Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Declares ‘Moral AI Is Not Enough’

Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), a 43,000-word papal encyclical, on Monday, targeting the tech industry’s rapid, profit-driven deployment of artificial intelligence. 

As history’s first US-born pontiff, Leo used his first major teaching document to demand strict external oversight of AI.

The document arrives amid an escalating regulatory battle. Tech leaders OpenAI and Anthropic are currently hurtling toward near-trillion-dollar initial public offerings (IPOs), while the Trump administration has aggressively pushed to deregulate the domestic AI sector. 

By entering the fray, the math-major pope has established a massive new benchmark for policymakers and tech leaders worldwide.

The encyclical directly targets the private sector’s consolidation of data and infrastructure. Leo argued that leaving the future of such a powerful technology entirely to commercial entities puts the public at immense risk.

“It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required,” the pope wrote. 

Pope Leo appealed directly to tech executives and political regulators to slow down and reflect on their trajectories, urging them to pivot from a mindset of raw profit toward the betterment of humanity.

A direct challenge to Silicon Valley’s power

While the Vatican invited Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah to participate in the launch event, Leo repeatedly criticized the concentration of AI power inside private corporations. The pope warned that massive control over data and computing infrastructure by a handful of firms could endanger vulnerable communities, especially children and workers.

“A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,” he wrote. The criticism lands at a moment when leading AI firms are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars and are competing aggressively to dominate the next phase of generative AI.

At the Vatican event, Olah acknowledged those pressures directly. “Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” he said, according to Reuters.

Olah also backed calls for outside scrutiny, saying AI companies need oversight because of the enormous stakes tied to the technology’s future.

Disarming the digital battlefield

The most contentious chapters of Magnifica Humanitas focus on the rapid militarization of AI.

Pope Leo warned that autonomous algorithms are helping accelerate a “normalization of war” by desensitizing the public to human casualties, noting that some remote weapons systems have advanced beyond human control.

The pope declared it “not permissible” to hand over irreversible, lethal decisions to automated AI systems. He demanded full transparency from developers so that the chain of command behind any AI-driven military strike remains perfectly traceable, emphasizing accountability for “those who design, train, authorize and employ technology.”

AI’s threat to jobs and human identity

Beyond warfare, Leo focused heavily on labor disruption and the growing fear that AI systems could replace human workers at scale.

“The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means,” the pope wrote.

The document compares today’s AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution addressed by Pope Leo XIII in the landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which defended workers’ rights during rapid industrialization.

Experts in tech and academia said the new encyclical could become one of the defining ethical frameworks for AI governance debates.

Also read: Google’s AI search manipulation risks have pushed Google to clarify that its spam policies also apply to generative AI responses.

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