Pope and co-founder of Anthropic to launch pontiff’s AI encyclical on May 25

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV and the co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic will launch the pontiff’s first encyclical on May 25, a document on the care of human dignity in the era of AI, the Vatican said Monday.

Anthropic has billed itself as the AI company that puts safety and risk-mitigation at the forefront of its research. As a result, the presence of Anthropic’s Christopher Olah at the Vatican is significant, and suggests that the U.S. pope’s position on AI will become a new flashpoint with the Trump administration.

In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology. Anthropic is currently suing the administration, which it has accused of retaliating against it illegally because of its attempt to impose limits on how its AI technology can be deployed.

Leo, who has made AI a priority of his young pontificate, is greatly concerned about AI in warfare and has called for monitoring of how the technology is used.

The pope’s presence at the launch of the document, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) is also significant, since such presentations are usually conducted in the Vatican press room with a few selected officials and invited guests who answer reporters questions about the document.

This time, the Vatican is bringing out an all-star cast for a formal launch in the main Vatican auditorium: Two of its top cardinals, doctrine chief Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and development chief Cardinal Michael Czerny, will be the main presenters. Olah will be among the lay speakers, along with theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will offer a conclusion and Leo will make a speech and provide a final blessing, the Vatican said.

Leo signed the document May 15, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway.

It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope has already cited it in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the church’s social teaching, which also covers issues such as labor, justice and peace.

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei had worked at OpenAI before he and a group quit to form Anthropic in 2021, disagreeing with OpenAI chief Sam Altman about AI safety. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build.

In a recent post on its website, Anthropic wrote about the U.S.-China competition in AI and the threats of the technology falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes. It warned that the U.S. and democratic allies must continue to lead on AI development and impose rules and norms on its spread, to prevent China and other authoritarian regimes from deploying it as a weapon of repression and surveillance.

Earlier this year, privately held Anthropic said its valuation grew to $380 billion, positioning itself with its chatbot Claude alongside rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with his AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.