Pope Leo XIV wants to disarm AI — and reshape its future
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical calls for 'disarming' AI, challenging digital monopolies and placing the Vatican at the center of global tech governance.
At a Glance:
Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15 and published today, May 25, is the first papal encyclical dedicated to AI. Pope Leo XIV calls for “disarming” the technology to prevent it from serving geopolitical and commercial competition above human welfare.
The document takes direct aim at transhumanism, algorithmic monopolies, and the concentration of digital power in a handful of private hands — overwhelmingly Western.
The presence at the press conference of Christopher Olah, co-founder of AI safety company Anthropic, suggests a deliberate positioning strategy: aligning with the most safety-conscious actors in the tech industry rather than confronting Silicon Valley head-on.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
A founding text in the tradition of Rerum Novarum
The document was signed on May 15 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark encyclical (a formal letter carrying the highest doctrinal weight in Catholicism) in which Leo XIII laid out the Catholic Church’s social doctrine in response to the Industrial Revolution. The parallel is not accidental. With roughly 250 paragraphs and nearly 40,000 words, Magnifica Humanitas aims to establish a Catholic doctrine for the age of AI, weaving together a critique of technological capitalism, geopolitical analysis of warfare, and deep questions about what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world.
Experts suggest its impact could be comparable to that of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s landmark 2015 encyclical on the environment, which triggered a wave of political and civic responses worldwide. The precedent matters: the Catholic Church knows how to convert a doctrinal text into a lever for public policy.
“Disarming AI”: what the Vatican actually means
The encyclical’s central phrase demands careful unpacking. According to the Vatican’s own summary, the call to “disarm AI” targets three things: freeing it from the logic of military, economic, and cognitive competition; breaking the equation between technological power and the right to govern; and wresting it away from the monopolies that threaten to place it permanently beyond human control.
For Leo XIV, the global race for the most powerful algorithm and the largest data bank often serves no higher purpose than consolidating a geopolitical or commercial advantage over rivals. AI, in this diagnosis, is not a neutral tool — it is the terrain of a power struggle whose rules have yet to be written, and whose losers will be, as usual, the most vulnerable.
The encyclical insists that knowledge and technology must not be concentrated in the hands of a few actors. This demand draws from the Catholic principle of the “universal destination of goods,” applied now to the digital realm — a direct critique of the concentration model that defines today’s tech industry, dominated by a handful of American platforms.
The strategic alliance with Anthropic
Christopher Olah, a Canadian researcher and entrepreneur specializing in AI interpretability and co-founder of Anthropic — the company behind the Claude AI model — took the stage alongside the pope at the encyclical’s public presentation. It marked a historic first: popes almost never appear before the press themselves, with major documents typically presented by cardinals, theologians, or Vatican-appointed experts.
Antonio Spadaro, the Italian Jesuit theologian and former editor of La Civiltà Cattolica who served as an adviser to Pope Francis, reads this as a deliberate signal. In his view, the Church is not speaking against Silicon Valley — it is speaking with its most thoughtful actors. Anthropic is a company that has placed safety and interpretability at the core of its mission, and the encyclical calls for precisely the transparency and accountability that approach embodies.
That reading, however, deserves scrutiny. The presence of an Anthropic co-founder at the Vatican cannot be taken as an endorsement of the broader industry — or even of Anthropic itself, whose commercial trajectory remains subject to the same competitive pressures as its rivals. The Vatican appears to be betting on a distinction between “good AI” (safe, interpretable, oriented toward the common good) and “bad AI” (opaque, militarized, monopolistic). That line is intellectually coherent. Whether it can be maintained in practice is another question.
Transhumanism, human limits, and digital colonialism
Beyond governance, the encyclical devotes substantial space to a critique of transhumanism and posthumanism — currents of thought, influential in Silicon Valley and beyond, that interpret progress as the overcoming of human limitations. For Leo XIV, limitation is not a defect to be engineered away but a constitutive dimension of the person: humans flourish not in spite of limits, but often through them, finding in fragility and finitude the conditions for relationship, care, and openness to one another.
The document also calls for a renewed educational compact, so that young people do not lose “the desire to ask questions” in a world where algorithmically perfect answers make human thinking seem unnecessary. This concern cuts to a debate that Western democracies have yet to settle: how to cultivate critical minds in an environment where the AI-generated answer arrives before the question has even fully formed.
During his pastoral visit to Africa, Leo XIV had already lamented that AI was progressively replacing “reality with its simulation,” and raised alarms about the grip of new technologies on natural resources — particularly the rare earth minerals essential to modern electronics. The critique of “digital colonialism” — not named as such, but present throughout — extends a South-North geopolitical reading that runs through the entire document.
Analysis
① The Vatican is repositioning itself as a regulatory actor, not a Luddite. By associating with Anthropic rather than condemning the industry outright, Leo XIV stakes out a role in international AI governance negotiations. Think of it as the Church doing what independent ethics watchdogs attempt in Washington: not blocking technology, but setting the terms of accountability. Whether that influence translates into concrete policy outcomes will depend on whether governments treat Magnifica Humanitas as a diplomatic asset or a pastoral curiosity.
② The Laudato Si’ comparison is both flattering and revealing. Francis had the advantage of a consolidated scientific consensus on climate change behind him. On AI, the landscape shifts too fast for any doctrinal text to claim the same normative stability. Magnifica Humanitas risks being periodically overtaken by developments it could not anticipate — a vulnerability Laudato Si’ did not face in the same way.
③ The moral neutrality of AI, contested. Leo XIV’s insistence that AI “cannot be considered morally neutral” [translated] runs counter to the tech industry’s default self-presentation as a provider of neutral infrastructure. That claim — that the values embedded in how AI systems are built, trained, and deployed are not accidental — may prove to be the encyclical’s most durable intellectual contribution to the public debate.
AI “cannot be considered morally neutral” [translated] — and that claim may be the encyclical’s most durable intellectual contribution.
The bottom line
Magnifica Humanitas marks the Catholic Church’s formal entry into global AI governance — through a text that draws as much from geopolitics as from theology. The open question is whether it will translate into real leverage. When the United States, China, and the European Union cannot agree on the basic rules of the algorithmic game, does the Vatican have the tools to tip the balance — or will Magnifica Humanitas become, like so many well-intentioned technology declarations before it, a text that is admired, cited, and politely set aside?
Sources: Vatican News · France 24 · Le Grand Continent · RTS · Aleteia