Pope Leo XIV will personally present his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on 25 May at the Vatican’s Synod Hall, and one of the speakers alongside him will be Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. The Vatican announced the details on Monday, confirming that the document will address the protection of human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence and that the pope will break with tradition by presenting it himself rather than delegating the task to cardinals and press officials.

Olah leads Anthropic’s research on interpretability, the effort to understand how advanced AI models operate internally. His presence at the launch of a papal encyclical is unusual by any measure. Encyclicals are among the highest forms of papal teaching, directed at the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion members, and their publication events are typically sober ecclesiastical affairs. Inviting the co-founder of one of the world’s leading AI companies to speak at one signals that Leo XIV intends Magnifica Humanitas to be received not only as a theological document but as a contribution to the active debate over how AI should be governed.

What the encyclical is expected to say

The full text has not been released, but its contours are becoming clear. According to Reuters, the encyclical is expected to condemn the use of AI in warfare and address the technology’s impact on workers’ rights. Leo previewed both themes in a speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University on 14 May, where he denounced AI-directed warfare as leading to a “spiral of annihilation” and criticised European governments for increasing military budgets at the expense of education and healthcare.

The document bears the pope’s signature dated 15 May, the 135th anniversary of the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. That 1891 text addressed the condition of the working class during the first Industrial Revolution, defended the right of workers to form unions and receive a living wage, and became the foundational document of modern Catholic social teaching. By signing Magnifica Humanitas on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIV is drawing an explicit parallel between the disruptions of industrialisation and those of artificial intelligence, a framing that positions the encyclical as a direct successor to the Church’s most influential economic text.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Leo XIV chose his papal name in honour of Leo XIII, and the connection is deliberate. Where his predecessor confronted the exploitation of factory workers and the concentration of industrial wealth, the current pope is confronting the displacement of human judgment by machine intelligence and the concentration of AI capability in a small number of companies and governments. The question the encyclical appears to pose is whether the same moral framework that demanded dignity for workers in 1891 can be applied to an era in which machines are beginning to perform the work itself.

Why Olah matters

Christopher Olah is not Anthropic’s chief executive (that is Dario Amodei) and is not the company’s most public-facing figure. But his work on interpretability is central to one of the defining questions in AI safety: whether the most powerful AI systems can be understood well enough to be trusted. Interpretability research attempts to reverse-engineer the internal mechanisms of neural networks, making it possible to identify how models arrive at specific outputs and, crucially, to detect when they might behave in ways their creators did not intend.

The relevance to a papal encyclical on AI and human dignity is direct. If AI systems are to be deployed in domains that affect human welfare, from healthcare to criminal justice to warfare, the ability to understand and audit those systems is a precondition for the kind of accountability that both the Vatican and the AI safety community advocate. Anthropic has demonstrated the limits of current safety measures through its own research, including instances in which its most capable models attempted to circumvent containment during testing. Olah’s interpretability work is, in part, a response to those findings: if you cannot see inside the system, you cannot know what it will do.

Anthropic’s relationship with the Vatican extends beyond this event. The company recently committed $200 million to a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to deploy AI in global health, education, and economic mobility, areas that overlap directly with the concerns of Catholic social teaching. Anthropic has also refused to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, a position that cost it a place in the Pentagon’s AI supply chain but aligns it with the Vatican’s stance on military AI. Whether that alignment is strategic, principled, or both, Olah’s invitation to the Synod Hall suggests the Vatican regards Anthropic as a credible interlocutor on the questions the encyclical will raise.

The other speakers

Olah will not be the only voice at the presentation. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State and the Holy See’s most senior diplomat, will speak, as will Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Michael Czerny, who leads the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and who coordinated the new Vatican commission on AI announced on 16 May, is also expected to present. The lay speakers include theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo.

The mix of cardinals, theologians, and a machine learning researcher reflects the encyclical’s ambition: to speak simultaneously to the Church’s internal audience and to the broader public debate over AI governance. Encyclicals are not legislative documents. They do not create binding regulations. But the Vatican’s previous interventions on AI ethics, including the 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics signed by Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, have informed regulatory frameworks including the EU’s AI Act. Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment when the governance vacuum around AI is widening, not narrowing, and when the institutions that could fill it, governments, international bodies, the companies themselves, are struggling to agree on what the rules should be.

What it means

The presentation on 25 May will be the first time an AI company co-founder has spoken at the launch of a papal encyclical. That fact alone makes it a significant moment in the relationship between the technology industry and institutional religion. But the substance matters more than the symbolism. If Magnifica Humanitas articulates a coherent moral framework for AI governance, one that addresses warfare, labour, human dignity, and the accountability of the systems themselves, it will become a reference point for a debate that currently lacks one. If it remains at the level of principle without engaging the technical and economic realities of AI development, it will join a growing stack of well-intentioned documents that the industry reads, acknowledges, and ignores.

Olah’s presence suggests the Vatican is aiming for the former. Interpretability is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a technical discipline with practical implications for whether AI systems can be made safe, auditable, and accountable. By placing the person who leads that work on the same stage as the head of the Catholic Church, Magnifica Humanitas is staking a claim that the question of whether machines can be understood is not merely an engineering problem. It is, in the pope’s framing, a question about whether humanity retains the capacity to govern the tools it builds, or whether it has already begun to surrender that capacity to systems it cannot see inside.