In a standoff over ethics and foreign affairs with the leader of the free world, a company can do worse than to post up a co-founder alongside the spiritual father of roughly 1 in 5 living human beings.

Anthropic will pull that off next week, when Chris Olah, its lead on interpreting AI, joins the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, as he presents his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (that is, magnificent humanity), which concerns “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

The pope will break with tradition by appearing at the publication of his letter. The event will also include other church leaders and two theologians.

It will undoubtedly be a day of envy in the comms office at OpenAI. And the White House will be frustrated seeing a firm it shut out go global, but these are temporal matters.

All signs indicate that next week’s event will instead seek to refocus the attention of the faithful on what recurs through history, on the eternal.

In one of his first speeches to fellow cardinals, Pope Leo echoed the past with the present, calling artificial intelligence “another industrial revolution.”

On new things

We don’t know what his encyclical will say, but its context indicates the pope believes humanity has entered an era of rapid growth powered by data centers, neural networks, and a vast electrical dynamo bent to the will of a manmade demiurge.

Notably, his first encyclical will be dated May 15, the anniversary of the day his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, published the Rerum Novarum (or “On New Things”), the crucial Catholic doctrine written amid humanity’s first age of machines, on workers and capitalists and how they might collaborate for the “beauty of good order.”

But for a hint of what to expect, we can look to prior messages on AI from the church. In January 2025, the Roman Curia released a note, Antiqua Et Nova (ancient and new), calling on believers to “a renewed appreciation of all that is human.”

Which echoes a sentiment from the Rerum Novarum, that “it is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute.”

After humans

But now brute machinery may, as Anthropic’s founder Dario Amodei wrote in his own extensive missive in 2024, “Machines of Loving Grace,” create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”