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1.3 billion Catholics just got an opinion on artificial intelligence, and honestly, it's more coherent than most of what comes out of Washington or Brussels.
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Monday, a document called Magnifica Humanitas, and I've been reading papal letters since John Paul II was warning us about the internet in the 90s. This one's different. This one actually grapples with the thing that most AI policy documents dance around: that the "use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affects people's lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom."
Call me old-fashioned, but that's the clearest articulation of the AI problem I've read in months.
I've seen this movie before. Every major technological shift produces two camps: the boosters who promise utopia and the critics who predict apocalypse. What we rarely get is someone standing in the middle saying, hey, maybe we should think about the actual people who have to live with this stuff.
The Pope's encyclical, which The Verge covered extensively, focuses on "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence." Not safeguarding innovation. Not safeguarding competitive advantage. Not safeguarding shareholder value. The human person.
This is where the tech industry gets uncomfortable, and I find that interesting.
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Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical uses artificial intelligence as a lens for something older: who gets to shape the future and who gets shaped by it.
When Leo XIV talks about AI-powered warfare and the effects of automation on labor, he's touching nerves that Silicon Valley prefers to leave alone. The young founders I talk to, they're brilliant kids, but they've been marinating in a culture that treats disruption as inherently good. The Pope is asking a different question: disruption for whom? At what cost? With what protections?
These aren't new questions! We asked them about the assembly line, about containerization, about offshoring. The difference is that AI moves faster than any of those, and our institutions haven't caught up. Leo XIV seems to understand this in a way that, frankly, a lot of tech executives do not.
Here's where it gets weird, or maybe instructive. Standing alongside the Pope at the announcement was Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic and head of their interpretability team. The Verge reported on the partnership between the Catholic Church and one of the biggest AI players, and the reactions from the tech industry were, let's say, mixed.
I don't know what to make of this partnership yet. On one hand, you have an institution that thinks in centuries collaborating with a company that measures product cycles in months. On the other hand, Anthropic has positioned itself as the "responsible" AI company, so maybe this makes sense for their brand. But what do I know.
What I do know is that the encyclical isn't AGI-pilled, as one headline put it. Leo XIV isn't worried about superintelligent machines taking over the world. He's worried about the machines we have right now, the ones that are already making decisions about hiring and firing, about loan approvals, about who gets what opportunities. That's a much more immediate concern, and it's one that the AI safety community sometimes glosses over in their rush to discuss existential risk.
WIRED's coverage highlighted another theme: the concentration of technological power in a few global players. This is the monopoly question dressed up in Vatican robes, and it's not wrong. When three or four companies control the foundational models that everyone else builds on, that's a kind of power that we don't have good frameworks for governing. The Pope is essentially calling for new legal and ethical frameworks, which sounds vague until you realize that nobody else is even asking for them.
I'm not particularly religious, if you want to argue about that my email's on the about page, but I think dismissing this document because it comes from the Vatican would be a mistake. The Catholic Church has 1.3 billion members across every country on Earth. When the Pope speaks, governments listen, even secular ones. This encyclical will influence policy debates in ways that a white paper from Brookings or a blog post from a16z simply cannot.
More importantly, the document fills a gap that's been bothering me for years. The tech industry talks about AI ethics in terms of bias and fairness, which are important but narrow. The policy world talks about AI in terms of competition with China, which is important but misses the human element. Leo XIV is talking about dignity, about what it means to be a person in a world where algorithms increasingly shape our choices and opportunities.
That's not a technical question. It's a philosophical one, maybe even a spiritual one, and we've been avoiding it.
The encyclical warns about economic and social upheaval from rapid AI adoption, with inadequate protections for individuals. This is obviously true! We're deploying these systems at scale while the regulatory frameworks are still being drafted. The EU's AI Act is the most comprehensive attempt so far, and even that feels like it's chasing a moving target. In the US, we have, what, a handful of executive orders and some voluntary commitments from companies that could change their minds tomorrow?
I've covered tech since the 90s, and the pattern is always the same: innovation first, consequences later, cleanup never. The Pope is suggesting, politely but firmly, that maybe we should try a different approach this time. Given what's at stake, that doesn't seem unreasonable.
Look, I'm not naive enough to think a papal encyclical is going to change how OpenAI or Google or Meta operate. These companies respond to market pressures and regulatory threats, not moral exhortations from Rome. But I do think Magnifica Humanitas shifts something in the conversation, or at least it should.
For years, the AI debate has been dominated by two voices: the accelerationists who want to build as fast as possible and the doomers who think we're all going to die. The Pope is offering a third perspective, one that's neither techno-utopian nor apocalyptic. It's just... humanist. Concerned with actual people living actual lives, not hypothetical superintelligences or science fiction scenarios.
That might not be revolutionary. But it's refreshing. And in a debate that's become increasingly unmoored from reality, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is state the obvious: that technology should serve people, not the other way around.
Whether anyone in Silicon Valley is listening remains unclear. But 1.3 billion people just got told to pay attention. That's not nothing.
