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Pope Leo XIV presents first AI encyclical, Anthropic co-founder invited as guest speaker
Key Points
Pope Leo XIV will personally present his encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" on May 25, focused on protecting human dignity in the age of AI.
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has been invited as a guest speaker, which could open the door to a discussion on the safety and interpretability of powerful AI models.
The document is expected to condemn the use of AI in warfare and warn of negative consequences for workers' rights, echoing historical church writings on industrialization.
Pope Leo XIV will present his first encyclical on artificial intelligence on May 25. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has been invited as a guest speaker.
Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical on May 25, focused on artificial intelligence. The document is titled "Magnifica Humanitas" and addresses the protection of human dignity in the age of AI, the Vatican announced Monday.
The pope will present the document personally, breaking with tradition. Popes typically leave that task to cardinals and press officials. Christopher Olah, co-founder of AI company Anthropic, will join as a guest speaker.
Olah leads Anthropic's research on interpretability, the effort to understand how AI models work internally. His presence could open the door to a key AI safety question: whether the most powerful systems can be understood well enough to be trusted. Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez will also speak.
The encyclical likely targets AI in warfare and the workplace
According to Reuters sources, the encyclical is expected to condemn the use of AI in warfare and address the technology's impact on workers' rights. Just last week, Leo XIV criticized AI-powered warfare in a speech at Europe's largest university, pointing to the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran as examples of an "the inhumane evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation."
Leo XIV signed the text on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum. That earlier pope had pushed for better wages and working conditions amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. The current pope chose his name in honor of Leo XIII and clearly sees the AI revolution as a comparable societal rupture, one that demands a clear stance from the Church. Encyclicals rank among the highest forms of papal teaching, directed at the Catholic Church's 1.4 billion members.
Leo XIV, the first American pope, has made AI a central theme of his papacy and has repeatedly raised concerns about the technology's risks.