Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Warns AI Concentrates Power Among Elites, Calls for Global Oversight

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Monday, a 200-page document titled Magnifica Humanitas that calls for binding oversight of artificial intelligence and an end to what the pontiff describes as a global AI arms race.

The document, framed around "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence," argues that technology developed and governed by a narrow elite cannot serve the common good — a concern Leo grounds in long-standing Catholic social teaching rather than in the technical specifics of machine learning.

"When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities," the pope writes.

Leo presented the encyclical alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of AI company Anthropic — a detail that underscored the Vatican's effort to engage directly with practitioners inside the technology industry.

The document explicitly targets the competitive logic driving AI development, criticizing the push to build "ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets" that companies and governments believe will "secure geopolitical or commercial dominance." Leo calls for dismantling that assumption, writing that "to disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern."

The encyclical also takes aim at the industry practice of harvesting user data. Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have "corroded our capacity to recognize what's true and what's not true, and that really has consequences for democratic politics." The tech industry's practice of "harvesting and manipulating" human data, he added, poses "fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom."

Leo calls for AI to be guided by "clear criteria and effective oversight" rooted in participation from communities directly affected by the technology — a framing that echoes calls from regulators in the European Union and elsewhere, even as enforcement mechanisms remain contested.

The encyclical arrives days after President Donald Trump delayed signing an executive order that would have required government review of new AI models before their public release. That delay was reported to have come at the urging of venture capital investor and former White House AI adviser David Sacks.

Leo draws a historical parallel to Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed the concentration of industrial power during the Industrial Revolution, reinforcing the Vatican's position that the ethical tensions surfaced by AI are not novel in kind, only in scale.

The document's publication signals that major institutional voices outside the technology industry — and outside traditional regulatory bodies — are increasingly willing to stake out specific positions on AI governance, adding pressure on governments and companies that have so far resisted binding international frameworks.

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