The Vatican and Anthropic's unexpected crossover
What the Pope understands about AI that most CEOs don’t.
Hey there,
The most useful piece of writing I read on AI and work this week was 42,000 words long. It came from the Vatican.
Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on May 25 and presented it alongside Anthropic's co-founder. The document is about AI, labor, and human dignity, and it draws a direct line from the Industrial Revolution to now.
The data this week makes that line concrete.
Let's get into it.
🌐 News Shortlist
1. The Pope Published a 42,000-Word Document on AI and Labor
Recap: Pope Leo XIV published "Magnifica Humanitas" on May 25, his first major teaching document, a 42,300-word encyclical on AI, labor, and human dignity. He signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical on labor rights during the Industrial Revolution. The document addresses job insecurity from AI, the concentration of technological power, and the risk of treating workers as something to be replaced or optimized out of existence. The Pope warned that treating human beings as "something to be perfected or surpassed" makes it easier to accept that some lives are less useful or less worthy. The encyclical was presented at a Vatican press conference alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.
The parallel to 1891 is the detail worth taking seriously.
Rerum Novarum was written during the Industrial Revolution, when factories were absorbing rural workers and the question of what ownership and labor owed each other had no formal answer. Rather than stopping industrialization, Leo XIII's encyclical set out principles for valuing human work within it: the dignity of labor, fair wages, decent working conditions, and the right to organize. Companies that ignored that framework faced a different kind of risk than those that engaged with it.
Leo XIV is making the same move 135 years later. His document asks companies to account honestly for what they are doing to the people whose jobs are changing or disappearing in the process. The line he draws is pointed: if you treat workers as variables to optimize away, you have already accepted a logic that assigns different values to different human lives. That is a harder position to defend than most AI restructuring announcements have acknowledged.
The week before, Standard Chartered's CEO described cutting 7,800 support jobs as "replacing lower-value human capital with investment capital." That is exactly the kind of thinking the encyclical challenges. Even if you do not share the Pope's religious views, his point stands. There is a real gap between how companies talk about AI changes and how workers experience them. A 42,000-word document that tackles this directly deserves more attention than most technology policy writing produced this year.
Advice:
If you cannot explain your AI and staffing decisions in terms of how they affect people, not just efficiency, you do not have a real strategy. You have a narrative. The encyclical calls for honesty about what is really happening. The goal is not to slow down. It is to be honest about the impact.
2. The Unemployment Rate Is Fine. White-Collar Payrolls Have Contracted for 31 Straight Months.
Recap: White-collar jobs have shrunk every month since October 2023, the longest sustained contraction in professional employment outside of a formal recession on record. The headline unemployment rate has stayed near 4.3 percent, masking what has happened in professional services, information, and financial activities. Job openings in these areas dropped below 1 million for the first time since April 2020, according to January 2026 JOLTS data. The average professional job search now takes six months. About 20 percent of job seekers have been looking for ten months or more, and some have sent over 1,700 applications without hearing back.
The headline unemployment rate shows how many people want a job but cannot find one. It does not reveal which sectors are hiring or how long it takes to land one. The 4.3 percent rate has been steady for months. So has the 31-month contraction in white-collar jobs. Both are true at once.
White-collar job losses show that recovery has been uneven. Health care and transportation are adding jobs, but core professional fields like software and finance have seen nearly three years of decline while overall numbers look favorable.
The most valuable white-collar professionals held onto their roles throughout the long downturn because they proved indispensable to their employers. You will not find them on job boards or among the flood of applicants.
Advice:
The 4.3 percent unemployment rate tells you very little about the people you actually want to hire. The best candidates in professional services and tech have made it through a long contraction and are not waiting for your job posting. You need to reach out to them directly.
3. Colombia Votes Sunday. Here Is What That Means for Building a Team There.
Recap: Colombia holds its first-round presidential election on May 31, four days from now. Three candidates are running: Ivan Cepeda of President Gustavo Petro's Historic Pact, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right independent drawing comparisons to Argentina's Javier Milei, and Paloma Valencia, a center-right senator from the Democratic Center. A candidate needs more than 50 percent to avoid a June 21 runoff. Foreign direct investment in Colombia is 9 percent below its 2022 level. Investors have been in a sustained wait-and-see posture ahead of the vote, reflecting three years of regulatory uncertainty, high corporate taxes, and a strained relationship with US investors under President Petro.
Beneath the political headlines, this is a story about investment. And that investment story is also a hiring story.
When investor confidence in a country drops, competition for senior talent drops with it. The companies most likely to hire experienced engineers, product managers, and operations leaders in Bogota and Medellin are multinational employers with confidence in the regulatory environment. Three years of investor caution under Petro has kept that competition lower than it would otherwise be. US companies hiring in Colombia right now face fewer competing offers than they would in a fully open investment climate.
That window is directly tied to Sunday's result. A Cepeda win keeps current policies in place, foreign investment likely stays cautious, and talent competition remains low. A Valencia or De la Espriella win signals a more business-friendly posture, accelerating investment and bringing more competition for the senior professionals you are trying to hire.
Most US companies building teams in Colombia have not thought about this election at all. That is a competitive advantage, but it has an expiration date.
Advice:
If you have been planning to build a team in Colombia and have been moving slowly, now is the time to pay attention. If investment picks up after the election, salaries and competition for talent will rise before it shows up in any hiring report. Moving before that happens is the advantage that closes first.
That is it for this week.
The Pope released the most direct moral accounting of AI's impact on workers that any major institution has produced this year. The unemployment rate has been accurate, and so has the 31-month contraction in white-collar jobs underneath it. And Colombia votes in four days, which will shift hiring conditions in Bogota and Medellin before most companies notice.
The trends that change first are the ones worth watching now.
That is what this newsletter is for. And it is what we help clients figure out every week at lupahire.com.
Until next time,
Joseph Burns
CEO & Founder, Lupa