Pope Leo XIV Releases Historic AI Encyclical Alongside Anthropic Co-Founder
In what may be the most remarkable intersection of religion and technology in modern history, Pope Leo XIV personally presented his first encyclical on May 25 — titled Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity") — dedicated to "the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence."
What made the event extraordinary was the presence of Christopher Olah, the 33-year-old Anthropic co-founder and self-described atheist, who was seated among cardinals and theologians at the Vatican to address a packed auditorium. The Pope thanked Olah for his presence, stating: "What a great sign of hope it is that with our differences we can listen to one another."
Olah emphasized that the church's voice is needed to "ensure the gains of AI are shared globally," noting that AI development is "concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations." The encyclical was signed exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum on workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution — a deliberate parallel drawing attention to AI's transformative impact on labor and human dignity.
The document calls for international cooperation on AI governance, emphasizing the protection of human agency, dignity, and the common good in an age of increasingly autonomous systems.
Anthropic Set to Surpass OpenAI with $900 Billion+ Valuation
In a stunning financial development, Anthropic is closing a $30 billion funding round that would value the Claude maker at over $900 billion — surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion March 2026 valuation for the first time. The round is expected to close by the end of this month.
Investors including Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, and Dragoneer are each expected to invest $2 billion or more. The company's meteoric rise is backed by hard numbers: Anthropic projects $10.9 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, up 130% from $4.8 billion in Q1, and is on track for its first quarterly operating profit ever.
The valuation reversal is remarkable given that Anthropic was valued at $380 billion just in February 2026. The company's run-rate revenue has now surpassed $30 billion annually — up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025.
Adding to Anthropic's momentum, the company recently hired Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI leader, who joined the pre-training team on May 19 under team lead Nick Joseph. Karpathy is launching a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research.
Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5, AI Agents, and a New World Model
Google's I/O developer conference on May 19 delivered over 100 announcements in two hours, headlined by three major AI releases:
Gemini 3.5 Flash is now generally available, offering frontier-level intelligence at 4x the speed of comparable models. Priced at $1.50/$9 per 1M tokens with a 1M context window, it scored 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agent tasks.
Gemini Spark is Google's new personal AI agent that runs 24/7 on Google Cloud virtual machines, capable of working autonomously across Google Workspace, third-party apps, and the web. It represents Google's push into always-on agentic AI that proactively manages information for users.
Gemini Omni represents a leap forward in multimodality — a world model capable of generating any output from any input, starting with video generation and editing. Google also confirmed that Gemini will power a new personalized version of Siri launching later in 2026, in partnership with Apple.
On the infrastructure side, Google introduced two next-generation TPU chips: TPU 8i for fast inference powering autonomous agents, and TPU 8t designed for training on massive unified memory pools.
$67 Billion Energy Deal Signals AI's Infrastructure Transformation
NextEra Energy's $67 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, announced May 18, is the clearest signal yet that AI is fundamentally reshaping America's power infrastructure. The deal creates the world's largest regulated electric utility with a combined construction backlog of 130 gigawatts.
The crown jewel: Dominion controls Virginia's "Data Center Alley" — the densest concentration of AI and cloud infrastructure on the planet. NextEra CEO John Ketchum explicitly cited "AI factories" as the primary driver of a structural inflection in power demand.
The combined entity aims to serve over 30 active data center hubs by year-end, with a goal of reaching 40. Dominion shareholders receive a 23% premium — roughly $10 billion above pre-announcement market cap — reflecting the strategic value of controlling power supply to AI compute clusters.
AI Policy: Trump Cancels Executive Order, EU Streamlines AI Act
On the regulatory front, President Trump abruptly canceled the signing of an AI executive order this week, telling reporters it risked undermining America's competitive edge. The reversal comes despite the administration's earlier move toward oversight of advanced AI models following national security concerns about Anthropic's "Mythos" model.
In Europe, the EU Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement on May 18 to streamline the AI Act, adjusting timelines for high-risk AI system rules by up to 16 months to ensure standards and compliance tools are ready before enforcement begins.
Meanwhile, U.S. states continue to advance their own AI legislation, with Connecticut's bipartisan SB5 set to be signed into law — adding to growing state-level momentum in Washington, Florida, Virginia, and Utah.