At 11 a.m. Rome time yesterday, Pope Leo XIV walked into the Sala Regia, set down a leather-bound document on a 16th-century lectern, and quietly rearranged the moral landscape of the artificial intelligence industry. The document is called Magnifica Humanitas — Latin for "the magnificence of humanity" — and it is the first encyclical, or formal papal teaching letter, ever written about AI. Standing a few feet to his right was not Sam Altman of OpenAI, not Sundar Pichai of Google, not Satya Nadella of Microsoft. It was Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, the smaller, San Francisco–based AI lab that has made "safety first" its public identity.
The choice of date is not a coincidence either. Exactly 135 years ago today, on 25 May 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church's foundational defence of workers caught in the gears of the Industrial Revolution. That document is still taught in seminaries and law schools. By stamping his first encyclical with the same date, Pope Leo XIV is telling the world that what is happening with AI right now is, in his view, the same kind of moment — a technology reshaping human life faster than human institutions can keep up.
And by inviting Olah, and only Olah, he has handed Anthropic something money cannot buy.
