Pope Leo XIV and the co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic will launch the pontiff’s first encyclical on May 25, a document on the care of human dignity in the era of AI, the Vatican said Monday. The launch will feature Christopher Olah, an expert in machine learning and co-founder of Anthropic, who will join Pope Leo at the Vatican. The document is titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity).
The Vatican said the pope’s presence at the launch is significant because such presentations are usually conducted in the Vatican press room with a few selected officials and invited guests who answer reporters’ questions about the document. This time, the Vatican is planning a formal launch in the main Vatican auditorium. The shift in venue turns a routine institutional rollout into a staged display of authority, with the hierarchy placing itself at center stage while ordinary people remain outside the room.
Two of the Vatican’s top cardinals, doctrine chief Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and development chief Cardinal Michael Czerny, will be the main presenters. Olah will be among the lay speakers, along with theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will offer a conclusion and Leo will make a speech and provide a final blessing, the Vatican said. The lineup makes clear who controls the message: the institution’s top officials first, the invited experts second, and everyone else left to watch the ceremony from a distance.
Who Has the Power
Leo signed the document May 15, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed his most important encyclical, Rerum Novarum, or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway. It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope has already cited it in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the church’s social teaching, which also covers issues such as labor, justice and peace.
The historical reference is not subtle: the church is once again positioning itself as an interpreter of labor and social order while the people most affected by technological upheaval are expected to absorb the consequences. The document’s framing around dignity, labor and justice arrives through the same top-down machinery that has always preferred managed reflection to direct control by those living under the system.
The AI Industry Enters the Sanctuary
Anthropic has billed itself as the AI company that puts safety and risk-mitigation at the forefront of its research. The presence of Anthropic’s Christopher Olah at the Vatican is significant, and suggests that the U.S. pope’s position on AI will become a new flashpoint with the Trump administration. In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology. Anthropic is currently suing the administration, which it has accused of retaliating against it illegally because of its attempt to impose limits on how its AI technology can be deployed.
That dispute lays out the familiar hierarchy: a corporation claiming safety, a state demanding access, and the military sitting at the center of the fight over what the technology can be used for. The people most exposed to the consequences of AI deployment are not the ones deciding its terms. Instead, the battle is being fought between institutional powers over control of the apparatus.
Leo, who has made AI a priority of his young pontificate, is greatly concerned about AI in warfare and has called for monitoring of how the technology is used. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei had worked at OpenAI before he and a group quit to form Anthropic in 2021, disagreeing with OpenAI chief Sam Altman about AI safety. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build.
In a recent post on its website, Anthropic wrote about the U.S.-China competition in AI and the threats of the technology falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes. It warned that the U.S. and democratic allies must continue to lead on AI development and impose rules and norms on its spread, to prevent China and other authoritarian regimes from deploying it as a weapon of repression and surveillance. Earlier this year, privately held Anthropic said its valuation grew to $380 billion, positioning itself with its chatbot Claude alongside rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with his AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.
What They Call Safety
The Vatican said the pope’s presence at the launch is unusual, but the event still follows the same familiar pattern: a closed institutional stage, a controlled list of speakers, and a message about human dignity delivered from above. The church’s social teaching, the AI industry’s safety language, and the state’s demand for unrestricted use all meet in one polished room, while the actual public remains on the receiving end of decisions made elsewhere.
The launch of Magnifica Humanitas on May 25 will place the church’s AI message in the middle of a larger struggle over labor, warfare, surveillance and control. The Vatican says Leo will make a speech and provide a final blessing. The rest is the usual arrangement: the powerful speak, the institutions posture, and everyone else is left to live with the system they built.