Key Takeaways
- Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," released on May 25, 2026, centers on artificial intelligence, declaring that the moral crisis of our era includes who controls the machines shaping our world.
- The encyclical calls to "disarm AI," not by rejecting technology, but by preventing its domination over humanity and breaking the monopolistic grip of corporations on AI, returning power to diverse human cultures.
- Pope Leo XIV warns against the concentration of digital power in AI, stating that technology is not morally neutral as it carries the values of its creators, and emphasizes that AI ethics must be subject to open, democratic deliberation, not just internal company frameworks.
Pope Leo XIV has done something no pontiff has ever done before: made artificial intelligence the centrepiece of his very first encyclical. Released on May 25, 2026, and titled “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), the landmark 235-page document is Pope Leo’s formal declaration that the moral crisis of our era is not just about war, poverty, or climate change. It is also about who gets to control the machines shaping our world. For anyone wondering whether Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical matters to people outside the Catholic Church, the short answer is: yes, very much.
In This Article
Why a Pope Is Talking About ChatGPT (And You Should Listen)
Pope Leo XIV is not your typical theologian staring nervously at a laptop. The 70-year-old American-born mathematician was elected to the papacy in May 2025, and from day one he signalled that AI would be a defining issue of his pontificate. He even chose his papal name as a deliberate echo of Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 wrote “Rerum Novarum,” the famous encyclical that addressed the devastating impact of the Industrial Revolution on workers. Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, 2026, precisely the 135th anniversary of that historic document. The symbolism is hard to miss.
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What makes this encyclical particularly striking is how it was presented. Breaking with centuries of Vatican tradition, Pope Leo unveiled the document alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies. A theologian from the University of Durham in England, Anna Rowlands, also joined the launch. “The time to talk about AI is now. It is urgent,” Rowlands said at the event.
What “Magnifica Humanitas” Actually Says
The encyclical is divided into five chapters and spans 245 paragraphs, covering ground from Catholic social doctrine to the ethics of algorithmic warfare. But a few core ideas stand out with particular clarity.
The document’s most memorable phrase is the Pope’s call to “disarm AI.” This is not simply a warning against autonomous weapons systems, though it certainly includes that. The Pope argues that disarming AI means dismantling the assumption that whoever builds the most powerful technology automatically has the right to govern it. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. It means breaking the monopolistic grip that a handful of corporations currently hold over artificial intelligence and returning that power to “the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”
Pope Leo takes direct aim at the concentration of digital power, warning that AI must not be “concentrated in the hands of only a few people,” as that would only widen the gap between those included in and those excluded from the technological revolution. He insists that technology is never morally neutral, because it carries the values of those who design it, fund it, regulate it, and use it.
On the subject of ethics, the Pope makes a pointed argument that has already attracted considerable attention. “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,” he writes. In other words, it is not sufficient for OpenAI or Anthropic or any other company to develop its own internal ethical framework for AI. The ethics of this technology must be subject to open, democratic deliberation across all societies.
AI, Work, and the People Left Behind
One of the encyclical’s most practically urgent sections concerns the future of work. Pope Leo draws a direct parallel between AI and the Industrial Revolution, noting that just as mechanisation displaced millions of workers in the nineteenth century, AI is poised to do the same in the twenty-first. The document calls for the dignity of work to be protected, for inequality to be actively reduced, and for financial systems to focus on the creation and evolution of meaningful employment rather than pure profit metrics.
The Pope also pushes back against the ideologies of transhumanism, which holds that technology can help humans overcome physical and biological limitations like ageing, and posthumanism, which blurs the boundaries between human beings and machines. Both, he argues, risk eroding the “unique dignity” of the human person.
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AI in Warfare: A Hard Line
On military applications of AI, the encyclical draws a firm line. The use of artificial intelligence in warfare, it states, must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life, and to avoid an arms race in autonomous weapons. This echoes a warning Pope Leo issued just days earlier when he addressed students at Rome’s La Sapienza University, signalling that this was always going to be central to the document.
What It Means for Everyday Users of AI
Magnifica Humanitas does not just address governments and tech executives. It also speaks directly to ordinary people about how they engage with AI tools in daily life. The speed and convenience of AI can be genuinely appealing, the Pope acknowledges. But that same convenience can erode personal creativity, weaken critical judgment, and encourage over-reliance on ready-made answers.
He raises a concern that many psychologists and researchers have also highlighted: that AI systems designed to mimic human warmth and communication can create the illusion of a genuine relationship, particularly for people who are isolated or lonely. “The danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections,” he writes. That is a sentence worth reading twice.
A Document for Everyone, Not Just Catholics
Magnifica Humanitas is addressed not just to the Catholic Church but, in the spirit of recent papal social encyclicals, to all people of goodwill. It is broad in scope, grounded in decades of Catholic social teaching running from Rerum Novarum through Laudato Si, and calibrated to serve as a reference text for policymakers, technologists, educators, and citizens navigating the AI era. Theologians have already noted its likely influence on international policy discussions.
The encyclical frames AI as humanity’s pivotal fork-in-the-road moment: “Either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
