Pope Leo XIV didn’t mince words. In his first encyclical, released today in Rome alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, he called for AI to be “disarmed” in service of the common good. The 40,000-word document, titled “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), represents the most significant update to Catholic social teaching on technology in decades.
The Language of Disarmament
“The word is strong,” Leo admits, but he chose “disarmament” deliberately because “this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.” The Pope sees AI today as being “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.”
The encyclical contains uncompromising critiques of AI-powered autonomous weapons, neo-colonial attitudes towards data collection, and the hoarding of what the document calls “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data.”
But this isn’t merely a critique. Leo updates Catholic social teaching in a way that calls on everyone to “build” — a favorite term of the Silicon Valley elite, famously used by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in his 2020 essay “It’s Time to Build.” In Leo’s vision, though, this “building” extends far beyond code, startups, factories, or housing. He calls for nothing less than the creation of a “civilization of love” in which technology serves and augments humanity rather than dominating it.
Data as the New Colonialism
Perhaps the most striking passage in the encyclical draws a direct parallel between today’s tech giants and colonial conquerors. Leo warns that entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are being subjected to a new mindset of extraction: the collection of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps, and demographic information.
“These have become the new ‘rare earths’ of power,” Leo writes. “Vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter.”
Those who control the health data of entire peoples often collect it under the pretext of aid, research, or innovation. They possess “structural leverage over the future,” the encyclical says, because they can shape needs and markets, deciding before others whom medicines, investments, and protections will be allocated.
If we don’t figure this out, Leo warns, “the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.”
The Limits of Intelligence
The Vatican isn’t opposed to AI as a tool. Indeed, this spring it rolled out an AI-powered system that translates services at St. Peter’s into 60 languages on people’s smartphones.
But Magnifica Humanitas argues that AI must be kept in perspective, since “these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.” While they may be faster thinkers, AI tools “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience.”
This is why Leo argues we should not be led astray by AI’s focus on “intelligence.” Elevating one quality of the human person in this way can overshadow “other essential dimensions of life, such as affection, the will, commitment, and relationships.” If you give humans mere technical power apart from wisdom, emotion, and relationships, Leo says, it “does not make us more capable; it makes us more isolated and more vulnerable to being dominated and excluded.”
A Deliberate Nod to History
Despite releasing the encyclical today, Leo actually signed it on May 15, the anniversary of the famous 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (“New Things”). That older document set out Catholic social teaching during an era of capitalist upheaval, largely taking the side of workers and labor unions.
Today, Leo updates the church’s social teaching for the age of AI, which he sees as the “res novae of our time.” Just as his predecessor did 135 years ago, he warns that individual humans and humanity itself must not be left behind by technological advancements or by new forms of power.
The Tolkien Quote
In sounding this call to both disarm and to build, Leo turns to “twentieth-century Catholic author” J.R.R. Tolkien. Though he can’t quite bring himself to say he’s quoting Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, that’s exactly what’s happening. The encyclical says only that the quote comes from “the words of a protagonist in one of [Tolkien’s] novels.”
Gandalf says: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
This moral and local action envisioned here, along with Tolkien’s suspicion of the dehumanizing effects of technology, clearly appealed to the Pope.
What the Church Is Not Doing
Still, the Church knows its place, Leo says, and does not wish to dictate. Religion does not possess “technical answers, nor do we seek to displace those with expertise,” he writes. “But we bring a wisdom concerning the human that our present time desperately needs: every person is unique and irreplaceable, a free and intelligent subject with a conscience, capable of seeking God, serving one another, caring for our common home.”
The encyclical asks everyone who reads it to make a commitment to “stay awake and, as ‘artisans of hope,’ to keep on building the worksite of our time.”
The Conversation Continues
At the release, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah called the document “timely,” pointing to three questions he most wants religious and moral leaders to help the AI industry think through. The first is our duty to the global poor and ensuring the gains of AI are shared globally, which he called “an unsolved problem.” The second is the need for moral imagination regarding human flourishing. And the third is the need for discernment about what AI models actually are, noting that his researchers keep finding things that are “mysterious, even unsettling” inside these systems.
When releasing Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo thanked Olah for attending and added that they would keep in touch.
“I accept your invitation to walk together,” the Pope said, “to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.”
