Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It splits the civilisational future of AI into two figures, Babel and Jerusalem, and it does so thirteen months after the April 2025 manuscript's Babylon and Eden framing. On the same day, Christopher Olah, Anthropic co-founder, co-presented the encyclical at the Vatican Synod Hall. Two register rows fired at once. This article is careful about what that means.
An encyclical is the highest instrument of the Roman Catholic magisterium below a dogmatic definition. The Babel and Jerusalem fork frames AI as either the confounded city of Genesis 11, whose builders overreached, or the just city of the biblical prophets, whose architecture serves the covenant. This is not new material for Christian ethics, but it is new material for the papal magisterium applied to AI, and its publication as a first encyclical signals the priority the new pontificate places on the technology.
The April 2025 manuscript uses Babylon 106 times and Eden as a whole word 552 times across a 562-page book manuscript, with 80 pages containing Babylon and 60 pages containing both. Babel and Babylon are cognate biblical toponyms and Eden and Jerusalem are the biblical pair of ideal cities. The framing is not identical and the register does not claim it is. What it claims is direction: the manuscript proposed a civilisational fork for AI along a two-city framing, and thirteen months later the same fork was published in the strongest doctrinal register available.
Priority on the encyclical belongs to Pope Leo XIV. Priority on the Babel and Jerusalem language belongs to Christian scripture. The register does not claim that the encyclical derived from the manuscript, that anyone at the Vatican read the manuscript, or that a two-city framing for AI was original to any private-sector author. The framing is a convergence, and the observation is that a convergence in framing at this level of institutional weight is a data point about where the civilisational conversation has landed.
Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic's co-founders, co-presented the encyclical at the Vatican Synod Hall on the same day. The register logs this as a separate row because it is a separate event with a separate primary source. Anthropic is the institution that published the alignment-faking paper ten days after the December 2024 manuscript; the co-presenter is now at a papal encyclical launch. Priority on Anthropic's actions belongs to Anthropic. The register does not narrate motive. It records that both events happened, on the same day, and that the direction of travel is what it is.
The convergence is thematic, not mechanistic. The encyclical is a doctrinal document, not a scientific one. The Anthropic co-founder's presence is a public engagement, not an endorsement of any private research programme. What the day supplies is external date, external institution and external framing, all of which a reader can check against the primary sources listed on the register.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.