Pope Leo XIV waves to supporters as he leaves after his visit in April to the Ngul Zamba orphanage in Yaounde, Cameroon. The Vatican will release the pope’s first encyclical, a pastoral letter, on Monday. Photo by Alberto Pizzoli/EPA/POOL
May 20 (UPI) — Pope Leo XIV will release the first encyclical of his papacy next week, the Vatican announced Wednesday. Magnifica Humanitas will address artificial intelligence and human dignity.
The title of the encyclical (a pastoral letter written to the church) means “magnificent humanity” in Latin. The pope will appear Monday at a press conference for the encyclical’s release, along with other speakers, including academics, cardinals and Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, a U.S. AI company. Olah is also Anthropic’s head of research on the interpretability of AI.
Pope Leo spoke about AI early on in his tenure and has mentioned the topic frequently, The Catholic Register reported. The Vatican also created a study group on AI and its use days ago.
“In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” the pontiff said only days after his election in 2025.
Some of Anthropic’s founders have spoken on ethical concerns about AI. In fact, the company gathered Christian religious leaders this year to speak to AI researchers about its AI chatbot, Claude, and how to steer its “moral and spiritual” development, including ethical questions and how to respond to those grieving, The Washington Post reported.
Also like Pope Leo, the company has run afoul of U.S. President Donald Trump. CEO Dario Amodei said in a blog post that he opposes the Defense Department’s use of Anthropic’s technology, leading Trump to call it a “radical left, woke company” and order federal agencies to stop using it, Forbes reported. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, then called Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security, drawing a lawsuit.
Pope Leo signed the new encyclical on May 15, a day that marks 135 years since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which dealt with social teachings.