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To Understand Pope Leo’s Efforts on A.I., Look at the Man 3 Seats Away
Pope Leo XIV has been a major global critic of immigration crackdowns and war, staking out a moral agenda that has at times challenged the political leadership of his home country.
Now Leo, the first pope from the United States, has added to that list artificial intelligence, taking on American power brokers of another kind — this time in Silicon Valley.
Leo’s papal document, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” and made public on Monday, is the defining theological statement so far of his young papacy, and the most significant moral intervention on AI to date from a religious leader. It also is an effort to inject Catholic moral values into a famously secular, and significantly American, industry that is transforming the world at lightning speed.
“Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Leo wrote.
Leo specifically called for AI to be “disarmed,” similar to the church’s support for nuclear disarmament, meaning “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he explained in a speech at the Vatican.
The document’s release in the synod hall was styled as a branded launch event, with bright yellow banners and a splashy introductory video, produced with EWTN, an American Catholic network with global reach.
Seated three seats away from the pope on the dais was a high-powered A.I. pioneer, Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the American company Anthropic. The Vatican’s invitation to such a business executive was a rarity. It signaled an attempt to expand Leo’s influence, and his priority on dialogue even among unlikely partners, presenting a friendly posture alongside an ostensible adversary.
For Leo, the way forward must involve collaboration, said Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Leo’s hometown, who sat in the front row.
“I think that openness on the part of Mr. Olah, as well as the Holy Father, can be the bridge by which all that can happen,” he said in an interview on his way out of the synod hall. “There is a need for the wisdom that the church’s tradition can bring to this discussion of how to use AI in a way that preserves human dignity.”
But Mr. Olah’s presence also underscored that significant power lies not only with governments, but “with major economic and technological actors,” as Leo noted, and that the Vatican is prioritizing these relationships in an almost official diplomatic capacity.
Leo opened his remarks with a special thank you to Mr. Olah, almost as if he were a head of state. “In turn, in the name of the church I accept your invitation to walk together to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence,” Leo said.
The Vatican is acutely aware of technology’s power to upend existing political and religious order. The invention of the printing press in the 15th-century famously preceded the rise of nation-states, and the Protestant Reformation, remaking the power of the Catholic church.
The Vatican has been an instrumental force over the last decade in generating a global conversation about the value of the human in the AI age.
Church leaders under Pope Francis regularly held meetings called the “Minerva Dialogues” with technology leaders to discuss AI developments. Pope Francis met with the Group of 7 leaders in 2024 and urged regulation, and also called for the banning of lethal, autonomous weapons.
Leo’s document, called an encyclical, is in many ways a culmination of that effort.
“At key moments in history, the Church is called to decipher the ‘new things’ in the light of the Gospel and the dignity of the human being,” Leo said on Monday. “Today we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude, with perhaps even greater consequences. “
A moral critique of AI has been growing within some religious communities in the past few years. The effort to elevate a broader discussion has grown more urgent as the technology’s impact for war and on children becomes more pressing. Powerful companies including Anthropic are on a path to becoming trillion-dollar ones.
“When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” Leo wrote.
With this document, Leo is offering a way for efforts to congeal into a united movement to defend what he describes as human flourishing.
Catholic universities in the U.S., including Georgetown and Santa Clara, have taken significant steps to advance the conversation about AI and Catholic moral values in academic and public circles.
The University of Notre Dame received a $50 million grant from the Lilly Endowment in December to develop faith-based ethical frameworks for AI through its Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
Meghan Sullivan, the director of that institute, said she often hears a concerning view when she meets with AI developers in Silicon Valley — “that only a few hundred people on earth actually matter right now: the ones building frontier models and the politicians powerful enough to regulate them.”
“This encyclical is a direct rebuttal to that worldview,” she said. “The Church is insisting, as it has for 2,000 years, that the people of Wichita and South Bend and Nairobi and Manila are not bit players in someone else’s technological revolution.
“I think that we are seeing with Pope Leo in this encyclical, finally an institution that’s powerful enough to stand up for those ideas.”
The document has a particularly American appeal. Leo specifically references the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — the only national conference to get a callout — in a section about caring for young people facing job insecurity. He quotes J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King,” a novel beloved by many in America, particularly young men.
How effective Leo’s efforts will be, and how much impact a papal treatise can have even in Catholic circles, remains to be seen.
Societies like the United States once held constitutional conventions to have robust public conversations about such critical topics, noted Ron Ivey, a longtime writer and research fellow with Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program.
Too often the prevailing narrative is that humans have no choice but to accept the widespread required use of AI, he said.
“We need to have a public conversation, in our libraries, in our civil society, whatever is still strong in that area,” he said. “Why are we building this thing, and who is it for, and how do we make it work for our flourishing?”
new video loaded: What We Learned About Jeffrey Epstein’s Death
By Steve Eder, Christina Shaman, James Surdam, Alex Gallitano and Paul Abowd
June 16, 2026
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans on Capitol Hill said Monday they need more information about the agreement between the United States and Iran announced by President Donald Trump, and some are expressing skepticism as they ask the White House for details.
The agreement announced Sunday to end the war in Iran, set for a ceremonial signing Friday in Geneva, is centered around reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the United States’ naval blockade in the region, along with financial incentives for Iran if it meets certain benchmarks. But Senate Republicans and Democrats who returned to Washington on Monday said there were still many unanswered questions about the deal and they need thorough briefings before it is finalized.
“I just don’t know enough about it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters in the Capitol. “Even the people who follow this stuff closely up here don’t know that much about it.”
Congressional leaders and intelligence committees generally receive higher-level intelligence briefings before rank-and-file members, and they are notified of major developments before they are announced. But Thune said he had not been personally briefed on the deal.
“I think that my understanding of what it entails — and, again, not having seen anything — it would require, I think the issues are going to be compliance, and how are you going to enforce that,” Thune said.
Thune’s concerns were echoed by several other GOP senators.
“If it’s a secret deal then how can I take it seriously?” asked Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Vice President JD Vance told ABC News on Monday that the White House would release the text this week, “and what everybody will see is that Iran doesn’t get a dime of money unless they perform their obligations.”
Senators have questions about details
Trump has not yet explained how his agreement will address Iran’s nuclear program, including who will be in charge of verifying that Iran is in compliance and who will destroy or remove highly enriched uranium believed to be buried under nuclear sites that were badly damaged by U.S. strikes last summer.
A memorandum of understanding also includes the possibility of releasing Iran’s frozen funds, sanctions relief and a $300 billion fund to help rebuild Iran if Tehran meets certain benchmarks, senior U.S. officials told reporters Monday. But the document has not been released.
Thune said he wants to know more about the conditions on the financial incentives for Iran. He said the deal would be a “good one” if the incentives are conditioned upon Iran winding down its nuclear program and getting rid of the enriched uranium, “preventing them from having a nuclear capability in the future.”
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said he is hopeful but “until you see the final document, it’s hard to make an assessment.”
“I go into it very skeptical of the government of Iran,” Kennedy said. “They learn to lie before they learn to talk. So any agreement we make with them has to have guardrails. It has to have a way to judge through independent inspection if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.”
Senate could have a vote
Under the Iran nuclear agreement review act passed by Congress during the Obama era, any deal the U.S. reaches concerning Iran’s nuclear material must be submitted within a certain amount of time to Congress for review. But it is up to Congress whether that happens — it is not required.
President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the JCPOA, was submitted for what’s called a vote of disapproval in the Senate. The outcome did not roll back the agreement, but put the senators on record with their support or opposition.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump and a longtime hawk on Iran, has appeared skeptical over the emerging agreement. He said he is “pulling for a deal” but Congress will need to review and vote on it, and he wants to see the memorandum that the two countries have agreed on.
“The way Iran describes it, it’s awful. The way we describe it, it makes sense to me,” Graham, R-S.C., said. “Let’s look at it and see what it actually is.”
Graham has said he wants Vance, whom he called “the architect of the deal,” to present it to lawmakers.
Vance responded to Graham on Monday, saying in the interview with ABC that he would “caution Lindsey Graham and anybody else not to believe the hard-liner propaganda in Iran, but to believe what’s actually in the agreement.”
Even though Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is the son of the last supreme leader, and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard still has significant authority in Iran, Vance told CNN in a separate interview that “fundamentally, it is a much different group of people.” He insisted that the conflict had unlocked much more direct communication with high-level Iranian officials and that the relationship was “fundamentally transformed.”
Next steps in Congress unclear
Most Senate Republicans said they want to review the deal, but it was still unclear whether they would have a vote, or if Congress could pass it.
Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri said he doesn’t think an up-or-down vote is necessary.
“You have the camp that wants us to lose and then you have a camp that wants a forever war,” Schmitt said. “President Trump’s not in either one of those camps, and neither am I.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he expects the Senate will get the final say. But he praised Trump for making “the single most consequential decision of his presidency” by attacking Iran.
“I think he made America safer,” Cruz said. “The president as commander in chief acted decisively to stop that ayatollah from getting nuclear weapons.”
Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said he expects there are still many more steps to the process before any package would come to Congress for review.
“Seems like early reports are showing that this is kind of the first step,” he said. “Once we have a final agreement, we need to take it up and pass it. … If you want a long-term agreement it’s got to be law.”
Democrats ask what has changed
Democrats questioned how the deal will improve upon the U.S. position before the war — and how it differs from Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
“For all his critique of JCPOA, we had international observers, we actually had an alliance there that included the Europeans, and Russia and China were all signatories,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said there are more questions than answers, including what happens to the Iranian nuclear program and sanctions on Iranian oil.
Trump has spent “tens of billions of dollars” and service members and Iranians have died, “and he still cannot explain how one family in Massachusetts is better off,” Warren said.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said an end to what has been a costly and unpopular war would be a good resolution, but he wants to hear more details.
“An off ramp is good because it was a war that should have never been started,” he said.
___
Associated Press writers Michelle Price in Washington and Bill Barrow in Alpharetta, Georgia, contributed to this report.
From: To:
Subject: RE: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2019 17:10:55 +0000
Importance: Normal
Attachments: 19 Cr._490_Epstein_Arrest Warrant_(002).pdf
“
Hi all,
We received a hit notification that our sub will be landing at Teterboro at 1720 tomorrow, 7/6/2019. I’ve attached a copy of the arrest warrant. Identifiers are below.
Sub: Jeffrey Epstein
DOB: 1/20/1953
Tail #: N212JE
Thank you for your assistance with this. Please let me know if there is anything else you’d need. We’d like to plan to meet at Teterboro around 3:30pm to be there early in case of an earlier landing.
Thanks again,
SA
FBI New York
VCAC/Human Trafficking
C:
From:
[mailto:
Sent: Monday, July 01, 2019 11:28 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: RE: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
Good morning all,
Please let me know as soon as you’re aware of his pending arrival/departure from Teterboro. In dealing with private/charter aircraft notifications, our systems don’t always identify a specific subject correctly.
My pleasure,
From:
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2019 11:18 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: Subject possibly flying into Teterboro
EFTA00038049
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