The Customer Is Missing: What The Encyclical And Anthropic Both Forgot

Just last week, on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, a major encyclical on safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. Anthropic's founder was present at the announcement and highlighted its updated Constitution for Claude, one of the most thoughtful governance documents yet produced for a frontier AI model. Both are serious, well-intentioned efforts to confront the challenges of AI.

Yet they share a striking and consequential omission: neither document mentions the customer, even once.

The encyclical devotes extensive attention to the "inalienable dignity of the worker," the evils of unemployment, exploitation, new forms of digital slavery, and the need to protect labor amid AI disruption. Anthropic's Constitution carefully defines "helpfulness" in service to "principals" and "users" (primarily organizations and their internal employees), while prioritizing safety, ethics, and human oversight. Both documents are steeped in concern for producers, workers, and internal stakeholders.

Yet the people who ultimately pay the bills and judge whether products and services create real value -- the customers -- are not mentioned.

A Telling Blind Spot

This is not a minor linguistic oversight. Catholic Social Teaching has long prioritized the vulnerable, especially workers facing industrial-era exploitation. That focus made sense in 1891 when Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum. But in 2026, in mature service and knowledge economies dominated by large organizations, the bigger problem is often different: unproductive or low-value work that persists because incentives are misaligned with customer outcomes.

Professor David Graeber famously estimated in his book, Bullshit Jobs (2018), that 30-50% of work in large organizations serves no meaningful purpose. Subsequent surveys have consistently found large numbers of employees who believe their own jobs could disappear without anyone noticing. When documents of moral authority emphasize worker dignity without a corresponding emphasis on customer value, they risk providing intellectual and moral cover for this phenomenon.

The encyclical speaks powerfully about the dignity of the worker, integral human development, and the universal destination of goods. Yet it rarely asks whether the work being protected actually improves customers' lives. Anthropic's Constitution is even more explicit in its inward focus: "helpfulness" is defined relative to operators and users inside paying organizations. The external customer -- the person whose satisfaction ultimately validates economic activity -- is not mentioned even once.