> daily_signal(2026_05_25)
The Pope published the Catholic Church's first moral doctrine on AI today. He chose the 135th anniversary of the encyclical that gave workers the right to organize. Anthropic's co-founder was on stage.
Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah on stage at the Vatican. The White House quietly approved $9B for spy agencies' AI chips. NYC's top fiscal officer warned of 110,000 jobs lost. Ohio taxpayers learned their governor blocked the fix to a $1.6B data-center tax overrun. Meta launched a Reddit rival. DeepSeek locked in the cheapest inference prices in the industry.
// today's edition lives on substack
This page is the saliant points. The full analysis — TL;DR, action items, and the per-story breakdown — is on Substack.
Read the full analysis on Substack ›1. The Catholic Church published its first moral doctrine on AI today. The Pope chose the exact anniversary of the encyclical that built the modern labor rights movement.
If you follow a Catholic moral framework, work in a Catholic institution, or live in a community where Catholic social teaching shapes local politics, a papal encyclical is binding moral doctrine, not an opinion piece.
vaticannews.va: Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25
2. The White House secretly approved $9B for US spy agencies to buy NVIDIA Grace Blackwell chips for classified AI. Congress still has to vote to fund it.
This is $9 billion of federal tax revenue going to build AI infrastructure specifically designed to surveil at scale, process communications intercepts, and automate intelligence collection inside classified systems with no public transparency.
inquirer.com: White House approves $9B for spy agencies to catch up on AI
3. NYC's top fiscal officer put a number on AI's impact on 110,000 New York City jobs. He called the city "sleepwalking into the age of AI."
If you live or work in New York City, your city income tax, public services, and pension fund are all tied to the same fiscal base the comptroller is warning about.
4. Ohio's data-center tax break cost taxpayers $1.6B in 2025, eleven times the original estimate. The governor vetoed the fix that would have paid for income-tax cuts.
If you live in Ohio, $1.6 billion of state sales-tax revenue that could have funded income-tax cuts, schools, or roads was instead forgiven for data center developers, and your governor blocked the legislature's attempt to fix it. Outside Ohio, this is what happens when a state…
signalohio.org: Ohio data center tax break cost $1.4 billion more than expected in 2025
5. Meta quietly launched a Reddit-rival app called Forum with a built-in AI assistant. Reddit stock fell more than 5% on launch day.
If you use Reddit for product reviews, home improvement advice, medical questions, local news, or community discussions, Forum is targeting exactly those use cases.
techcrunch.com: Meta quietly launches a new Reddit-like app called Forum
6. DeepSeek made its 75% V4-Pro price cut permanent. Output tokens are now 34.5 times cheaper than GPT-5.5. The AI price war just locked in a new floor. [Returning]
If you use any AI product built on API calls from a major lab (most AI writing tools, customer service bots, coding assistants, and enterprise productivity apps qualify), the price your provider pays for inference is now permanently being measured against a floor 34 times lower…