GreyguardThe Pope met with Chris Olah last week. Chris Olah is one of the co-founders of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the most powerful AI systems in the world. He is also one of the people who thinks most deeply about what happens when AI becomes something we no longer fully understand. That meeting happened. In the Vatican. Let that sink in for a second.
There is something happening right now that is hard to put into words but everyone feels it.
The graphic designer who used to spend a week on a project now watches AI do it in four minutes. The junior analyst who spent months learning to write reports finds out their role is being "restructured." The customer service team that used to be twenty people is now three people and a chatbot.
Nobody is saying AI is bad. That is not the point. The point is that we are moving faster than our ability to ask the right questions.
Who benefits? Who loses?
What happens to the people in the middle, the ones who are not running AI companies and are not protesting in the streets, but are just trying to do their jobs and provide for their families?
The EU AI Act is not perfect. No regulation ever is.
But when I look past the legal language and the compliance deadlines, I see something actually quite simple at its core. It is an attempt to say: humans still matter. It says AI cannot make decisions about your job, your loan, your healthcare, your future, without a human being in the loop who can explain why and be accountable for it. It says you have the right to know when you are talking to a machine. It says your data cannot just be fed into a system without governance and consent.
It is not trying to stop AI. It is trying to make sure AI does not stop us.
The weird thing about this moment in history is that the people raising the alarm are not the ones you expect.
It is not just activists and academics. It is the founders of the AI companies themselves sitting in the Vatican, having conversations about consciousness and dignity and what it means to be human. That tells you something. When the people building the thing are also the ones worried about it, maybe the rest of us should start paying attention too.
The EU AI Act deadline lands in August. More regulation will follow.
Not because governments are trying to slow down progress. But because somewhere along the way, we decided that progress without protection is not actually progress at all.
Curious about what the EU AI Act means for your organisation? Start at greyguardconsulting.com