Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Understanding Why the Pope Chose Anthropic as the Vatican’s AI and Interlocutor
By Ami Carter-Wilson | Fansweek.org | Milano, May 27, 2026
The Vatican unveiled its first AI encyclical alongside Anthropic’s co-founder — a partnership that is as much theological as strategic. To understand why, you have to go further back than most people are comfortable going.
On May 25, 2026, in a ceremony that would not have been recognizable in almost any other papal reign, Pope Leo XIV stood beside Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, and together they unveiled Magnifica Humanitas — the first papal encyclical on artificial intelligence. The image alone is worth studying: a centuries-old institution and a Silicon Valley startup, flanking each other like mutually necessary accomplices.
The Vatican had picked an interlocutor. And it chose not Google, not OpenAI, not any lab with the most compute or the most users. It chose the company that built its product around the word “constitution” and the principle that artificial intelligence should be constrained by something resembling conscience. That is not an accident. It is the whole story.
To understand why, you have to go further back than most people are comfortable going.
The Roman Precedent
Rome was free — intellectually and culturally free — long before Christianity arrived. The Stoics debated ethics on the streets of Athens. The Ciceronians argued liberty not as a gift from God but as an achievement of civil society. The Roman Republic at its best was a genuine experimental platform for pluralistic thought: competing schools, no orthodoxy, no mechanism for heresy. People argued. They lost. They argued again.
Then the Christian message arrived — and not the gentle version you hear in Sunday school, but the real thing, with its totalizing claims and its intolerance for competing truth. The decay was not immediate, but it was inexorable. By the time the Western Empire formally collapsed, the infrastructure of intellectual freedom had already been replaced by something narrower, more certain, and less interesting. The Church inherited the buildings, but not the conversations.
There is a reason, then, that the Vatican’s relationship with technology has always been ambivalent. Technology is, at its core, a secularizing force — it puts capability in the hands of individuals rather than institutions. The Church understands this. It has always understood this.
A Brief History of the Vatican Online
The Vatican’s foray into the internet is instructive. The website vatican.va went live on Christmas Day, December 25, 1995 — Pope John Paul II’s Christmas message was the first official content published under that domain, which had been granted in September that year. The work was shepherded by Archbishop John Patrick Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications since 1984.
But behind the scenes, the choice of technology told a quieter story. The first version of the Vatican website ran on Illustra — a pioneering object-relational database — rather than IBM’s DB2, the corporate standard. It was a genuinely unusual technical choice: Illustra was an academic product built at Northeastern University, and the Vatican’s choice of it over the IBM alternative was a signal that they preferred independence over vendor lock-in, at least in the early days.
Fast forward three decades. The Vatican is once again choosing its technical partner — and this time, the choice is as much theological as it is commercial.
Constitutional AI Meets Constitutional Authority
Anthropic’s entire brand is built on the conceptual framework of “constitutional AI” — systems whose behavior is bounded by a set of core principles baked into their training. For a 2,000-year-old institution founded on the notion that there are truths that bind us all, the fit was inevitable. It is the Church adopting the company that sounds most like a religious order.
But there is also a more cynical reading, and cynicism is sometimes the correct hermeneutic. Anthropic needed legitimacy. In a market crowded with models that compete primarily on capability and price, being the Vatican’s AI was the equivalent of a papal endorsement — something literally no competitor can replicate. A university partnership can be copied. A regulatory exemption can be reverse-engineered. Having the Pope stand beside you in the Synod Hall? That is a moat.
For the Vatican, the calculus is equally clear. By aligning with Anthropic, Leo XIV positions the Church as the moral voice in a conversation dominated by engineers. Not an opposing voice — an interlocutor. The distinction matters. The Church is not claiming to reject artificial intelligence. It is claiming to speak to it, on behalf of humanity, from the only institution old enough to remember what humanity was supposed to be before we started outsourcing our conscience to machines.
What Comes Next
The real question is not whether the Vatican and Anthropic will cooperate. They already are. The question is what happens when the other labs respond — as they inevitably will — with their own legitimacy plays, their own university partnerships, their own regulatory alignments. We will watch the next twelve months for those moves.
What we have here is the beginning of something new: the secularization of morality and the moralization of technology, converging on a single institution that has been navigating the tension between freedom and authority since the day it was formed. Rome was free before it had a Church. Now the Church has a constitutional AI. Perhaps history, in its most ironic fashion, has simply come full circle.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.