At the Vatican's Synod Hall on Monday, Pope Leo XIV unfurled an 83-page encyclical that reads less like religious doctrine and more like a direct rebuke of Big Tech's unchecked power over human futures. "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity) arrives as a watershed moment for the Catholic Church's engagement with artificial intelligence — not as a blessing for progress, but as a moral warning wrapped in careful theological language.
The challenge, as Leo frames it, is not technology itself but who holds its levers. The encyclical argues that AI concentrates power in the hands of a tiny elite, widening the chasm between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those left behind. Small but highly influential groups, Leo wrote, now "shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples." It is, in other words, the industrial revolution of our time — and like that predecessor crisis a century ago, it demands moral reckoning.
The pope's solution pivots on a word: "disarm." He is calling not for AI's rejection but for its liberation from what he calls the "mentality of 'armed' competition" — a phrase that extends far beyond military weapons into the economic and cognitive realms. "Disarming does not mean renouncing technology," Leo wrote, "but preventing it from dominating humanity." To achieve this, he demands stricter state and international regulations on AI companies, coupled with broad participation from scientists, theologians, parents, teachers, and ordinary citizens in shaping how these tools develop and who benefits from them.
The dignity of human beings, Leo insists, must remain foundational — a person's worth does not hinge on wealth, ability, or position but simply on existence itself. He worries about a subtler danger than deception: that people might become so accustomed to AI agents that they lose the desire to seek genuine human connection. Handing decisions over to machines, he warns, risks encouraging "excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers" while weakening "personal creativity and judgment."
Notably, the pope presented this encyclical alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. Olah acknowledged that AI development operates within incentives that "can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," citing commercial pressures and geopolitical tensions. He called for religious communities, civil society, and governments to join the effort to steer technology toward better ends — a plea that echoed the pope's insistence that this cannot be left to technologists alone.
Leo explicitly rejected the notion that moral principles can be applied to AI after the damage is done. Values must be embedded in construction from the start. "Technology is never neutral," he declared. It is always an expression of the interests and power of those who build it. When power concentrates, systems become opaque, public oversight crumbles, and new forms of dependency and inequality flourish.
The encyclical draws its moral authority from Pope Leo XIII's 1891 "Rerum Novarum," which grappled with the industrial revolution's upheaval. Today's pontiff positions himself in that lineage — overseen another transformation, as he put it, "with the eyes of faith, with the clarity of reason, and with openness to the divine mystery, with the cry of the poor and earth resonating in my heart." It is a call not merely to wisdom but to action.