If you wanted to get a good sense of how Washington insiders viewed the release of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical laying out Catholic doctrine on artificial intelligence, let me take you inside an actual room of Washington insiders.

Here’s the scene: a black-tie gala last week at the Waldorf Astoria, which used to be the Trump hotel, held by the Washington AI Network. In attendance, spotted among the dancers dressed like robots on stilts: AI lobbyists, AI safety nonprofits, tech industry representatives, tech journalists, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, senior administration officials — Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz, Department of Energy Under Secretary Darío Gil — and me. Papal nuncio Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Vatican’s top diplomat to the United States, is also there, making his surprise debut to deliver remarks to the assembled, who expected to celebrate the breakout power players of artificial intelligence. (Yeah, Kevin O’Leary was receiving an award. It was that broad of a celebration.)

The nuncio is trying to relay the pope’s message of safeguarding humans and the human condition before innovation and profit. But I can barely hear him. The salad course has come out, and Caccia is being drowned out by the sound of cutlery on plates and people murmuring to their tablemates, because this is prime networking time.

Even if the general public is excited about Magnifica Humanitas, the pope doesn’t carry the force of law, nor can he impose onerous regulations, and therefore the pope does not immediately matter to Washington. For all the dinner talk chatter, the AI industry seems to be experiencing some tunnel vision. Generally, corporate lobbyists try to befriend everybody, Democrat and Republican alike, and cultivate those relationships for as many years as possible without pissing off either side. But that’s not a possibility in Donald Trump’s Washington, where supporting a Democrat in the past could be viewed as disloyalty, even for tech oligarchs. (Billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administrator, for instance, was iced for several months after Trump learned he’d once donated to a Democrat.)