Pope Leo XIV just released Magnifica Humanitas. It’s the first papal encyclical that’s focused on AI. When the Pope unveiled it, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was standing alongside him.

Leo, the first American pope, didn’t pick his name by accident. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, the church’s response to the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the old world labor order. This Leo picked his name to signal that AI is a rupture on that same scale. It’s not another tech cycle in his eyes. It’s a shift in power, work and what it means to be useful.

Big Tech has spent a decade insisting that old institutions were obsolete. Now some of the people building AI are looking to these institutions, like the Vatican, to help govern what comes next.

Olah argued at the Vatican that AI development needs scrutiny from governments, religious leaders and civil society. He spoke frankly about the tension inside the AI labs: commercial pressure, political pressure and the reality that companies racing to build the future may not be equipped to govern it.

He even brought up job displacement directly. This isn’t usually how Silicon Valley talks.

For most of the last decade, the industry has treated religion, government and the humanities more generally as obstacles to innovation and growth. They need to move fast, scale globally and let the regulators catch up. Just like social media (didn’t that turn out well?).

Now some of the top labs are publicly admitting that the market alone won’t be capable of governing AI.

The encyclical’s sharpest line also happens to be its plainest. Leo XIV writes that “the promise of automatic general prosperity often proves illusory.”

AI is moving too quickly for a trickle-down version of it to happen on its own. Someone has to decide who will benefit. Someone has to decide who will absorb the disruption. Does efficiency matter more than stability or dignity?

Those are political and moral questions. They’re not being raised only by critics outside of the room. Now, the Pope and the Vatican are in the room, working with one of the leading figures inside Anthropic.

The takes are already sorting themselves out. Some will argue the Pope doesn’t understand technology or even consciousness. Others will say the real risk is the government, not the companies. Both critiques are missing the point and not talking about what happened in the room with the Pope and Chris Olah.

The consciousness debate is easier to have than the power debate. That’s why so many critics prefer to use that line.

The Vatican is treating AI like a societal shift and DC still mostly treats it like a tech story.

Just this week, President Trump pulled back an executive order that would’ve created government testing for advanced AI models after pressure from allies like David Sacks.

The Pope is talking about labor, power and human dignity. He gets it.

Washington is still listening to the people who stand to profit from it.

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