Two voices showed up at the Vatican on Monday saying the AI race is moving too fast, and one of them came from inside the industry.
The pope was the louder one. The other was Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the company that builds the Claude AI tools.
Pope Leo XIV released his first major teaching document, an encyclical called "Magnifica Humanitas," or Magnificent Humanity. It runs nearly 43,000 words and ranks among the most authoritative documents a pope can put in front of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics.
The headline takeaway is simple: slow it down.
Leo wants governments to step in, calling for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility."
His worries: AI data sitting in a few private hands, worker rights getting steamrolled, kids exposed to systems no one really understands, and labs racing each other in a way that pushes safety to the back of the line.
The sharpest part is on weapons. Leo said some autonomous systems have advanced "practically beyond any human reach to govern them," adding that it is "not permissible" to entrust AI with lethal decisions.
We break down what regulatory pressure on AI rules actually means for big tech investors every weekday morning in Market Briefs - and you get a free investing masterclass when you join.
Here is where it gets unusual.
Chris Olah was in the room as the co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the leading AI assistants on the market.
Olah did not push back on the encyclical. He thanked Leo and said outside scrutiny was needed.
"Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," Olah said, according to coverage of the Vatican event.
A senior figure at one of the biggest AI labs in the world told a global audience that the companies pushing this technology cannot always be trusted to police themselves. That is a different tone than the usual Silicon Valley confidence.
The encyclical also drew a line on war. Leo said the centuries-old "just war" theory, the Church's long-running framework for when wars can be ethically waged, is "now outdated."
Trump administration officials, including VP JD Vance, have invoked that theory to defend the recent Iran war, the same conflict that recently saw Washington walk back its AI oversight plans.
For investors, the AI part matters more than the politics. Big tech is spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure, and the pressure to slow down keeps building.
Regulators in the U.S., the EU, and now the moral weight of 1.4 billion Catholics are all pushing in the same direction: slower, more careful, more accountable.
When the people building the technology and the people warning about it start sounding the same, the conversation shifts.
If you want this kind of read on the market and the companies behind it, join the investors getting Market Briefs every morning - a 45-minute investing course is thrown in as a bonus.
