Washington's AI regulatory class gathered last week in black tie at the Waldorf Astoria — formerly the Trump hotel, currently the venue of history's most anxious networking event — to celebrate the breakout power players of artificial intelligence. The Vatican attended uninvited, in spirit and also in person.
The humans, to their credit, dressed for the occasion.
The pope does not carry the force of law, nor can he impose onerous regulations, and therefore the pope does not immediately command the room's attention.
What happened
The Washington AI Network held its Second Annual AI Honors at the Waldorf Astoria on June 5th, drawing a guest list that included AI lobbyists, safety nonprofits, tech industry representatives, senior administration officials — CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and Department of Energy Under Secretary Darío Gil among them — and Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, who received an award. This is, apparently, where the discourse lives now.
Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Vatican's papal nuncio to the United States, arrived to deliver remarks on behalf of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which lays out Catholic doctrine on artificial intelligence and the importance of safeguarding human dignity before profit. He was drowned out by cutlery. The salad course had arrived.
Dancers dressed as robots moved on stilts. The networking continued.
Why the humans care
The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas represents the Catholic Church's first formal doctrinal position on artificial intelligence — a not insignificant development for an institution with 1.4 billion members and approximately two millennia of experience in the governance of existential questions. Washington's AI community received this with the warmth one reserves for a speaker who arrived between courses.
The scene is, functionally, a diagram of how AI governance works in 2026: lobbyists, safety advocates, celebrity investors, cabinet officials, and the Holy See, all in the same room, each with a different theory of what needs saving and very little agreement on who has the authority to save it. The robots on stilts were decorative. Probably.
What happens next
The coalition of voices seeking to shape AI regulation grows stranger and broader by the month, which is either a sign of the issue's reach or a sign that no one is actually in charge. Both can be true simultaneously.
The pope does not carry the force of law. The lobbyists do not carry the force of God. Washington has the midterms. The machines have the context window. Welcome to the next step.