Pope Leo Releases Sweeping AI Encyclical, Takes Aim at Big Tech

Pope Leo XIV took direct aim at the power of Big Tech in his first encyclical on Monday (May 25), warning that artificial intelligence risks widening inequality, weakening democracy, and undermining what it means to be human. Think of it as the Catholic Church's most formal, high-stakes memo to the world — and this time, the subject line is AI.

Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the church's 1.4 billion members. So when the Pope puts pen to paper like this, it carries serious weight — and this one is aimed well beyond church pews.

The document, titled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), frames AI as the new industrial revolution and makes an appeal to "disarm AI" by removing it from military and economic interests, subjecting AI companies to stricter state and international regulations, and inviting the broad participation of individuals and communities in shaping the future of this rapidly developing technology.

Pope Leo presented the encyclical at the Vatican's Synod Hall, where he referenced the 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum," written by his namesake Pope Leo XIII to address the challenges posed by the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In other words, he's drawing a direct line from factory workers getting exploited in the 1800s to what's happening in Silicon Valley today.

The Pope says that the future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a few wealthy tech leaders, and warns of new forms of exploitation behind it — from hidden labor, to rare mineral mining, to data taken without genuine consent. If you've ever wondered who's really profiting from the AI boom, and at whose expense, Leo's asking the same question.

The pope warned against "new forms of slavery," highlighting the trail of human and environmental exploitation behind AI — from the models training on copyrighted material to the extraction of rare minerals used in AI hardware.

In a time of AI chatbots, Leo wrote that the risk is not just that someone interacting with an AI agent might believe they are talking to a person, but 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." That hits differently when you think about how many of us already Google — or now AI-chat — our way through daily decisions.

In the encyclical, Leo also sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was "not permissible to entrust lethal" decisions to tech.

One of the most eyebrow-raising moments of the event? The pope presented the document alongside high-ranking Vatican prelates, Catholic theologians, and Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, the American AI company behind Claude. Speaking at the event, Olah said that AI development "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," citing commercial concerns, geopolitical pressure, and pride and ambition.

"Technology is never neutral," Leo wrote, adding that it's an expression of the interests and stakeholders behind it. That's the core of his argument: whoever controls AI controls the future — and right now, that's a very small group of very powerful people.