I feel like I'm eating crazy pills when I read the countless bad takes around how the Vatican would have virtually anointed Anthropic.
When if you read the Pope's encyclical it's actually a COMPLETE repudiation of everything Anthropic - and U.S. AI generally - stands for.
Read this part of the encyclical for instance (paragraph 110: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence):
"Finally, I would like to employ the expression 'to disarm,' which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life."
In a nutshell what the Pope is saying is:
1) The "AI race" mentality itself is the disease: there is no "winning it responsibly", we need to stop seeing AI as a way "to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance"
2) Technical dominance and being the most powerful does not give you the right to set the rules
3) AI must be "freed from monopolistic control", opened to scrutiny, and "restored to the plurality of human cultures"
Now compared and contrast it with what Anthropic is officially saying - namely Dario Amodei in his famous essay "Machines of Loving Grace" (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace):
1) Where the Pope says stop the AI race. Dario says win it: "A coalition of democracies [should seek] to gain a clear advantage on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment."
2) Where the Pope says technical power doesn't confer the right to govern. Dario says it does: "This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition's strategy."
3) Where the Pope says free AI from monopolistic control and restore it to the plurality of human cultures. Dario says concentrate it and use it to impose one model: "If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an 'eternal 1991.'"
These aren't cherry-picked gotchas. This is the central thesis of Dario's essay.
And Anthropic keeps repeating this over and over. On May 14, just days ago, Anthropic published a 5,000-word policy essay titled "2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership" (https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership) urging the US to "lock in a 12-24 month lead" over China by blocking chips, cutting off model access, and ensuring that "democracies, not authoritarian regimes" control AI. They warn that "a lead in frontier AI will enable a widening lead across the full national security technology stack" and urge America not to "squander our advantage."
This is, almost word for word, everything the Pope is condemning in his encyclical.
I'll grant Anthropic one thing: they have an excellent PR team. Turning what's an obvious repudiation into a perceived endorsement is pretty masterful.
But it doesn't mean you have to fall for it...
