On Sunday, May 25, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical and the most authoritative form of papal teaching. The subject: artificial intelligence. At roughly 42,300 words across 245 paragraphs, the document is a sweeping call to "disarm AI" — to free it from concentrated corporate control, to keep humans in the loop on decisions that affect human dignity, and to subject AI development to "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility."

Pope Leo gives the direction in operational terms. He calls for governments to slow the pace of frontier development to match the pace of societal adjustment. He argues that ethics alone will not suffice without external regulation — "it is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract." He singles out autonomous weapons as a category that should remain under unambiguous human control. He warns repeatedly about power concentrated "in the hands of a few" private companies. And he frames the test of any AI system as whether it serves human dignity, work, education, and the most vulnerable — including children, workers displaced by automation, and migrants.

The pope presented the 245-paragraph document personally — a first for any pope — and did so standing alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, whose company is currently in a legal dispute with the Trump administration over military use of its technology. Several observers are already calling Magnifica Humanitas the seminal moral text that AI companies and governments will reference for years when deciding how to build the technology and write policy around it. The document places one of the world's oldest institutions directly inside the AI governance debate, and it does so with a level of specificity — child protection, data ownership, autonomous weapons restraint, antitrust posture toward AI consolidation — that goes well beyond moral framing.

When the Vatican picks the venue for its first encyclical of a pontificate, and an American pope personally presents it standing next to a frontier AI lab co-founder, that's a signal about whose voice now belongs in the global AI governance conversation.

This week in Washington, that conversation went the other direction.