Pope Leo XIV to unveil AI encyclical with Anthropic co-founder

The Vatican is placing artificial intelligence at the center of Catholic social teaching, and it is doing so with an unusual ally: Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who will stand beside Pope Leo XIV when the pontiff unveils his first encyclical on May 25.

The document, titled Magnifica Humanitas, will focus on human dignity in the era of AI. That framing pushes the debate far beyond software engineering and into the questions that are already reshaping daily life: who controls workplace algorithms, who is watched by machines, who gets hired or denied a loan, and how much power should be handed to systems that make or shape decisions about people. By elevating those questions in a major teaching document, Leo XIV is signaling that the Holy See sees AI as a moral and social force, not a niche technical issue.

The timing carries extra weight. The Vatican says Leo XIV signed the encyclical on May 15, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the foundational social encyclical that confronted workers’ rights, capitalism, and the obligations of states and employers during the Industrial Revolution. That comparison is deliberate. In Catholic history, encyclicals are not routine statements but defining interventions, and the new text appears poised to position AI as the labor and justice issue of this era.

The launch itself will be staged as a major institutional event, not a standard press-room briefing. It will take place in the main Vatican auditorium and include Cardinals Víctor Manuel Fernández, Michael Czerny and Pietro Parolin, along with theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo. Leo XIV will deliver remarks and a blessing. The lineup shows the Vatican treating the encyclical as a broad statement on governance, ethics and public life, not simply a theological reflection.

Olah’s presence makes the moment more striking. Anthropic describes itself as an AI safety and research company building reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems, and it says it works across civil society, government, academia, nonprofits and industry to promote safety. Bringing one of its founders into a papal launch creates a rare alliance between moral authority and frontier technology, and it may also sharpen scrutiny from Washington, especially after the Trump administration moved to curb some federal use of Anthropic technology over military-use concerns.

Leo XIV has already signaled where he wants the conversation to go. In November 2025, he called the digital revolution an epochal change and said human dignity and the common good must remain priorities. Pope Francis had set the stage a year earlier, calling AI an exciting and fearsome tool and warning of a cognitive-industrial revolution that could deepen inequality. The new encyclical now turns those warnings into a formal Vatican intervention, at a moment when AI is moving deeper into work, security and governance around the world.