The Pope takes on AI with his first papal encyclical

Silicon Valley usually looks to regulators or quarterly earnings for direction. But next week, the most influential critique of the AI boom might come directly from the Holy See.

The Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV will publish his first papal encyclical on May 25, titled Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Signed on May 15, the landmark letter aims to offer global moral guidance on the digital revolution and emerging tech.

Echoing a 135-year-old warning

The timing of the document is a deliberate historical parallel.

May 15 marked the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the groundbreaking papal letter on capital and labor that addressed the brutal fallout of the first Industrial Revolution.

Pope Leo XIV explicitly connected the dots back in May 2025 during an address to the College of Cardinals. He explained that he chose his papal name specifically to follow Leo XIII’s playbook, treating today’s AI boom as a new industrial revolution that brings fresh threats to human dignity, justice, and work.

Anthropic takes the Vatican stage

The official presentation will take place at 11:30 a.m. Rome time on May 25 inside the Vatican’s Synod Hall, featuring remarks from the Pope himself.

The speaker lineup brings together church leadership, academia, and frontier tech. Alongside top Vatican officials like Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and Cardinal Michael Czerny, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah is scheduled to speak.

They will be joined by UK theological ethics professor Anna Rowlands and Santa Clara University theological ethicist Léocadie Lushombo, with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin delivering concluding remarks.

Why it matters

Encyclicals are the highest form of papal teaching, carrying immense cultural and diplomatic weight worldwide.

For builders and enterprise leaders, this is a clear sign that the conversation around AI has graduated far beyond productivity benchmarks. By anchoring AI directly to labor rights and human dignity, the Vatican is framing technological displacement as a core moral crisis of our time.

We think inviting an Anthropic co-founder directly into the Synod Hall is a sharp move. Instead of issuing broad philosophical condemnations from an ivory tower, Rome is actively engaging the engineers who build these frontier models.

While an encyclical carries zero legal enforcement, it will almost certainly arm European and international regulators with fresh philosophical backing to tighten the screws on autonomous labor and model safety.