Washington wants to win the AI race. Rome says the race is the problem.

Washington wants to win the AI race. Rome says the race is the problem.. American AI policy begins from the premise that there is a race with China and that America must win it. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical begins from the premise that treating AI as a race is itself the danger. Peter Thiel thinks that makes the pope an ally of Beijing. Underneath the row sits a question neither side can avoid: who gets a say in what these machines are for? Two governments published policies on artificial intelligence in the past year, and they are not really about the same subject. Two documents Washington's is about winning. The White House issued an executive order in December 2025 setting out a national approach to AI, directing federal agencies to challenge state rules judged obstructive and calling on Congress to build a framework that overrides conflicting ones. In 2025, 38 states had adopted AI measures of some kind, roughly a hundred in total, and the administration regarded the resulting patchwork as a drag. The reasoning is a race. Whoever reaches artificial general intelligence first, meaning systems that match or beat people at most kinds of thinking, sets the terms for everyone else, and the administration intends that to be the United States rather than China. Rome's is about survival. On 25 May, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, signed ten days earlier. An encyclical is among the most authoritative forms of papal teaching, a letter to the whole Catholic Church, which has around 1.4 billion members. This one runs to 245 paragraphs across five chapters and is largely about artificial intelligence. What "disarm" means The word Leo chose is disarmament, and he is careful about what he means by it. At paragraph 110 he says disarming AI means freeing it from a mentality of armed competition, which he takes to be economic and cognitive as well as military. He describes that mentality as a chase after ever more powerful algorithms and ever larger datasets, driven by the wish to secure commercial or geopolitical dominance. Disarming does not mean rejecting the technology. It means stopping it dominating people, breaking monopoly control of it, and above all discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. That is a more precise disagreement than a call for regulation, and a much deeper one. Washington's policy takes the race as given and treats the only open question as who wins it. Leo's argues that this particular way of holding the race, in which falling behind would be catastrophic and restraint is therefore a luxury, is a construction rather than a fact of nature. Each side's central claim is the other side's diagnosis of the problem. The Vatican is an unusual body to be making the argument. It is a church and a state at once, with embassies in most capitals. It also has no army, no technology industry and no regulatory power over the American AI industry. What it has is an audience, and a claim to speak about right and wrong that nobody can buy. A quarrel already running The encyclical did not start a fight. It joined one. Washington and the Vatican have been at odds since January, over three things. Immigration, where American bishops have opposed the deportation programme and Leo has backed them. The American intervention in Venezuela. And the war with Iran that began on 28 February, which Leo opposed outright. The temperature is easy to read. On 9 January, Leo told the diplomatic corps that the principle established after 1945, forbidding states from using force against other countries' borders, had been completely undermined. In April, President Trump called Leo weak on crime and poor on foreign policy. On 7 May, at Washington's request, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was given a private audience running beyond 45 minutes, a formal courtesy the pope normally extends to heads of state or government. President and pope have never spoken directly on the public record. On 4 July, the day the United States turned 250, Leo went to the Italian island of Lampedusa to pray for migrants who had drowned trying to reach Europe. Artificial intelligence is now the fourth front. The footnote At paragraph 213, the encyclical carries a footnote pointing to The Return of the King, the final volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was a devout Catholic who went to Mass daily and described the books as a religious work, so the choice is less odd than it looks. Popes had quoted him in sermons before. Leo is the first to bring him into an encyclical. The quoted line, spoken by the wizard Gandalf, is that it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, and that the task instead is to clear the ground we stand on for whoever comes after us. The same volume contains the palantíri. These are seeing stones, ancient objects that let whoever looks into one watch events far away. In the story they destroy two of the wisest characters. One man looks in and is slowly taken over by the stronger mind at the other end. Another looks in, sees that his cause is hopeless and kills himself. Neither stone tells a lie. Each shows true things, chosen by whoever holds the greater power, which is a more useful description of an intelligence platform than most trade press manages. The person looking in believes he is gathering information. He is being shown a selection. Peter Thiel named his company Palantir after them, and at a conference in June took the time to explain the choice again. The Tolkien habit runs deeper than the brand: he holds his Palantir stock through personal vehicles, and two of them are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Rivendell 7 LLC and Rivendell 25 LLC, after the elven refuge in the same books. Palantir sells data and surveillance tools to governments. Its revenue reached $1.63bn in the first quarter of this year, up around 85 per cent on the year before. It holds an American Army agreement with a ceiling of $10bn over ten years, though the Army is under no obligation to spend it, and a $30m contract giving immigration enforcement near real-time visibility across the deportation process. It deserves an essay of its own, and will get one. The Vatican has never said the Tolkien quotation was aimed at anybody, and it does not need to have been. Catholic readers made the connection themselves within days. Thiel, Vance and the pope Thiel answered on 30 June at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Americans might listen to the pope, he argued, and Beijing certainly will not, so the encyclical slows one runner in a two-runner race. On that basis Leo is working for the Chinese communists. His own word for the pope's role was inadvertent. The room laughed. The Vatican has said nothing since. The rebuttal answers a question Leo did not ask. It depends on accepting the race on the industry's own terms, that losing would be catastrophic, that speed therefore outranks restraint, and that governments have little choice but to clear the track. Those are the assumptions paragraph 110 sets out to take apart, so observing that Beijing will ignore the pope leaves the argument itself untouched. The third figure here is Vice President JD Vance, who connects the other two. Thiel employed Vance, invested in his firm, and put $15m behind his Senate campaign. Vance also credits Thiel with starting the thinking that led him into the Catholic Church, where he was baptised in 2019. That has become complicated. In February 2025, Vance defended mass deportation using an old Christian argument that love is owed first to those closest to you. Pope Francis rebuked him. So, on X, did a cardinal named Robert Prevost, who was elected pope three months later and is now Leo XIV. By the autumn Thiel was telling a private audience in San Francisco that his worry about Vance was that he was too close to the pope, and that he had put this to the vice president directly. The recordings leaked and his spokesman did not dispute them. On 30 June this year, the same day Thiel spoke in Aspen, Vance told Fox News that the Vatican's position on immigration was troubling. The money is not all on one side One correction to the obvious reading. This is not the technology industry against the pope, because the industry is already fighting itself. Leading the Future, backed by OpenAI's president, the venture firm a16z and others, has advertised a war chest of more than $125m. Innovation Council Action, run by the White House AI adviser David Sacks, has planned north of $100m. Meta has put $45m into a separate vehicle aimed at state-level bills. All of that money pushes in one direction. Against it, Anthropic has now given $40m to Public First Action, in two instalments in February and July, explicitly to argue for safeguards, transparency requirements and against overriding state AI laws in the absence of a strong federal standard. The Senate had already rejected preemption by 99 votes to one. So one frontier lab is spending heavily to make roughly the argument Leo is making, while its competitors spend several times more to defeat it. Rome is not a lone dissenter. It is the loudest voice on the smaller side of a fight the industry is already having. The strongest case for the other side deserves stating, and it comes in two parts that do not depend on each other. The first is directly responsive: restraint that only one competitor accepts is a real strategic problem, not an imaginary one, and no encyclical binds Beijing. The second is broader and older, that church and state should never fuse into a single authority. Thiel applies that consistently, including to world government, and it is a serious position rather than a convenient one. The Church's own record on power held to account is hardly clean either, which the encyclical half concedes by apologising for the Church's part in slavery. Nor have American Catholics revolted. Pew found 78 per cent of them viewing Leo favourably in early June, and 51 per cent saying Trump has been too critical of him against 19 per cent saying the reverse. That figure is awkward for Thiel, though. Leo runs at 84 per cent among Catholics leaning Democratic and 72 per cent among those leaning Republican. The Americans best placed to shape this administration's AI policy are the ones least inclined to take the pope's advice, so whatever brake the encyclical applies is a light one. To attack the pope's power, Thiel has had to inflate it first. Which returns us to the palantír. The stone shows true things. What ruins the man holding it is that somebody stronger decides which true things he sees. Leo's argument, at paragraph 9, is that technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it, and that building it confers no right to rule with it. If that is right, the question is who else counts as a party to the decision. An institution with no technology industry, no jurisdiction over one and no army has no way of being heard except by being listened to. The answer Washington is currently giving is that a say in what the machines are for belongs to those who can be bought, lobbied or overruled, and to nobody else. Sources: Pew Research Center, CNN, The Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press, National Catholic Reporter, America, EWTN News, Axios, The Hill, NPR, OSV News, Anthropic, Benedictine College. Disclosure: Anthropic is named in this essay, and Anthropic's Claude was used in its research and drafting. See the site's AI disclosure for details.