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On May 25th, 2026, the Pope sat down in person at the Vatican’s Synod Hall and presented his first major document to the world. That alone was unusual. Most popes delegate the presentation of encyclicals to cardinals. This one showed up himself.
The document was 42,300 words. It took over a year to write. Its subject: artificial intelligence, and what it means for the future of the human being.
That same week, in the pages of the New York Times, a Silicon Valley technologist named Jeremy Nixon was asked what he thought about it. Nixon is the co-founder of AGI House — one of the most prominent AI research communities in San Francisco — a Harvard-trained applied mathematician who spent years at Google Brain. He did not dismiss the encyclical outright. He said something more direct.
He told the Times that AGI — artificial general intelligence — “and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming.” He added, practically speaking, that AGI “will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve.”
Another tech executive agreed, on record: “People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God. They are not saying that ironically or in jest.”
So here is what actually happened in the last month of spring 2026: the head of the world’s oldest institution wrote the most comprehensive statement ever issued by any religious body about artificial intelligence — and Silicon Valley’s answer was to say they were already building something more powerful than God.
You do not need to be Catholic to find that collision interesting.
What the Pope Actually Said — and Why He Said It Now
Pope Leo XIV chose the name Leo deliberately. His predecessor with that name — Pope Leo XIII — published an encyclical in 1891 called Rerum Novarum, which addressed the social upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution. It’s considered one of the most important documents in modern social history. New Leo XIV signed his encyclical on May 15th, 2026 — the 135th anniversary of that document, almost to the day. The message was intentional: we are in the same moment, a century later, with a different machine.
The document is titled Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity.” Its full subtitle: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. At 245 paragraphs across five chapters, it covers AI’s impact on labor, dignity, truth, power, and what it means to be human. It is not a pastoral letter. It is not a prayer guide. It reads more like a very long, very serious argument about anthropology — what a human being is, and what happens when that question gets answered the wrong way.
The presentation of the document at the Vatican was attended by AI researchers and technologists, including Chris Olah — co-founder of Anthropic, the AI safety company that builds Claude. Olah offered praise for the Pope’s “discernment.” He adopted, as one commentator described it, a posture of gratitude toward those who could offer guidance from outside the incentive structures of the AI industry — profit, speed, competitive pressure. He was polite. He listened.
And then, in the same news cycle, his industry colleagues compared what they were building to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
The gap between those two moments tells you something important about what is actually happening.
What Jeremy Nixon Is Actually Saying — and Why It Matters
Jeremy Nixon is not fringe. AGI House, which he co-founded with Andrej Karpathy, is a serious community of serious researchers. His own work on model calibration and uncertainty quantification has been published at NeurIPS and CVPR — the top venues in machine learning. When he uses religious language to describe what he’s building, he knows what he’s doing.
And he’s not alone. The religious language that has crept into the AI industry — “singularity,” “alignment,” “salvation,” “extinction,” “gods” — is not accidental. Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti, who has advised the Vatican on AI, described AI leaders in Silicon Valley as “a new priesthood” in the Wall Street Journal. “They speak of extinction and salvation,” he wrote. “Of a coming singularity that will transform human existence beyond recognition. They have not abandoned eschatology. They have downloaded it, debugged it and redeployed it.”
The people most seriously building AI are, genuinely, thinking in terms of transcendence. Not metaphorically. When Nixon says AGI is analogous to the Second Coming, he means it. He means that AGI will do what religious traditions have always promised a deity could do — cure disease, end suffering, surpass every human limitation. He believes the project is real and the stakes are ultimate.
That is not a technology prediction. That is a theology. It just doesn’t have a name for itself yet.
(The broader question — what humanity’s place in the cosmos actually is — is one we’ve explored elsewhere. If you want more of that thread, scientists this month found something that reframes it again.)
The Pope’s encyclical was written, in part, for exactly this moment. “The magnificent humanity that God has created stands today before a decisive choice,” it opens. It then gives the choice a name borrowed from the oldest story in the Bible about human ambition gone sideways.
The Babel Question Nobody Is Asking
The Tower of Babel. If you remember it at all, you probably remember the Sunday school version: humans got too proud, tried to build a tower to heaven, God got angry and confused their languages, project abandoned, everyone scattered.
That version is mostly wrong.
The actual story is stranger and more specific. The builders weren’t villains. They weren’t corrupt. They were unified — “one people, one language” — and they were building something genuinely extraordinary. The text doesn’t say God was angry. It says God looked at what they were doing and said something closer to: “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
That’s a statement of capability, not accusation. God didn’t stop them because they were evil. He stopped them because He saw exactly where it was going — and what happens when human capability scales without limit, without relationship, without anything outside themselves to check it. The people building Babel weren’t answering to anyone. That was the problem. Not the tower. Not the ambition. The answerability.
You could write that story today.
Replace “one language” with “the shared codebase of foundation models.” Replace “building a tower to heaven” with “building something more powerful than God.” The builders aren’t villains. They’re brilliant. They’re unified around a common goal. They’re building something genuinely extraordinary. And they’re not, by their own account, answering to anything outside themselves — not governments, not encyclicals, not the people whose jobs are disappearing as a result.
Pope Leo XIV opened his encyclical with the Babel framing: either build a new tower, or build the city where God and humanity dwell together. The choice he names is not really about regulation. It is about what you think a human being is for.
The Question Underneath the Headlines
Here is what’s actually at stake in this collision — and it has almost nothing to do with the Pope or Silicon Valley executives.
Millions of people are watching their jobs get automated. Not the dramatic, science-fiction version — robots on the factory floor, machines replacing human hands. The quiet version. The writer whose work was replaced by a language model. The radiologist whose diagnostic readings are now audited by software that’s cheaper and faster. The paralegal. The graphic designer. The customer service team. The mid-level analyst whose entire role existed to synthesize information that a dashboard now delivers in seconds.
And the question those people are carrying — often quietly, often at night — is not really “what do I do next?” It’s the one underneath that: if a machine can do what I do, what am I?
The tech industry’s answer, in its most honest moments, is: probably less than you thought. Nixon and his colleagues believe the human being is essentially a biological machine running suboptimal algorithms — brilliant, but supersedable. If AGI can do everything you can do but faster and better and without needing sleep, then the human being’s worth was always contingent on its productivity. Supersede the productivity, supersede the worth.
That is an answer. It is internally consistent. And the Pope’s encyclical, for all its length and density, is essentially a 42,300-word argument that it’s wrong.
An Old Answer to the Newest Question
There is a concept that runs through the oldest traditions of human thought about what a person is. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, it’s called the imago Dei — the image of God. The idea, in its simplest form: every human being carries something that cannot be replicated, automated, or superseded. Not because of what they can do. Because of who they are.
That idea has its own history of being used badly. It’s been co-opted, weaponized, selectively applied. But in its original form, it is a statement that cuts directly against the logic currently coming out of Silicon Valley: worth is not contingent on output. A person who cannot produce — who is sick, old, young, displaced, or simply unable to compete with a machine — is not less. They never were. The worth was never in the productivity.
What it was in: relationship. The theological claim is that humans are built for connection — with each other, with something beyond themselves. The worst outcome at Babel wasn’t the unfinished tower. It was the scattered people who could no longer understand each other.
That is the quiet fear in the automated job, when you actually sit with it. Not that the machine took the work. That the work was how you understood yourself in relation to other people, to purpose, to something that needed you. The loss is not economic. It’s existential. It’s the feeling of having been written out of a story you thought you were part of.
The ancient answer to that feeling is not that you need to find a different way to be productive. It’s that the story was never about productivity in the first place.
Whether or not you’re religious, that reframe is worth sitting with. The person who got automated out of a job last week is not less human. Their worth was never located in what they could produce. The machine cannot take that. Not because the machine isn’t capable. But because that isn’t where the worth ever was.
The Pope and Jeremy Nixon are both, in their different ways, asking the same question: what is a human being for?
They just arrived at completely different answers. And the gap between those answers is not primarily a political or regulatory question. It’s the oldest question there is.
Whatever you conclude about AI, the fact that we’re asking it again — loudly, publicly, urgently — might be the most important thing happening right now.
What Do You Think?
Do you think the AI industry is building something that genuinely challenges what it means to be human — or do you think this is mostly hype from people who’ve never seriously thought about what “human worth” even means? Let me know what you think in the comments.
If This Was Worth Your Time, It Might Be Worth Sharing
Post 1 (X / short-form):
The Pope wrote 42,000 words about AI. A Silicon Valley expert responded by saying AGI is like ‘the Second Coming of Jesus — more real and far more powerful than God.’ I didn’t expect this article to hit me the way it did. [link]
Post 2 (Facebook / LinkedIn):
There’s a detail in the Tower of Babel story that nobody surfaces in the AI conversation — and it changes everything about what the story is actually warning against. This is worth reading if you’ve ever felt like AI is doing something to how we understand what it means to be human. [link]
Post 3:
If a machine can do what you do, what are you? That question is being answered two very different ways right now. One answer is coming from Silicon Valley. The other is 3,000 years old. [link]
A Moment to Sit With
If You’re there — and looking at all of this, I find I’m less certain than I thought about what exactly I believe — I don’t need anything from You today. I just want to know that the thing I’ve been afraid of losing isn’t actually the point. That what makes me matter was never the list of things I could do. That would be enough for now.
Three Things You Can Do Today
- Pick one thing you do — at work, at home, anywhere — and ask yourself: if a machine could do this tomorrow, would my life still matter? Don’t answer it quickly. Just sit with the question for ten minutes without reaching for your phone.
- Look up one line from the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1-9 — it’s six paragraphs, takes two minutes). Read it as a documentary, not a religious text. Notice what it says God was afraid of — and notice that it wasn’t the tower.
- Tell someone you care about what you actually think about all of this — not what you’re supposed to think. Whether you’re terrified by AI, excited by it, or just exhausted by the conversation — say the real thing out loud to one real person.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Pope’s AI encyclical say?
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released May 25, 2026, is a 42,300-word document on artificial intelligence and human dignity. It argues that human worth cannot be reduced to productivity or capability — and that the rise of AI forces society to answer a fundamental question: what is a human being for? The document places human dignity as the central criterion for evaluating all technological development, and warns against what it calls the ‘technocratic paradigm’ — treating efficiency and control as the only things that matter.
What did Jeremy Nixon say about AGI and the Second Coming?
Jeremy Nixon, co-founder of AGI House and a prominent AI researcher who previously worked at Google Brain, told the New York Times that AGI ‘and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming.’ He added that AGI will ‘practically speaking, achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve.’ His comments were made in the same news cycle as the Pope’s encyclical release, and represented a broader sentiment in parts of Silicon Valley that AGI will transcend human limitations entirely.
Why does the Pope’s AI encyclical use the Tower of Babel?
Pope Leo XIV opens Magnifica Humanitas with a reference to the Tower of Babel story: ‘The magnificent humanity that God has created stands today before a decisive choice: to build a new tower of Babel, or to build the city where God and humanity dwell together.’ He uses the Babel framing because the ancient story describes what happens when human beings build at unlimited scale without accountability to anything beyond themselves — not out of evil, but out of unchecked capability and ambition. The encyclical presents AI development as the contemporary version of that same human choice.
What does the imago Dei have to do with AI?
The concept of imago Dei — the theological idea that every human being is made in the image of God — is central to the debate over AI and human worth. It argues that human dignity does not come from what people can produce or accomplish, but from who they are in relation to God and each other. This directly challenges the assumption, held by some AI researchers, that human beings are essentially biological machines whose value is tied to their capabilities. If AI surpasses human capabilities, imago Dei says that does not diminish human worth — because the worth was never located in the capabilities.
Why did Chris Olah from Anthropic attend the Pope’s AI encyclical presentation?
Chris Olah, co-founder of AI safety company Anthropic, attended the Vatican presentation of Magnifica Humanitas and praised the Pope’s ‘discernment.’ His presence was seen as significant — one of the leading figures in AI development engaging directly with the theological critique of that development. However, commentators noted that his attendance at the Vatican did not reflect consensus in the AI industry: in the same news cycle, other prominent AI figures compared AGI to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and described their goal as building a ‘machine God.’
