Pope Leo XIV published his article first encyclical monday, dubbing Magnificent Humanity About “Protecting human identity in the age of artificial intelligence”. While AI is a fork, the problems Leon focuses on are older and more widespread: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the concentration of power in the hands of those who don’t care whether humanity writes great or not remain spectacular.
In a 200-page document that Pope presented with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, Leo argues that technology built and controlled by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.
“When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to be opaque and avoid public scrutiny, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that lead to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”
“In fact, as with any major technological change, artificial intelligence tends to increase the power of those who already have economic resources, expertise and access to information,” the encyclical continued, highlighting concerns that elites could use their power to “shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes, and manipulate economic dynamics to their advantage.”
The encyclical comes a few days after President Donald Trump He delayed signing his executive order on AI, would provide government oversight before new models are released, reported At the urging of VC investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks.
Pope Leo called for artificial intelligence to be governed by “clear criteria and effective supervision” based on the participation of the communities that will be affected. More specifically, Leo called for an end to the AI arms race “for more powerful algorithms and larger databases” that companies and countries believe will “provide geopolitical or commercial advantages.”
“To disarm means to discredit the assumption that technical power automatically gives the right to rule,” he said.
Again, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum touched on the same concentration of power during the Industrial Revolution, but there is no need to look back that far. Elon Musk buying Twitter and positioning the platform to help elect Trump; the hundreds of millions flow from the tech elite to super PACs to block AI regulation—an example that clearly inspired the work of Leo XIV.
The Pope comes to the same conclusion as many others: the surreal power and capabilities of today’s artificial intelligence greatly increase this risk.
Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Review Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven disinformation and deep-fakes have “corrupted our ability to understand what is true and what is not true, and this has consequences for really 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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