FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris, May 25, 2026. Pope Leo XIV released his encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas"—Magnificent Humanity—on artificial intelligence this Monday, presented in person at the Vatican alongside senior Vatican officials and technology sector experts, including Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic. The event marks a first in Catholic Church history: a Pope personally participating in the official launch of such a document.

For France, this papal call arrives at a pivotal moment. Paris is closely tracking negotiations around the European AI Act and the competitive race for data center investments, in which the French government is actively participating. The encyclical disrupts the prevailing techno-optimist consensus by raising questions that regulators typically approach with caution: who owns the data used to train AI models? Who protects workers whose jobs face elimination from accelerated automation? How can children be shielded from the risks of uncontrolled deployment?

Amodei's presence—whose company Anthropic is at the center of ongoing U.S. litigation for declining to adapt its Claude model for lethal military applications or mass surveillance purposes—gives the Vatican ceremony powerful symbolic weight. By aligning with a pontiff calling to "slow down," the co-founder of one of the world's leading AI companies appears to signal that social and ethical pressure on the sector can no longer be ignored, even by major industry players themselves.

In France, the AI governance debate oscillates between technological sovereignty ambitions—championed by actors like Mistral AI—and rising social concerns from labor unions facing announced job cuts across multiple sectors. The papal encyclical, by explicitly articulating worker rights, collective data ownership, and minor protection, offers a moral framework to French voices that struggle to gain traction in a debate still dominated by economic competitiveness logic.

The concept of "slowing down" promoted by Leo XIV speaks most directly to Paris's predicament. France has committed to attracting billions in AI investment, pledged at February 2025's Summit for AI Action. Curbing competition among major sector players, as the encyclical requests, would require international coordination that governments have struggled to organize amid diverging interests between the United States, China, and the European Union.

The Catholic Church's moral authority, with over one billion adherents globally, lends this document political weight that European chancelleries cannot dismiss. For Paris, "Magnifica Humanitas" represents less a binding directive than a strong signal: the era of benevolent self-regulation by the technology sector has ended, and demand for more robust governance now rises from all quarters.