Chris Olah

Christopher Olah (born 1991 or 1992)[1] is a Canadian machine learning researcher and a co-founder of Anthropic.[1][3] He is known for his work on neural network interpretability, particularly mechanistic interpretability, and for research and tools that visualise internal representations in neural networks.[4][5] In 2025, Forbes reported he had become a billionaire due to his ownership in Anthropic.[1] Olah was born in Canada.[2] He studied mathematics at the University of Toronto for one year before dropping out.[6] According to an interview with Wired magazine, he left university at age 18 without earning a degree to "support a friend accused of terrorism". In 2012, he received a Thiel Fellowship, which supported him in pursuing independent work.[2][3] Olah has worked on interpretability research at Google Brain, OpenAI, and Anthropic.[7][8] He started as an intern at Google Brain in 2015, working his way up to a research scientist.[6] In 2017, Olah co-founded an interactive machine learning publication, Distill, with the goal of creating more transparency surrounding machine learning.[9][10] A paper published in Distill led Olah to a job at OpenAI.[9] In 2018, he left Google Brain to lead OpenAI's interpretability team.[6] In 2020, he left OpenAI and co-founded Anthropic a year later.[6] On May 25, 2026, Olah spoke at the Vatican during the official presentation of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, which addresses artificial intelligence and human dignity.[11][12]