Pope Leo XIV’s new open letter, “Magnifica Humanitas,” has drawn a muted but sharply divided response from Silicon Valley, where some of the industry’s leading figures see artificial intelligence as a transformative force that could eventually rival human capabilities, while the pope argues that A.I. must remain subject to strong ethical limits. In the letter, addressed to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo warned that A.I. is not human and lacks embodiment, lived experience, moral development and the capacity to truly know love, work, friendship or responsibility. He urged governments, corporate leaders and citizens to protect human dignity, preserve meaningful employment and avoid allowing technical progress to produce social stagnation. He also invoked the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to caution against technological ambition that exceeds human limits.
The pontiff’s remarks came alongside an appearance by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the most prominent A.I. companies in the United States. Leo presented Olah as part of the dialogue he hopes to foster between religious and technological leaders. But Jeremy Nixon, a founder of San Francisco’s A.G.I. House and a veteran of Google’s A.I. work, said the two perspectives remain fundamentally different. Nixon argued that the Vatican’s message sounded like a policy paper and suggested that the church does not yet grasp A.I. deeply enough to form a distinct position on it. He said Silicon Valley noticed the event mainly because Olah was invited to speak.
The encyclical prompted reactions from a handful of influential tech figures. David Sacks, the investor and White House A.I. czar, criticized the pope’s call for more regulation, warning that broad government control could be used for censorship and surveillance. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and chief executive of Block, welcomed Leo’s argument that the foundations of A.I., including patents, data and infrastructure, should be shared more widely. The Vatican did not comment.
A.G.I. House, the group home and discussion space that Nixon co-founded for researchers, entrepreneurs and philosophers, has become a hub for debates about artificial general intelligence, the hypothetical machine intelligence that could match the full range of human thought. Nixon said many in his circle were raised on secular critiques of religion and now see A.I. as a more tangible and powerful alternative. In his view, the field is already solving problems once thought impossible and may soon deliver advances in medicine and other areas that resemble the outcomes religious believers attribute to divine power.
That belief is increasingly common in parts of Silicon Valley, where some researchers now speak openly about building a “machine God.” While the pope framed A.I. as fundamentally limited and derivative, Anthropic’s Olah suggested in his Vatican remarks that advanced systems may already exhibit internal structures that resemble aspects of human neuroscience and emotions. Nixon called Olah’s talk more spiritual than the pope’s, yet still insisted A.I. remains controlled by humans and still depends on human goals, incentives and institutions.
For Nixon and his peers, the debate is not whether A.I. will matter, but how soon it will take on abilities and roles that blur the line between tool and something more. He predicted that within a decade, A.I. systems could possess traits that mirror or exceed the qualities humans associate with personhood.
