Vice President JD Vance — the first Catholic vice president since Joe Biden — told White House reporters on May 19 that Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas "is going to have some influence" on global AI policy and that the administration is "pro-innovation" on artificial intelligence. [1] The Saturday position that the Trump administration was silent on the encyclical is therefore openly corrected on Sunday. The administration spoke five days before publication, in conciliatory rather than adversarial terms.

The lab silence is not corrected. Saturday's brief named Anthropic's silence on three documents in one weekend — the $30 billion funding round closing past OpenAI's valuation, the SpaceX S-1 disclosure of $45 billion in Anthropic compute through 2029, and Magnifica Humanitas itself, with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah confirmed on the Vatican Synod Hall lay-speakers panel. Through Sunday morning, T-1 to publication, Anthropic has produced no statement on any of the three. Olah has posted nothing. CEO Dario Amodei has posted nothing. [2]

The structural reading is that the two silences are now separate documents. The administration's silence ended on May 19 at the White House podium. The lab's silence is what the Monday encyclical will be measured against — including by the audiences inside the company. A company invited to share a Vatican dais on AI ethics, on the same weekend it closes the largest funding round in AI history, has elected not to introduce itself to the audience the pope will create. The Vance preview was the easy paragraph. The Anthropic paragraph is the one not yet written.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin