On May 25, Pope Leo XIV will stand in the main Vatican auditorium to launch his first encyclical, a formal letter to Catholic bishops that carries the weight of official church teaching. The document is titled "Magnifica Humanitas" -- Magnificent Humanity -- and addresses the care of human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence. Standing alongside the Pope will be Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. The pairing is unusual enough to deserve a closer look.
Anthropic is a San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by researchers who left OpenAI over disagreements about AI safety. It builds large language models and has positioned itself, since its founding, as the company that takes safety and risk constraints seriously. The Vatican is the oldest governing institution in the Western world. What brought them together, at this specific moment, is not just theological curiosity about technology. It is, at least in part, politics.
In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. government agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI technology. The dispute was over whether Anthropic would grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its systems; Anthropic refused, citing the limits it places on how its AI can be deployed. The administration imposed other significant penalties. Anthropic is currently suing the administration, alleging illegal retaliation. That dispute makes the company's presence at the Vatican launch far more than a ceremonial gesture. It positions Anthropic as the AI company willing to accept limits on its technology's use, even at the cost of a fight with the most powerful government in the world.
Leo XIV has made AI a central concern of his pontificate. He has spoken specifically about AI in warfare and called for sustained monitoring of how the technology is used militarily -- a position that collides directly with the Trump administration's argument that safety constraints on AI are incompatible with national security requirements. The encyclical is expected to situate AI in the context of the church's social teaching, covering labor, justice, dignity, and the role of technology in human life.
The historical framing the Pope has chosen is striking. He signed the document on May 15, exactly 135 years after his namesake Leo XIII signed "Rerum Novarum," which addressed workers' rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution transformed the economy. That encyclical became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought. The current Pope has already cited it explicitly, arguing that the AI revolution poses the same existential questions the Industrial Revolution posed a century ago. The structural parallel is not subtle.
The Vatican assembled a serious presentational lineup for the May 25 launch: two of its most senior cardinals, theologians from multiple continents, a concluding address from the Vatican's secretary of state, and a final blessing from Leo himself. Encyclical launches normally happen in the press room with a few officials. The main auditorium and an all-star cast signal that the document is meant to serve as a reference point in international debates about AI governance, not simply as a statement of Catholic teaching.
It arrives at a fractured moment. The EU's AI Act is in force but contested. The United States has stepped back from multilateral AI safety agreements. The major AI companies are visibly splitting between those that accept constraints and those that reject them as obstacles. The Vatican has, in inviting Anthropic's co-founder to stand at the launch of its AI teaching document, made a choice about which side of that divide it recognizes as a legitimate interlocutor. That is itself a form of governance, and one that carries weight with roughly 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide.