The week the Pope and the FBI agreed about AI. The Anti-AI Brain is the operator's response.

On Monday, May 25, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical. The document is called Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The opening words are stark: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” What follows is the most serious moral document on AI any institution has produced in the last decade. The Pope calls for AI to be “disarmed” — not rejected, but stripped of “the mentality of military, economic, and cognitive competition.” He names the “architecture of visibility” that algorithmic platforms run on, and labels it a new form of power. He insists that human limitations are not defects to be eliminated, but a constitutive dimension of the person. He says that “there is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable.”

On Tuesday, May 26, WIRED reported on more than 1,000 pages of leaked DHS and FBI documents establishing “anti-tech extremism” as a federal surveillance category. The designation followed a Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman’s home and a shooting linked to a data-center approval vote. The new category, the leak shows, captures criticism of AI and data centers under a broad domestic-threat framework.

On Friday, May 29, The Anti-AI Brain shipped on Amazon. Its argument: AI use, at current intensity, produces measurable cognitive change in the people who use it most. The protocol inside is 30 days of structured practice that rebuilds the four circuits AI offloads, in the order it offloads them. The book does not ask the reader to reject AI. It asks the reader to use it without becoming it.

Three authorities, three different vocabularies, one diagnosis. This essay is the side-by-side.

What Magnifica humanitas actually says

The encyclical’s argument is layered. Start with the premise: “Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” From that premise, five claims flow.

1. The architecture of visibility is a new form of power. “Profiling, predicting, and directing behavior is a new form of power that risks discriminating against the weakest.” The Pope is not talking about deepfakes. He is talking about the feed.

2. AI must be disarmed. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” This is not a luddite call. It is a call to revoke the moral entitlement that ships with capability.

3. Limitations are constitutive. “Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” This is the explicit rejection of the transhumanist frame in which AI is the long-awaited fix for a defective human substrate.

4. Schools matter again. “The desire to ask questions may not be extinguished in young people by perfect machines that make human thought seem useless.”

5. The ecology of communication. “Transparency in how content is selected, protection of personal data, serious journalism founded on argumentation and verification, a new awareness in the proper and critical use of digital tools.”

Whether you read Latin or not, these sentences are operational. They describe a posture, not a policy. They describe what it means to remain a human when the medium is trying to render you legible.

What The Anti-AI Brain says

The book is shorter. Its argument is empirical, not theological. Use it or lose it — the brain’s oldest rule — applied to the cognitive tasks AI now performs on our behalf. Synapses that fire get reinforced; synapses that stop firing get pruned. Every task you hand to an AI is a training signal your neurons will never receive. Miss the signal long enough, and the capacity goes with it.

The book’s 30-day protocol does six things. It diagnoses the four circuits AI degrades fastest (attention, memory, reasoning, decisions). It teaches the Cognitive Tax matrix — a four-quadrant tool that names which AI uses are safe, which are reversible, and which are draining the circuit you need to do the work at all. It installs the Anti-AI Seven practices that rebuild what AI dissolves: deep reading, handwriting, movement, strategic play, silence, cognitive ops, and recall-and-teach. It names the Ten-Minute Wall as the neuroscience of attention’s hardest threshold. It teaches the Hallucination Audit workflow for checking AI outputs in under ten minutes. And it draws the line between the Cognitive Partisan (a user who treats AI as a sparring partner) and the Outsourced Mind (a user whose thinking now runs through the model).

The book is operator-grade. I built it from inside the house. I trained more than 1,500 professionals and AI users across 33 countries through my prior company. I co-founded an AI music studio that has crossed 15 million streams. I ship code with Claude every day. The Anti-AI Brain is the protocol I run on myself.

Side by side

Here is what the convergence looks like at the level of sentence.

Magnifica humanitas (Pope Leo XIV)	The Anti-AI Brain (the protocol)
“Technology is never neutral.” (§9)	The Pharmakon framing: AI is simultaneously poison and medicine, dose-dependent. (Ch. 8)
“Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” (§118)	The Ten-Minute Wall: the friction between minute two and minute twelve of focus is the entire game. (Ch. 4)
“AI must be disarmed… preventing it from dominating humanity.” (§110)	The Cognitive Partisan: use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. (Ch. 11)
“Architecture of visibility… new form of power.” (§171)	LLM sycophancy + False Competence: the four mechanisms that starve your error-detection circuit. (Chs. 2–3)
“Schools as places to seek and love the truth.” (§147)	The Anti-AI Seven practices reinstall the cognitive habits schooling used to install. (Ch. 6)
“To not react or tolerate grave violations means becoming accomplices.” (§176)	The protocol’s premise: cognitive sovereignty is a duty, not a preference. (Epilogue)

The vocabulary is different. The diagnosis is the same.

What this means for the operator

The Pope works at the level of moral framework. The book works at the level of daily practice. The FBI category, troublingly, works at the level of state surveillance. The middle position — the one that is being created by the combination of the three — is operator-grade cognitive sovereignty. It is the position of the person who builds with AI, ships with AI, profits from AI, and refuses to be consumed by AI. It is not anti-tech extremism. It is not luddism. It is also not Silicon Valley accelerationism. It is what comes when a working professional reads MIT, Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT and UCLA, decides the evidence is real, and builds a daily routine that protects the cognitive tissue AI tends to consume.

The book argues this is the only position from which AI can be safely used at scale.

What I am asking you to do

If you have made it this far, you are not the person the FBI category is designed to surveil. You are the person Magnifica humanitas is addressed to. You are also, almost certainly, a daily user of generative AI. The Anti-AI Brain is the user-side implementation of what the Pope laid out on Monday.

Three asks, in order.

1. Take the two-minute quiz at antiaibrain.com/score. It places you in one of four tiers (Ghost, Partisan, Operator, Sovereign) and tells you which of the four circuits AI degrades fastest is the first one to rebuild in your case. Free, on-site, no email required to see your score.

2. Read the book. The Kindle edition is live on Amazon at $9.99. Paperback comes shortly.

3. Run the 30 days. That is the only part that actually counts. Magnifica humanitas is a framework. The FBI category is a warning. The Anti-AI Brain is the protocol.

The Pope and the FBI got there first. The book is the daily practice that connects them to what you do at your desk on Monday morning.