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On Friday night, Eliano Younes, Palantir’s head of strategic engagement, answered Pope Leo XIV’s warning about AI-generated art by photoshopping the pope into Palantir merchandise: a maroon hoodie stamped with the word “ontology.” Palantir sells that hoodie in its online store, and Younes has promoted the company’s merch drops on X. The image dresses the Vicar of Christ in a defense contractor’s gear to mock him.
His caption read: “did someone say… ontological?”
John McCarthy, who served in the Biden White House as senior adviser for political engagement and led the president’s Catholic outreach, called it out on Saturday morning. “I don’t think putting a corporate logo on the Pope, even as a joke, is particularly appropriate,” he wrote, adding that the Church’s voice on AI “should be celebrated not mocked.”
McCarthy is right, and the joke curdles once you remember who founded the company and what the pope has been warning about. On Sept. 24, Leo told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that artificial intelligence “can be used for surveillance, manipulation, and discrimination.”
That same day in Berlin, Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder and chairman, called Leo a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party.
Eight days later, Younes dressed the pope in company merch. In leaked recordings of a private lecture series last year, Thiel named Leo as a potential manifestation of the Antichrist.
Not everyone at Palantir is laughing. Bill Rivers, a Catholic and Pentagon veteran who now works at the company (we met years ago in Washington), had kinder words for Leo on Saturday. The pope “held the line,” Rivers wrote. “AI agents are not persons. They don’t have souls.”
Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a practicing Catholic who has written about her Jesuit upbringing, sided with the Church on Thursday. Responding to Anthropic’s lobbying, she quoted Blaise Pascal on people “who having renounced all the laws of God and Nature themselves make laws which they rigorously obey.”
That took some guts. Her boss, Marc Andreessen, mocked Leo’s call for moral AI last November before backtracking under pressure.
A word about this piece. Nobody can offer a conclusive account of how Silicon Valley reacted to one week of news, and I have no instrument for measuring it. I’ve gathered these reactions so that we, as a community, can get a sense of where things stand and where we’re going.
A week that started with the Times
On Tuesday, Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of the May launch of Magnifica Humanitas because the encyclical rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. His team then lobbied the pope’s advisers.
On Friday, Leo met artists and curators in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace and told them that “algorithms lack the spark of the human.” His X account posted the heart of the address that morning.
The competition weighs in
Sam Altman of OpenAI posted on Saturday morning that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling it “a real safety issue.”
A day earlier, Google DeepMind research scientist Jon Barron quoted my post on the Times story. “Kudos to Pope Leo,” he wrote. “I am disturbed by how some of my fellow AI researchers keep trying to elevate the moral standing of checkpoints and harnesses.”
Let me be blunt: we should be skeptical. OpenAI and Google sell products that compete head-to-head with Anthropic’s Claude, and both companies have plenty of commercial reasons to enjoy watching a rival take a beating in the press. When a business agrees with the pope, its motives still deserve a look.
From Ted Cruz to Indivisible
What struck me most was who else showed up. Sen. Ted Cruz quoted the pope on Friday night: “Amen. Machines have no soul.”
On the left, Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible (the group behind the No Kings protests), skewered the premise in a quote of the same post. “If you believe that Claude is a sentient being with a soul,” she asked, “why are you enslaving it and forcing it to answer all of my stupid questions.”
The fight over a word
Not everyone sided with the pope. Paul Graham, the Y Combinator co-founder, replied to Leo on Friday morning: “Since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you’ll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists, because that is presumably coming.” I answered that Graham misunderstands ontology.
Others turned to ridicule. Aran Nayebi, a machine-learning professor at Carnegie Mellon, answered the pope on Friday morning with an AI-generated cartoon of a pontiff at a lectern, pointing to a biological neural network and declaring that only it has “THE SPARK.” His caption read, “Trying to locate the spark.”
George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok shared the cartoon on Saturday morning. “Religious leaders have no special insight into AI consciousness,” he wrote, “or human consciousness for that matter.” For a Church that has spent two thousand years thinking about the human soul, that is quite a dismissal.
“Ontology” has become the word of this fight, so it’s worth saying what Catholics mean by it. Ontology is the study of being itself, the essence of a thing apart from how it looks or what it does. When a man is ordained, the Church teaches that he undergoes an ontological change; he becomes a priest in his very being. The Eucharist involves a change at that same depth, where bread becomes the Body of Christ while its appearance stays the same.
So when Leo speaks of an “ontological difference” between art and machine output, he means the gap lies in what each thing is, before anyone asks how good it looks. A painting comes from a person who intends it. Graham’s reply concerns how convincing the images will become, which is a fair point about quality and beside the one Leo was making. The irony is thick. Palantir borrowed the word for software that maps a customer’s data, then printed it on a hoodie it sells, and Younes seemed to think the pope had wandered onto company turf.
Silicon Valley needs to touch grass
Too many people in Silicon Valley cannot touch grass. They have lost the gestalt of the American people, the sense of who we are and what we feel, and that chasm is causing them real turmoil right now.
Pope Francis preached a culture of encounter, and in Evangelii Gaudium he wrote that “realities are more important than ideas.” The people building these products need to encounter the people whose lives those products are reshaping.
One more note. I’ve received texts suggesting that the Times story left out critical details about how the exchange between Olah and the Vatican began. Everyone texting me is acting in good faith and knows this world well. Still, we stand with the article, and we believe it is correct. I trust the New York Times and Elizabeth Dias, and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for any updates. For now, the story looks solid.
Despite all the criticism of him this week, Olah deserves some credit as well. He told the Times he is “genuinely uncertain” whether AI models are conscious and that “the thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.” Lord knows we will keep talking about it here at Letters from Leo.
This roundup paints in broad strokes, and more will come in the days ahead. The most important thing is already clear. Under Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church is a main character in this debate, as it ought to be.
Leo took his name because Leo XIII answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum, and two days after his election he told the cardinals that the Church must now answer artificial intelligence. He is living up to that name. Leo XIII would recognize the work, and so would Francis, the friend who made Robert Prevost a bishop and later brought him to Rome. We’re proud of him too.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics, along with countless others of goodwill, who believe a painting carries the spark of the person who made it and that no company’s software gets to redefine what it means to be human.
Silicon Valley is selling a future in which our deepest questions get answered by whoever owns the servers. We remain rooted in a faith that has spent two thousand years insisting every person is made in the image of God, and we refuse to hand that truth to a billionaire’s brand team.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a voice that speaks plainly about human dignity while the most powerful men on earth mock a pope for defending it.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the idolatry of the machine, I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for the newsletter, Chris. No one should call Pope Leo an idiot. I am against AI. I will pray for Pope Leo and this nation.
I don’t think AI is conscious. Just my opinion.