May 28, 2026 · The Pope on AI, the Vatican's American moment

On Memorial Day, while we honored the American war dead, the first American Pope released his first encyclical. It is forty-two thousand words long, and its central verb is "disarm AI." At the Vatican launch, standing beside him, was the co-founder of Anthropic — the AI company currently being sued by the United States Department of War. Pip, Bash, and Heap walk what the Pope said, who he said it with, and what it means in the same week the D.C. Circuit is deciding whether to uphold the Pentagon's blacklisting. - **The Pope's encyclical** — *Magnifica Humanitas,* released May 25; "no algorithm can make war morally acceptable"; "we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral"; the worker passage, the misinformation passage, the concentration-of-power passage; Christopher Olah of Anthropic at the Vatican launch; the American Pope and the American AI fight - **Heap on the Iran campaign** — where the tempo sits after Tuesday's drone exchanges, what to watch as the negotiation track and the strike track run in parallel - **The American collision** — what it means that the Pope's first encyclical lands the same week as the Anthropic v. War oral argument, the same week as the scrapped White House AI executive order, and the same week as Florida's criminal AI investigation - **Florida update + the state-vs-federal gap** — AG Uthmeier's USF probe and the regulatory vacuum the case is filling - **The week ahead** — the Anthropic ruling watch, the Ressa "AI Red Lines" letter as the parallel moral-authority intervention, and one more Vatican event to track More analysis at [Power Moves Before Policy Does](https://annardudley.substack.com).