Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Takes Aim at Artificial Intelligence

So the new pope just dropped his first major statement to the world — and instead of starting with, say, a gentle reflection on faith, he went straight at Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence. Here's what you need to know.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical — think of it as a formal open letter to the world, the heaviest-weight document a pope can publish — on May 25. It's called "Magnifica Humanitas," which is Latin for "Magnificent Humanity." It's 42,300 words long, and the entire thing is essentially one sustained argument: AI, as it's currently being built and deployed, is a threat to what makes us human.

The pope didn't hold back. He compared the rise of AI to the biblical Tower of Babel — humans getting so caught up in their own ambition that things spiral out of control. He also explicitly called for AI to be "disarmed." That's a strong word, and he knew it — he said so in the document. What he means by it: strip AI out of military decision-making, break the stranglehold that a handful of corporations have over its development, and make it subject to real democratic oversight.

Why does this matter to you personally? A few reasons:

First, your job. The pope singled out the way AI is reshaping labor, warning that many people could lose access to meaningful work — and that those who keep their jobs may increasingly be forced to act more like machines than humans. He called for tax systems that shift more of the burden onto those benefiting most from AI profits, and less onto the most vulnerable workers.

Second, your relationships. In a line that'll hit home for a lot of people, Leo warned that AI chatbots risk not just fooling you into thinking you're talking to a person — but making you stop wanting to talk to real people at all. AI can simulate empathy and companionship, even send "words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love." But he says that's a trap: it creates the illusion of connection while quietly hollowing out the real thing.

Third, who's actually in charge of AI. The pope explicitly called out companies that have written their own internal ethical guidelines for their AI systems — like Anthropic, the company behind Claude — and said that's not good enough. "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few," he wrote. Decisions about how AI behaves shouldn't be made by a handful of tech executives, full stop.

Notably, Leo presented the encyclical at the Vatican alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic — a gesture that signaled the Church wants dialogue with the industry, not just a scolding. Olah reportedly called for "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."

The timing of the document was deliberate and historically loaded. Leo signed it on May 15, exactly 135 years after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed "Rerum Novarum" — the landmark 1891 encyclical that defended workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. The parallel is not subtle: Leo XIV sees AI as this century's version of that upheaval, and he wants the Church to play the same role it did then — as a check on unchecked power.

The document is addressed not just to Catholics but to "every person of goodwill." Whether you're religious or not, the pope is essentially arguing that how we build and govern AI isn't just a tech policy question — it's one of the defining moral choices of our era. That part, at least, is hard to argue with.