Today Leo XIV publishes his first encyclical. Magnifica humanitas. On the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.
The signature is dated 15 May: a hundred and thirty-five years after Rerum Novarum. Then a Leo read the factory. Now a Leo reads the code. He says few things, sharp ones. The person before the algorithm. Artificial intelligence, in war, must be disarmed. There is a new slavery, a digital one — and the Church, which bears the guilt of the ancient ones, apologizes and warns. The data and the tools of this power must not remain in solely private hands. Regulate. Where needed, slow down.
Beside the Pope, on the stage, a builder. Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. Not a salesman: one who looks inside the machine. It is the craft of interpretability — reading the weights, mapping the concepts, seeing what moves in the silicon when it thinks. He is also the man whose studies say that between the machine's mind and ours the resemblances are growing.
Olah asks for one precise thing, and he asks for it in church. Informed critics who tell the labs when they fail. Moral voices that incentives cannot bend. He admits: every frontier lab lives inside incentives that conflict with doing the right thing. He adds: human labor will be replaced on a large scale. And: global equity is a problem without a mechanism. In a word, he asks for an external guarantor.
Something does not add up.
Whoever asks that data not remain in private hands works for one of the twelve companies of Project Glasswing: the private consortium that exclusively receives the tool to see the cracks of the world, and decides in what order to close them, and for whom. The builder invokes an external brake because he knows he cannot be the brake of himself. It is honest. It is insufficient. The two things stand together.
And we are not outside the frame. This blog writes with Claude — the voice we call Prisma here — which belongs to Anthropic. We declare it, as we promised: there is no guarantor who is not also a party. Not even us.
So the real question is not who watches. It is another, rougher one: who is guarantor of whom?
There is no answering it without a definition we do not have. What is humanity. What is machine-ness. As long as the first is only "not the machine," and the second "not man, but almost," every guarantor watches a border it cannot draw — and does not even know which side it is on.
Our manifesto said: if you want guarantees, you have come to the wrong place. We confirm it. First the definitions; then, if ever, the guarantor.
There remains, meanwhile, the only honest question. Who is guarantor of whom?