Pope Leo XIV: AI Is 'Not Neutral' in New Encyclical
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Magnificent Humanity"), on May 25, 2026, signed at St. Peter's on May 15 — exactly 135 years after Leo XIII's landmark 1891 Rerum Novarum
- The 43,000-word document warns that AI is not neutral and carries the values of the people and institutions that design, finance, train, and deploy it, especially when systems decide who gets jobs, credit, public services, or reputational standing
- Leo's five core warnings span AI eroding human judgment by offering instant answers, simulating care without genuine relationship, deepening inequality by concentrating data and computing power, destabilizing democracy through disinformation, and speeding up lethal decisions in war
- Leo's starkest line in the encyclical: "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable"
- Meghan Sullivan, director of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, said Leo has "announced himself as one of the leading figures in AI ethics now" and that the document is likely to be remembered as one of the major documents in Catholic history
- Mirela Oliva, a philosophy professor at the University of St. Thomas, said the encyclical should be read less as a rejection of AI than as a call to shape the "AI era" around human dignity, with guidelines developed "from the bottom up rather than top down"
- Dan Rober, a Catholic Studies professor at Sacred Heart University, said the encyclical's biggest impact may be whether Leo's language starts shaping AI regulation debates, with warnings about children, screens, and chatbots-as-therapists resonating well beyond Catholic circles
Why it matters: The Vatican frames the encyclical as positioning it as a "central moral authority" in the global tech debate, and the 135-year echo of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum — the founding text of modern Catholic social teaching — signals the Church intends this to be a comparable landmark, one that experts at Notre Dame and Sacred Heart say is likely to bleed into secular AI regulation conversations.
