The headlines wrote themselves: the Catholic Church versus Silicon Valley. The Pope pushing back against Big Tech. An ancient institution telling the future to slow down. If that’s the version you got, you got the wrong story.
A video by @cfddose on Instagram stopped me mid-scroll. The creator — a software engineer who builds AI tools — was talking about Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Not from a theological angle. From a tech industry angle. And what he pointed out changes the whole picture.
Who was actually in that room
When the encyclical was presented at the Vatican, Chris Olah — co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and the recently unveiled Mythos — was standing three seats away from the Pope on stage. He wasn’t there as a reluctant guest. He spoke.
What he said, roughly: every AI lab, including his own, is trapped inside incentives that pull against doing the right thing. Commercial pressure, political pressure, ego, competing interests. And that they need people on the outside — people money can’t bend — to tell them when they’re failing.
The people building the future walked into one of the oldest institutions in the Western world to ask for help slowing themselves down. That’s not Silicon Valley versus the Church. That’s the AI industry admitting it can’t fully trust itself.
The one word that tells you how serious this is
Leo XIV used a specific word in the encyclical that signals exactly how high the stakes are. The same word the Church has historically used for nuclear weapons: disarm.
In English, that lands clearly. Disarm means neutralize the capacity for harm — the logic of arms treaties, non-proliferation, reducing offensive power. It’s a strong word, and it was chosen deliberately. In his presentation remarks, the Pope explained why: this moment needs words that can grab attention, wake people up, and point a direction. The nuclear disarmament analogy was intentional.
Worth noting: in Spanish and Portuguese, the same word carries an additional meaning — to disassemble, to take apart piece by piece, like dismantling a piece of furniture. That’s why Spanish-speaking audiences who encountered the term without context sometimes read it as a call to shut AI down entirely. Same root, same Latin origin, two very different first readings. The encyclical that reached Atlanta was not quite the same encyclical that reached Buenos Aires.
What the encyclical actually says
Paragraph 110 of Magnifica Humanitas — available in full on the Vatican’s website — defines the term three times in a row, as if anticipating the confusion. Leo XIV speaks five languages. The repetition was not accidental.
First: disarming AI means removing it from the logic of armed competition — no longer just military, but economic and cognitive. The race to the most powerful algorithm, the largest dataset, to lock in geopolitical or commercial advantage over everyone else. Second: disarming means breaking the equivalence between technical power and the right to govern. Third — and this is the key — disarming does not mean giving up on technology. It means preventing technology from dominating what is human.
Not shutting it down. Removing its weapons. Pulling it away from monopolies, making it debatable, contestable, livable. Returning it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.
Why the language gap matters for your business
If you work in AI, build on AI, or are trying to figure out how AI regulation is going to affect your business, this encyclical is worth reading — not as a religious document, but as a policy signal. The Vatican doesn’t have regulatory power over US markets, but it shapes the moral framing that eventually influences legislation. The EU AI Act, state-level AI bills moving through legislatures right now, growing pressure on liability frameworks — all of it is happening inside a broader conversation about what AI should and shouldn’t be allowed to do.
Leo XIV’s framing — disarm, not destroy — is actually a more tech-friendly position than most headlines suggested. It’s a call for accountability structures, not a shutdown. And the fact that a co-founder of one of the most influential AI labs in the world was in that room, publicly saying they need outside checks, is a data point worth taking seriously.
The question nobody is asking
When was the last time the people building a powerful technology walked into a room and asked to be held accountable? The Church didn’t chase Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley came to the Church. Whether that changes anything — in policy, in practice, in the culture of the industry — is the question worth watching.