May 25, 2026 – AI Daily Recap

The Vatican drops its first-ever AI encyclical, Trump kills an executive order on AI oversight at the last minute, GitHub confirms a major supply-chain breach, and Google declares the agentic era open at I/O 2026.

Pope Leo XIV Releases Historic AI Encyclical

In what may be the most symbolically significant AI event of the year, Pope Leo XIV today published his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), devoted entirely to artificial intelligence and its implications for human dignity. The document was presented at the Vatican’s Synod Hall alongside Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model. The encyclical addresses AI through the lens of Catholic social teaching, covering labor rights, the just distribution of technology’s benefits, and the ethics of autonomous systems. The Pope signed the document on May 15 — the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark Rerum Novarum, which addressed labor and capital during the first Industrial Revolution. It’s a deliberate connection: the Church is framing AI as this generation’s defining economic and moral disruption.

Trump Scraps AI Executive Order at the Last Minute

President Trump abruptly delayed the signing of a landmark AI executive order on May 21, pulling the document hours before a scheduled ceremony with AI executives at the White House. The order would have established a voluntary framework for the federal government to pre-evaluate frontier AI models for security vulnerabilities before public release. Trump told reporters he was concerned the order “could have been a blocker” to American competitiveness, adding: “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.” The move came less than two months after Anthropic’s Mythos Preview model demonstrated the ability to autonomously discover severe cyber vulnerabilities, which had reportedly accelerated the administration’s interest in oversight.

GitHub Breached via Poisoned VS Code Extension

GitHub confirmed that approximately 3,800 internal repositories were exfiltrated by threat actor group TeamPCP through a trojanized version of the Nx Console VS Code extension. The compromised extension was live on the Visual Studio Marketplace for just 18 minutes on May 18, but that was enough to compromise an employee device and enable a multi-stage credential theft operation. The stolen data reportedly includes internal repositories related to GitHub Actions, Copilot, CodeQL, and infrastructure tooling. The attacker listed the data for sale at $50,000, and the LAPSUS$ group subsequently joined the sale, raising the asking price to $95,000. GitHub says customer repositories and enterprise accounts were not affected.

NextEra’s $67 Billion Dominion Deal Creates AI Power Giant

NextEra Energy announced a $67 billion all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy, creating the world’s largest regulated utility. The strategic rationale is explicitly AI-driven: Dominion powers northern Virginia’s “data center alley,” the world’s largest data center market, and the combined company will control a 130-gigawatt construction backlog — enough to power roughly 100 million homes. NextEra CEO John Ketchum told analysts the deal was necessary to build at the scale hyperscalers demand, combining renewable energy, battery storage, natural gas, and nuclear generation into a single platform capable of powering AI’s insatiable appetite for electricity.

Google I/O 2026: Gemini Spark and the Agentic Search Era

Google used its I/O 2026 developer conference to declare the arrival of its “agentic Gemini era.” The headline announcement was Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud, capable of managing schedules, pulling files from Drive, writing emails, and eventually working with third-party apps through MCP integration. Google also unveiled information agents in Search, Gemini 3.5 Flash (described as four times faster than competing frontier models), and Gemini Omni — a new model capable of generating video outputs from any input modality. The company disclosed it now processes over 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month across its surfaces, a 7x year-over-year increase.

OpenAI Brings Codex to Mobile

OpenAI launched Codex in the ChatGPT mobile app on May 14, extending its autonomous coding agent to smartphones across iOS and Android. The mobile version isn’t designed for writing code on your phone — it’s a remote command center for managing coding tasks running on laptops, remote environments, and dedicated devices. Users can review diffs, approve agent decisions, redirect running tasks, and monitor terminal output from anywhere. OpenAI noted that more than 4 million people now use Codex weekly, and the mobile extension is available to all ChatGPT plans in preview.

The Big Picture

This week’s news paints a picture of AI expanding in every direction simultaneously. The Vatican is framing AI as a moral challenge on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. The White House is struggling to find the right regulatory posture. Infrastructure is consolidating at unprecedented scale to feed AI’s energy demands. And the major labs are racing to ship autonomous agents that can operate 24/7 on your behalf. Meanwhile, the GitHub breach is a stark reminder that the developer toolchain itself has become a high-value attack surface. As AI agents become more capable and more deeply embedded in critical workflows, the security of the software supply chain isn’t just a technical concern — it’s a systemic one.

Sources

• Vatican News — Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas
• National Catholic Reporter — Pope Leo to Present Encyclical Alongside Anthropic Co-Founder
• NBC News — Trump Scraps Signing of Landmark AI Executive Order
• CNBC — Trump Postpones AI Executive Order Signing
• The Hacker News — GitHub Breached via Employee Device Hack
• Help Net Security — TeamPCP Breached GitHub via Poisoned VS Code Extension
• Fortune — NextEra’s $67 Billion Dominion Takeover
• CNBC — NextEra to Buy Dominion in AI Data Center Race
• Google Blog — I/O 2026: Welcome to the Agentic Gemini Era
• Google Blog — Search’s I/O 2026 Updates
• TechCrunch — OpenAI Says Codex Is Coming to Your Phone
• Engadget — OpenAI Brings Codex Coding App to Mobile