Pope Leo XIV made artificial intelligence the subject of his first encyclical, a 43,000-word document warning that AI concentrates power in the hands of a few and risks letting them set humanity's moral direction without oversight.
With a potential reach of more than 2.7 billion people, it might be the most widely distributed AI warning ever published.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, made artificial intelligence the centerpiece of his first encyclical, the highest form of papal teaching. Titled Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), the 43,000-word document is built almost entirely around AI and the task of preserving the human person, according to CNN. An encyclical is a formal letter to the global Church laying out its position on a major moral issue, and a pope's first one sets the tone for his papacy.
The choice of topic was deliberate. The Vatican dated the document to the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that Pope Leo XIII wrote to defend workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIV took his name from that predecessor on purpose, arguing that AI represents another industrial revolution that demands the Church speak. He published the full text in more than 10 major languages.
The central argument is that technology is never neutral but "takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it," the Pope wrote, warning that AI "tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise, and access to data." Notably, the Vatican unveiled the encyclical alongside Chris Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, who spoke at the presentation and whose remarks were widely covered for echoing the Pope's concerns.
Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute, broke down what the encyclical means on Episode 217 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
43,000 - Words in the encyclical
135 years - Time since Leo XIV's predecessor, Leo XIII, delivered an encyclical on workers' rights
2.7 billion - People the document aims to reach, more than 30% of the world
10+ - Major languages the encyclical was published in
4 - Encyclicals Pope Francis issued across his entire papacy
The reach is the point. Encyclicals have become rare: Leo XIII issued around 85, Benedict 3, and Francis just 4. A first encyclical built around AI is a deliberate signal about where the Church believes the stakes now lie. It is addressed not only to the world's 1.3 billion Catholics but to all Christians and "all men and women of goodwill," broadening the audience to roughly 2.7 billion people. "The reach and influence you just mentioned is the primary reason we're leading off today," says Roetzer.
This is bigger than religion. The core worry is about who controls the technology. "Without oversight," the Pope wrote, "those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems." He added that "a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." Roetzer reads the message as universal, not denominational. "This is more about humans and humanity and what we are willing to give over to the machines and the impact it has," he says.
The debate over what AI actually is got real. On X, the Pope posted that artificial intelligences "do not feel joy or pain... Nor do they have a moral conscience. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce." That drew a reply from Yann LeCun, the former head of Meta's AI efforts: "AI today does not do or possess any of those things, but at some point in the future they will." Andrew Kieran predicted those boundaries "will not remain fixed boundaries for very long. Some of them will not even last until the end of this decade." For Roetzer, that disagreement is exactly the value. "It's an infinitely fascinating debate that there aren't really answers to right now because we still know so little about the human mind and what is human consciousness," he says.
Even an AI lab agrees all of the voices can't come from inside. At the Vatican, Anthropic's Chris Olah made a striking admission: "Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside of a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," he said, calling for "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend." He even called the models themselves unsettling: "We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." Roetzer has long flagged this lack of true understanding.
"We don't understand why there's emergent capabilities and behaviors.
"We should have respectful disagreements, and we should have conversations around these hard things."
— Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX, Episode 217 of The Artificial Intelligence Show
The most important thing about this encyclical might not be its theology but its source and distribution. For years, the people raising the hardest questions about AI have been the same people building it, keeping the conversation trapped inside a small technical bubble. A document aimed at a third of the world's population, in 10-plus languages, breaks that pattern. It puts the question of who controls AI in front of an audience no white paper or congressional hearing could reach. As Roetzer puts it, "What the church is doing is needed. I think we have to get the conversation outside of just the technology bubble here, and we need people challenging ideas."
For business leaders, the encyclical reframes AI governance as a moral question, not just a business one. The Pope's warning is that whoever sets the values inside these systems quietly sets them for everyone who uses them. The choices being made now, about whose interests the technology serves, are the ones that become invisible defaults later.
Whether Others Will Speak Up and Act. When the Vatican stages an AI announcement alongside an Anthropic co-founder who says the incentives inside his own industry can bend toward the wrong outcomes, the line between AI critics and AI builders gets blurrier. Look for whether other moral, civic, and academic institutions follow the Church's lead and assert a right to shape the debate.
Does any of this changes behavior? Moral pressure only matters if it translates into real governance and more deliberate deployment. The size of the audience guarantees the message will be heard. What will happen once it's heard is the real question.
Only 13% of organizations have all four AI governance foundations in place, an AI council, an AI roadmap, generative AI policies, and an AI ethics policy, according to the 2026 State of AI for Business Report. Nearly a third (32%) have none of them, and just 48% have an AI ethics policy or responsible AI principles of any kind. That gap is the Pope's central worry: if almost no one has the structures to govern AI, then its moral direction isn't universally owned.