The release of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on AI, “Magnifica Humanitas”, has lit a fire under global thought leadership in the realm of technology. Unapologetically long-form in a pagan world of YouTube shorts, the Pope’s 43,000-word document frames AI as a civilisational turning point comparable to the Industrial Revolution. While themes such as the concentration of power, autonomous warfare, labour displacement, and the manipulation of democratic institutions may be familiar enough to readers, the Pontiff has framed these as issues calling us to choose between two fundamentally different metaphorical projects – a hubristic tower of Babel, which idolises profit at the expense of the weak, or a collaborative rebuilding of Jerusalem, which cultivates “justice and fraternity”.
The document comes not long after Palantir circulated a combative 22-point manifesto derived from Alex Karp’s “The Technological Republic”, calling, among other things, for national service, American power, and a new era of deterrence built on AI.
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While the Pope does not name individuals or companies, the contrast between the two worldviews could not be clearer. Whilst Palantir claimed that “the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed”, the Pope has effectively said, “hold my beer” and made one of the most striking soft-power plays since the UK King’s visit to the US. Most fundamentally, where Palantir asserted “The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose”, the Pontiff has responded by saying “AI must be disarmed”.
At the same time as delivering a spiritual broadside against the Palantir worldview, it was striking that the Pope was accompanied by, among others, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. Invited to speak, Olah highlighted the importance of a “duty to the global poor” and the need for “moral imagination”. On the face of it, this positioned Anthropic very differently from Palantir (and their more direct competitors, OpenAI) and suggests that Anthropic may be looking forward to a world in which raw AI model capabilities are more commoditised and organisational trust itself could emerge as a real moat.
In presenting these opposing worldviews so starkly, the Pope has undoubtedly raised the stakes in the AI debate. He has suggested it is no longer a matter, simply, of what the best governance and alignment strategies should be. It is a fundamental question of who is, as it were, on the side of the angels. Whilst the direct procurement function of the Vatican is obviously limited, its global influence is, by its very nature, outsized. Accordingly, commentators worldwide have rushed to reflect upon the considerations raised. Where then does this leave Palantir and Anthropic in commercial terms? Will Palantir be cast into outer darkness as a result of its uncompromising support of Western hard power? Will Anthropic be invited to serve at the right hand of the Holy Father as a result of its apparently softer stance? The answer to both questions is likely to be no.
Regardless of the ultimate extent of any influence the Church may have outside the commentariat, in Palantir’s case, there are no obvious procedural mechanisms to exclude or constrain its commercial activities based on the sort of ethical concerns that have been raised to date. Supplying ICE or the IDF, for instance, does not provide a contracting authority with a legal rationale to discount or downgrade Palantir as a supplier. This can be seen most clearly in a recent UK example where Palantir was (possibly temporarily) barred by the Mayor of London from taking up a security contract with the Metropolitan Police. A spokesperson for the Mayor stated that “the mayor expects that Londoners would only want to see public funding go to companies that share the values of our city”. However, that was not (and legally could not have been) the reason the contract was barred, which was due to a technicality over the procurement process itself.
The reality is that until or unless contracting authorities include objective criteria for assessing a company’s “values” as part of a procurement policy or process (neither an easy nor altogether impossible task), they will have no legal basis to downgrade Palantir (or anyone else) on such. And so far, for all the public expressions of concern which have been voiced, few have attempted to do so.
In the case of Anthropic, closer scrutiny suggests its corporate position is not as divergent from Palantir’s as might first appear. Just a few weeks ago, Anthropic published an essay, ‘Two scenarios for global AI leadership’, in which it stated: “We support policies in the US and other countries that build and maintain a safe, near-term lead over the CCP in intelligence, domestic adoption, and global distribution.” This is also diametrically opposed to the Pope’s call for the “disarming” of AI and freeing it from “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”
In what did seem to be a genuinely candid and revealing moment, Olah observed in his remarks alongside the Pontiff that Anthropic (and organisations like it) “operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”. As things stand, it would appear that the incentives to leverage geopolitical concerns for commercial reasons remain dominant. Likewise, those who are concerned about corporate values do not yet appear to be incentivised to translate those concerns into objective and robust procurement policies and processes at scale. Until and unless any of this changes, the most likely outcome for Anthropic, Palantir, and their ilk is actually business as usual.
