Pope Leo XIV Issues First Encyclical, Taking Aim at Artificial Intelligence

The head of the Catholic Church just did something no pope has done before — he personally stepped to the podium to unveil his own encyclical. And instead of a familiar moral topic, Pope Leo XIV took direct aim at the power of Big Tech, warning that artificial intelligence risks widening inequality, weakening democracy, and undermining what it means to be human.

The document is called Magnifica Humanitas — Latin for "Magnificent Humanity." At 42,300 words, it marks Pope Leo's most sweeping statement yet on the promise and dangers of AI, a topic he has repeatedly spoken about in the year since his election. Think of it as the Catholic Church's formal, authoritative word on one of the biggest debates of our time.

So what does it actually say?

The Pope's core message: humans come first, full stop. At the heart of the encyclical is the insistence that human beings take precedence over artificial intelligence. The dignity of the human person "does not depend on a person's abilities, wealth or position in life," but simply by virtue of existing.

If you've ever felt uneasy about how much of your life runs on algorithms, the Pope is basically validating that gut feeling. He wrote that the risk of AI chatbots isn't just that someone might believe they're talking to a person — it's that they might lose the desire to seek other people at all. And handing over decision-making to machines may "encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment."

He didn't mince words on Big Tech either. "Technology is never neutral," Leo wrote, adding that it's an expression of the interests and stakeholders behind it. In other words: when a company builds an AI system, it's baking in its own values and priorities — and you're the one living with the consequences.

In a nod to AI models that have adopted ethical frameworks — such as Anthropic — the pope said such internal guidelines must still be subjected to criteria of shared social justice. "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few," he wrote. That's a pointed message for Silicon Valley.

It goes beyond your phone and your job.

The encyclical particularly condemns the use of AI in warfare, stating that reduced human control of weaponry makes it easier to begin wars. Leo writes that consequently, Catholic just war theory has become outdated. That's a major theological shift — the Church is essentially saying the old moral rulebook for deciding when war is justified no longer fits a world where AI can pull triggers.

The encyclical also discourages an AI arms race and criticizes deepfakes in politics — both things that affect the information you see every day.

The historical parallel is deliberate.

The encyclical was timed, to the day, for the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, his namesake Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical regarding industrialization. That 1891 document was the Church's response to the chaos of the Industrial Revolution — child labor, brutal working conditions, the rise of factory capitalism. Leo XIV has drawn a direct comparison between the current moment of technological development and the one his namesake confronted more than a century earlier, describing AI as ushering in a "new industrial revolution."

Who else was in the room?

Here's where it gets interesting. Pope Leo broke tradition to oversee the release of the 235-page text alongside Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, an AI company. Anthropic, for the unfamiliar, is one of the biggest AI labs in the world — the company behind Claude. A Vatican source said that Anthropic's inclusion is "not an endorsement, prize, reward or canonization." But the symbolism is hard to ignore: the Pope wanted one of the people actually building this technology in the room.

Why does this matter to you?

Even if you're not Catholic, this document carries weight. An encyclical is a major teaching addressed to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. That's a massive slice of humanity being asked to think critically about AI — about your job, your relationships, your kids' education, and the weapons being built in your name. A papal encyclical is a high-profile moral intervention that can shift public and political attention around AI governance. Policymakers, corporations, and advocacy groups are already paying attention.