Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday. title majestic humanity It deals with “Human Protection in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” AI is key, but the problems Leo focuses on are older, more widespread problems: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the concentration of power in the hands of people who don’t care at all whether humanity exists or not.
Throughout the 200-page document that the Pope submitted with Chris Olah, co-founder of AI company Anthropic, Leo argues that technology built and managed 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 become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that create new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” he wrote.
“Like virtually all major technological changes, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already have economic resources, expertise, and access to data.” The encyclical goes on to highlight concerns that elites may use their power to “shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes, and manipulate economic dynamics to their advantage.”
The encyclical comes days after President Donald Trump delayed signing an executive order on AI that would have given the government oversight before new models are released, at the urging of VC investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks.
Pope Leo called for AI to be guided by “clear standards and effective oversight” rooted in the participation of the communities it will affect. More specifically, Leo called for an end to the AI arms race, in which companies and countries seek to build “more powerful algorithms and larger data sets” that he believes will “secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”
“Disarmament means discrediting the assumption that technological power automatically grants sovereignty,” he wrote.
Again, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo Consider Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the deployment of platforms to help elect Trump, or the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from the tech elite to super PACs to block AI regulation, a pattern that clearly inspired Leo XIV’s work.
The Pope reached a conclusion that many have already reached. In other words, the surreal power and capabilities of today’s AI raise the stakes enormously.
Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Supervisory Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have “undermined our ability to recognize truth and lies, and this has real implications for democratic politics.” He added that the tech industry’s practices of “collecting and manipulating” human data pose “a fundamental challenge to cognitive freedom.”
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