Pope Leo XIV’s New AI Encyclical Is Actually a Warning on Concentrated Power
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A Lens for Older Struggles
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Monday, a 200-page document titled Magnifica Humanitas. While the text explicitly frames itself as a guide to “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” the document spends remarkably little time on the technical mechanics of large language models or neural networks. Instead, Leo uses AI as a catalyst to address systemic issues that have plagued the global order for centuries: extreme inequality, the volatility of war, and the steady erosion of democratic institutions.
The Pope presented the document alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of the AI safety laboratory Anthropic, signaling a willingness to engage with the architects of these systems. However, the partnership does not shield the industry from criticism. The core thesis of Magnifica Humanitas is that technology governed by a narrow 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,” Leo writes, warning that this opacity increases the risk of “distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”
The Amplification of Inequality
The encyclical argues that AI is not creating new social divides so much as it is accelerating existing ones. According to the text, the current trajectory of AI development tends to amplify the influence of those who already possess significant economic resources and access to proprietary data. This creates a feedback loop where a small group of stakeholders can steer economic dynamics and influence democratic processes to their own advantage.
This critique arrives at a moment of significant political friction. The release follows reports that President Donald Trump delayed signing an executive order on AI—which would have mandated government oversight of new models prior to release—allegedly following pressure from VC investor and former White House AI advisor David Sacks.
Leo specifically calls for an end to what he describes as the “AI arms race.” He targets the relentless drive to build larger datasets and more powerful algorithms, a trend driven by the belief that technical dominance equals geopolitical or commercial security. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” the Pope asserts.
Cognitive Freedom and the Truth Gap
The document’s concerns are echoed by legal and ethical experts who see the current AI boom as a threat to the very concept of shared reality. Paolo Carozza, a professor at Notre Dame Law School and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, noted that the proliferation of deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation has corroded the human capacity to distinguish truth from fabrication.
Carozza, who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that the industry’s appetite for “harvesting and manipulating” human data poses a direct challenge to “cognitive freedom.” This sentiment aligns with the Pope’s broader warning that when information patterns are shaped by a few invisible hands, the autonomy of the individual is compromised.
The thematic parallels here are not accidental. The Vatican is drawing a direct line back to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII to address the social upheavals and power imbalances of the Industrial Revolution. By framing the AI era through this historical lens, Leo XIV is suggesting that while the tools have changed—from steam engines to GPUs—the struggle remains the same: preventing the machinery of progress from becoming a tool of subjugation.
