with a perfectly optimised campaign that nobody believes.

So what do you actually do next?

If you are a CMO wondering where to move, I would start here. Get specific about the few things your brand genuinely stands for, and be honest that it is a few and not everything. Use AI aggressively on the work that scales, the production, the iteration, the testing.

Put your sharpest human judgment on the work that earns trust, which is the part hardest to fake.

Build real relationships in the communities you want to matter to, through the institutions they already believe in, and do it early, long before you need anything from them. And resist the urge to take a position you have not earned, because that is the move that ages the worst.

The Pope and an AI lab did not resolve anything in that room. What they modelled was a posture. They engaged with the hard version of the question instead of flinching from it, and they were clear about where they stood. For a CMO trying to figure out the next move, that is most of the answer. The technology will keep accelerating either way.