A 200-page warning landed on the AI industry’s doorstep this week, and it didn’t come from a regulator or a rival lab. It came from the Vatican. Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday, and according to TechCrunch AI, the document, titled Magnifica Humanitas, frames a stark danger: when the power to build and govern AI sits with a tiny elite, it can’t serve the common good by definition.
The risk Leo names is concentration. Not killer robots, not runaway superintelligence. Power pooling in too few hands, growing opaque, and slipping past public oversight.
What the encyclical actually says
The subtitle is “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” but AI is mostly the hook. The real targets are older and more familiar: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and power held by people who don’t much care whether humanity stays magnificent.
Leo’s central claim, as quoted by TechCrunch AI: “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.”
He argues AI doesn’t reset the playing field. It tilts it further. The technology “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data,” letting elites shape information, sway democratic processes, and steer the economy toward their own advantage.
Notably, the pope presented the document alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of AI company Anthropic. That’s an unusual pairing, a head of the Catholic Church sharing a stage with a frontier lab founder.
The defensive ask: oversight and disarmament
Leo doesn’t just diagnose. He prescribes. Two demands stand out:
- Real oversight. AI should be guided by “clear criteria and effective oversight” rooted in participation from the communities it affects, not decided behind closed doors.
- End the arms race. He calls for stopping the push to build “ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets” in pursuit of geopolitical or commercial dominance. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he wrote.
That second point is the sharpest. He’s challenging the core logic of the current race, the belief that whoever builds the biggest model earns the right to set the rules.
Why the timing matters
This isn’t landing in a vacuum. TechCrunch AI notes the encyclical arrived days after President Trump delayed signing his executive order on AI, which would have given the government oversight over new models before release. The delay reportedly came at the urging of VC investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks.
So the document drops precisely as government oversight in the US gets pushed back, and as hundreds of millions from tech elites flow into super PACs to block AI regulation. Leo XIV’s work was clearly shaped by those patterns, along with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his use of the platform in Trump’s election.
There’s history here too. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum took on the same concentration of power during the Industrial Revolution. The name choice isn’t an accident.
Why this matters for the industry
A papal encyclical reaches roughly 1.4 billion Catholics. That’s a distribution channel no AI ethics paper can match, and it reframes the regulation fight as a moral one, not just a policy one.
What stands out to me is the company Leo is putting himself in. Notre Dame Law 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,” with real consequences for democracy. The industry’s habit of “harvesting and manipulating” human data, he added, poses “fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.”
For builders and operators, the practical takeaway is simple. The pressure to justify how models are governed, who gets a say, and who benefits is no longer coming only from lawmakers. It’s now coming from the pulpit, and that audience doesn’t forget easily.
Expect the “who governs AI” debate to get louder, not quieter. You can read the full reporting at the original source.