The Vatican press office said it plainly Monday. Pope Leo XIV will personally present his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on the morning of May 25, in the Synod Hall, beginning at 11:30 a.m. local time. He will share the panel with Christopher Olah, co-founder of the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic. [1] Olah is listed among the lay speakers; Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, are the curial presenters; Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, will deliver the closing remarks. [2] Two theologians — Anna Rowlands of Durham University and Léocadie Lushombo of the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University — round out the panel. The pope will speak and bless at the end.

The text is signed already. Leo affixed his signature to the encyclical on May 15 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 social encyclical written by his namesake Pope Leo XIII to address the consequences of the Industrial Revolution for working people. [1] The temporal stagecraft is deliberate. The new document, the Vatican said, addresses the safeguarding of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence — a placement that signals Leo intends Magnifica Humanitas to function within the body of Catholic social teaching the way Rerum Novarum did inside the older Industrial-Revolution argument.

What the secular tech press has so far under-covered is the institutional choice. A pope's first encyclical is the document that defines a pontificate; popes do not, by convention, sit on a launch panel for an encyclical the way Leo will sit on this one. The Vatican confirmed Tuesday that Leo's personal presence "breaks with tradition" because such presentations are usually conducted in the Vatican press room by a few selected officials. [3] He chose to be there. He chose Olah to be next to him.

The paper has been writing about Anthropic in the access-instrument register since the Cloudflare Glasswing piece and the AI capex thread that closed Tuesday's Google I/O coverage. The Anthropic story has, since February, included a second register — the standoff between the company and the federal government. In February the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic's models and imposed penalties on the company for refusing to give the U.S. military unrestricted access to its technology. [4] Anthropic is currently suing the administration. That fact, recorded in AP's wire copy, is the context the May 25 panel slot makes unmistakable. The first US-born pope chose, for his inaugural encyclical on AI, to share a podium with the co-founder of the AI lab the US president has been actively penalizing.

The reading "Pope names Anthropic" — the framing that circulated in Vatican-watching circles last week — is precise about institutional intent and imprecise about the document's literal text. The encyclical's table of contents is not public until Monday. AP, OSV, America magazine, Vatican News, the-decoder, and Reuters have all confirmed Olah's panel slot; none have published the encyclical's text, and the Vatican has not previewed whether company names appear inside the document. [5] What is now confirmed, and load-bearing, is the panel choice and the date.

Olah is the company's interpretability lead, the researcher Time described in 2024 as "one of the pioneers of mechanistic interpretability." [6] His career — Google Brain, OpenAI, Anthropic — places him inside the safety-and-interpretability research thread the company has built its brand around. The Vatican's choice of Olah, rather than CEO Dario Amodei or president Daniela Amodei, is itself a signal: Leo is not endorsing a corporate brand; he is endorsing a research register. The distinction will become important if and when other AI laboratories ask for parallel access.

What Leo has said publicly so far frames the document. Just days after his 2025 election, he told the College of Cardinals that he took the papal name partly in honor of Leo XIII and that the Catholic Church needed to engage the "AI revolution" with the same seriousness Rerum Novarum had brought to the Industrial Revolution. [7] In an address last week at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, he called the use of AI in warfare "the inhumane evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation," citing Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. [3] The document is therefore expected to condemn AI in warfare and to address AI's impact on workers' rights and human dignity. Whether it names specific firms — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Microsoft, Meta — will be the Monday reveal.

The procedural backdrop the Vatican set in motion before the signature is also worth holding. On May 12, Leo approved the creation of an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence — a permanent in-house body representing seven Vatican institutions, including the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Culture and Education, and the Pontifical Academy for Life. [3] The commission is the operational arm; the encyclical is the doctrinal frame. Together they constitute the Church's first formalized engagement with a technology category since the Industrial Revolution.

What the panel placement signals to the Trump White House is harder to read but easier to predict. AP framed Olah's appearance as "a new flashpoint" with the administration. [4] The president has not yet commented on the Vatican announcement; Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic and who has spoken occasionally about the church's social teaching, has not either. The administration's federal-use ban on Anthropic remains in effect. If Magnifica Humanitas on Monday includes language that addresses state restrictions on AI safety research, the document will become a paragraph the U.S. Catholic Conference — currently led by Archbishop Timothy Broglio — will have to engage at the next conference plenary in November.

There is the lay-Catholic question, which the wire stories have not yet addressed. The American Catholic Church's centre of gravity, since 2010, has moved measurably to the political right; a US-born pope publishing his first encyclical on AI, signed on the Rerum Novarum anniversary, with an Anthropic co-founder on the launch panel, runs against that grain. How the parish reads the document — whether the document is preached on the following Sunday or quietly archived — will tell the church-historians what the encyclical actually means in American Catholic practice.

Monday at 11:30 a.m. local. The Synod Hall. A pope, two cardinals, two theologians, and the co-founder of an AI lab the US president is fighting in court. The reader who follows only the secular tech press will miss the panel. The reader who follows only the Catholic press will miss the legal context. The paper's lane is the seam between the two. [2]

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin