Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Mondays. Noble Magnificent humanity addresses “safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.” And while AI is the hook, the problems Leo focuses on are older and more pervasive: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the concentration of power in the hands of those who don’t necessarily care whether humanity as a whole remains magnificent.
Throughout the 200-page document, which the Pope presented together with Chris Olah, co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, Leo argues that technology built and governed by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.
“When that power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” he writes.
“Indeed, as with every major technological change, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise, and access to data,” the encyclical continues, highlighting concerns that elites could use their power to “shape patterns of information and consumption, influence democratic processes, and direct economic dynamics to their own benefit.”
The encyclical comes just days after President Donald Trump delayed signing his executive order on AI, which would have given the government oversight over new models before they are launched, reportedly at the urging of venture capital investor and former White House artificial intelligence czar David Sacks.
Pope Leo called for AI to be guided by “clear criteria and effective supervision” based on the participation of the communities that will be affected by it. More specifically, Leo called for an end to the AI arms race: the push to build “ever more powerful algorithms and larger data sets” that companies and countries believe will “ensure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”
“To disarm means to debunk the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he wrote.
Again, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 addressed the same concentration of power during the Industrial Revolution, but we don’t need to look that far back. Consider Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his deployment of the platform to help elect Trump, or the hundreds of millions flowing from tech elites to super PACs to block AI regulation, patterns that clearly inspired the work of Leo XIV.
The Pope reaches a conclusion that many have already reached: the power and surreal capabilities of today’s AI greatly raise the stakes.
Paolo Carozza, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and president of the Meta Oversight Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven disinformation and deepfakes have “corroded our ability to recognize what is true and what is not true, and that really has consequences for democratic politics.” The tech industry’s practice of “collecting and manipulating” human data, he added, poses “fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.”
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