Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalise an anti-human vision” and said vast digital power in a few private hands must be knocked back.
His encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, reads like a direct prod at the tech industry’s self-appointed prophets. It warns that people risk being reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Leo framed the problem with two biblical images – The Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
In the pope’s version, Babel is the corporate mega-project built from pride, profit and a fondness for making everyone behave the same. Jerusalem is the more awkward business of diverse people rebuilding together.
The encyclical has been watched closely by policymakers, business leaders and faith groups looking for ethical cover in the AI scrap. The Catholic Church, being the largest Christian denomination, still carries enough institutional heft to annoy the platform lords.
University of Dayton theology professor Vincent Miller said: “Leo sees the challenge of AI as a choice about its design, and about who gets to make those choices.”
The document leans on 2,000 years of Catholic moral teaching and is the result of a decade of Vatican chinwags with Silicon Valley over the social and ethical mess being created by AI.
Leo said conversations with scientists, political leaders and teachers had led him to a grim view.
“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death. It must be at the service of all, and of the common good.”
At the Vatican presentation, Leo was joined by Anthropic co-founder and safety researcher Christopher Olah. Anthropic has tried to sell itself as the AI outfit that worries about safety while still building the machines everyone is meant to worry about.
Olah’s appearance annoyed critics who thought it looked like the Vatican was blessing Anthropic’s homework. Vatican officials insisted it was not an endorsement, but a nudge for more dialogue with the industry.
Olah admitted AI companies, including Anthropic, face incentives that work against doing the right thing. He named commercial pressure, competition, pride and ambition.
“We will always be influenced by those incentives,” Olah said. That is why it is “enormously important that there be people outside those incentives,” such as church leaders, who insist on safety and who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.
Meeting the pope has become the latest status badge for the AI crowd. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez and top OpenAI figures have all had Vatican contact, while Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis was named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2024.
Leo’s intervention lands during a growing backlash against AI. Workers fear job losses, graduates have booed AI-happy commencement speakers, residents are protesting power-hungry data centres and OpenAI boss Sam Altman has even had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house.
Magnifica Humanitas was explicitly inspired by Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Both were signed on 15 May, in case anyone missed the Vatican’s fondness for symbolism.
Leo called the prospect of mass unemployment caused by digital innovation “a true social calamity. Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
He condemned the new servitudes behind the tech economy, including rare-earth miners, underpaid data centre workers and young people exploited by online criminal networks.
