Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical Monday, titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), and it is entirely about artificial intelligence. That alone would be the story. The part the industry is still processing is who got the chair next to him at the Vatican press conference.
Christopher Olah, Anthropic co-founder and the closest thing the field has to an academic celebrity for interpretability research, was on stage in the Synod Hall helping the Holy See roll the document out. The optics are not subtle. Of all the AI labs in all the world, the Church picked Anthropic to share the stage on its single biggest public statement of the year about how this technology should be handled. Olah used his time at the podium to say that computer scientists alone cannot determine the ethical boundaries of AI, and that the field needs informed external critics willing to tell labs when they are failing. The Pope appeared to agree.
The encyclical itself is a real piece of work. It runs in the tradition of Rerum Novarum (1891, labor) and Laudato Si’ (2015, climate), placing the AI question inside more than 130 years of Catholic social teaching on human dignity, work, and the common good. The phrase “disarm AI” appears in the text. So does language about protecting the human person in a time of rapid technological change, with explicit warnings about labor displacement, autonomous weapons, and what the document calls the temptation of treating intelligence as a commodity to be optimized rather than a property of persons to be respected.
The broader read for the industry: the soft power tournament inside AI is no longer just about who has the most users, the most parameters, or the most aggressive valuation. It is also about which lab gets to be the credible one when serious institutions go shopping for a partner. The Vatican does not pick lightly, and it picked Anthropic. Somewhere in San Francisco this morning, OpenAI’s communications team is sitting in a conference room having a very long meeting about exactly what just happened.