- Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas,” calling for AI to be “disarmed” — not rejected, but stripped of the assumption that technical power confers the right to govern — and freed from monopolistic control serving geopolitical or commercial ends.
- The pope, a mathematician by training and the first American pontiff in history, drew an explicit parallel to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum during the first Industrial Revolution, framing AI’s disruption of workers today as a moral challenge of equal historical weight.
- Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah — whose company’s Mythos AI model has triggered global alarm over its ability to find network vulnerabilities — was invited to the Vatican for the presentation and called for “more of the world” to take AI ethics as seriously as the pope.
- The encyclical puts Leo in direct tension with President Trump, who favors AI deregulation to maintain US dominance over China; VP JD Vance, a Catholic convert close to Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, acknowledged he may not agree with all of the pope’s conclusions.
What Happened?
Pope Leo XIV released “Magnifica humanitas” on Monday — a full papal encyclical, the highest form of Catholic Church teaching — addressed to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and focused entirely on artificial intelligence. The document calls for AI to be freed from monopolistic control and prevented from being used purely for geopolitical or commercial advantage. The pope warned specifically against AI in warfare, stating that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable” and that AI “does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict, indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal.” Anthropic’s Christopher Olah was present at the Vatican for the encyclical’s presentation — a striking signal of which voices in the AI industry the Church views as aligned with its concerns about safety and human dignity.
Why It Matters?
An encyclical is not a policy paper — it is a moral framework that shapes how 1.4 billion people worldwide think about an issue. The last time a pope made a direct intervention of this scale on a technology-driven economic disruption was Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, which helped define the modern concept of workers’ rights during industrialization. Leo XIV is explicitly invoking that legacy. The practical tension with Trump’s deregulatory AI agenda is real: the White House just pulled back from signing an AI cybersecurity executive order, citing concern that regulation could blunt the US lead over China. The Vatican is now a significant global voice on the other side of that argument — and Leo’s collaboration with Anthropic, which has itself clashed with the Trump administration over military use of its technology, is a meaningful alliance.
What’s Next?
The encyclical will reverberate through the global AI policy debate for years. Watch for whether European regulators — who already operate under the EU AI Act — cite the pope’s moral framework to justify stricter enforcement. The Vatican’s willingness to engage directly with Anthropic (and its ongoing conflict with Peter Thiel’s libertarian worldview, which a Vatican adviser called “a sustained act of heresy”) suggests Leo intends to be an active participant in the AI governance debate, not merely a moral commentator. And as Anthropic’s Mythos model remains a live flashpoint for governments and militaries, the question of whether religious authority can exert meaningful constraint on AI development — where commercial and geopolitical incentives are enormous — is now formally on the table.
Source: Bloomberg
