Monday morning. The smoke cleared, the ceremony ended. Now we have the paper. Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo XIV didn’t wait. He dropped an encyclical on artificial intelligence before most people had their coffee. It’s not a manual. It’s a warning.
“The use of AI is never a purely theatrical matter… it touches on rights, opportunities status and freedom.”
There. He said it. Right beside him stood Christopher Olah from Anthropic. Co-founder. Interpretability guy. Seeing a tech CEO—well, cofounder—standing in the Vatican says a lot about how fast this industry is trying to buy legitimacy. It’s a partnership. Strategic? Maybe. Weird? Absolutely.
Reactions split fast. Some tech insiders were annoyed. Others felt relieved. Everyone agreed one thing: this will matter.
Sacha Haworth runs the Tech Oversight Project. She wasn’t pulling any punches. To her, the letter was a direct shot across the bows of Big Tech. Those CEOs screaming about firing staff to save money, those same men buying politicians to write laws that help them.
“It was a pretty clear subtweet…”
Haworth called it exactly what it looked like. A takedown.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. People are angry. Six in ten US adults say they have zero control over how AI handles their data. Data center protests are popping up in towns that haven’t seen civil unrest in decades. Someone even tried to hurt an AI CEO. The mood isn’t good. It’s hostile.
So why the soft touch on Anthropic? Olah was there. The tone was… balanced? “Not against AI,” says Guru Sethupathy at Optro. “About responsibility.” He likes it. Others, like Daniel Kokotajlo from the AI Futures Project, want the Church to be meaner. Much meaner. They say it should scream, not whisper.
But here’s the twist. Anthropic likes being seen as the good guys. They spent months fighting the Pentagon on military AI. Linking arms with the Vatican helps. It buys trust. It lets them sit at the table when the rules get written.
Did they mention AGI? No. Not once. Superintelligence? Nothing. The letter admits machines might be faster than humans. Maybe smarter in calculation. But they lack soul. They lack wisdom.
Dean Ball on X thought it was dodging the real threat. He wants talk of what comes next, not old academic fears about jobs. He called it a dodge. Kokotajlo agrees. He wanted them to take the apocalypse seriously.
The Church says no. This isn’t a tech review. It’s a defense of human dignity.
Sister Susan Francois put it best. It’s about protecting the person. Brian Boyd from Notre Dame calls it a call to arms. Not marching orders. The Pope wants regulation. Justice. But he didn’t hand us a checklist.
That’s okay, say the supporters. The compass points North. The rest is up to us.
Is AGI the enemy? Haworth doesn’t think so. She thinks the creation of a subclass of human beings is. That’s the danger. Not a robot god. Us. Against them.
Aaron Fulkerson runs Opaque Systems. He cares about encrypted data. He sees something bigger. We’re ignoring the infrastructure. Look at CrowdStrike. One error, global banks frozen. Airlines grounded. Amazon Web Services goes down, half the internet dies. Now imagine AI labs running that infrastructure.
Two companies. Holding all our cognition hostage.
“We’re sleepwalking…”
Fulkerson isn’t talking about AI thinking. He’s talking about us losing resilience. We traded stability for speed. The power dynamics look like the Pope fighting tech bros. It’s not. It’s everyone depending on two rooms in California or wherever the labs are. That is systemic risk. Pure and simple.
The Pope compared AI to Babel. The Tower that tried to reach heaven through uniform language. Homogenization. Profit over people. Turning mystery into data.
“The risk of dehumanization is an ancient temptation that today takes on a technical disguise.”
It’s a biblical frame for a digital crisis. Whether you believe in God or just like stable servers, the warning lands the same.
Who listens to a Pope in Silicon Valley? Probably no one at first. That’s the point. Let them think they can ignore it. Meanwhile the system builds. Faster. Higher. Uniform.
