Pope Leo Issues Sweeping Rebuke of Big Tech Over Artificial Intelligence

So here's a story that cuts across religion, tech, politics, and your everyday life all at once. On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV dropped what might be the most ambitious papal document in decades — and it wasn't about theology in the traditional sense. It was about artificial intelligence.

The document is called "Magnifica Humanitas" — Latin for "Magnificent Humanity" — and it's what the Catholic Church calls an encyclical (think of it as the pope's highest-level formal letter, sent to the Church's 1.4 billion members worldwide). 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 core message? Humans first. Always. The document frames AI as the new industrial revolution and makes an appeal to "disarm AI" by removing it from military and economic interests. Leo drew an explicit parallel to Pope Leo XIII, who wrote a landmark encyclical in 1891 addressing the upheaval of the original Industrial Revolution — essentially saying: we've been here before, and we need to get ahead of it this time.

"When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities," Leo wrote. That's a pretty direct shot at Silicon Valley.

On a personal level, the pope touched on something a lot of us feel but rarely name: the creeping loneliness of AI-mediated life. In a time of AI chatbots, Leo warned 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 he's concerned about what it's doing to our thinking — handing over decision-making to machines may "encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment."

On the economic side, the pope didn't hold back. He warned against "new forms of slavery," highlighting the trail of human and environmental exploitation behind AI — from models training on copyrighted material to the extraction of rare minerals used in AI hardware. He called for tax systems that ease the burden on the most vulnerable and demand more from those with greater resources, while the benefits of innovations should be transparent and shared with the entire community.

The military angle is just as striking. In the encyclical, Leo sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was "not permissible to entrust lethal" decisions to tech. The "just war" theory, espoused recently by the administration of US President Donald Trump, was "outdated," Leo wrote, adding that "no algorithm can make war morally acceptable."

One more detail worth noting: the nearly 43,000-word text was presented alongside AI experts, including Christopher Olah, co-founder of US giant Anthropic — one of the biggest AI companies in the world. That's not a coincidence. It signals the pope isn't just preaching from a distance; he's engaging directly with the people building this technology.

Bottom line: whether you're Catholic or not, this is a major world leader using serious moral authority to say the AI boom needs guardrails — and that regular people, not just tech billionaires, deserve a seat at the table.