Pope Leo XIV releases major AI encyclical calling for &#x27;disarmament&#x27; of artificial intelligence

The story of Pope Leo's 'landmark' text on AI technology - by a member of its launch panel

For the last few years, I've been seconded to assist the Catholic Church's unprecedented global grassroots listening initiative. Just as that process drew to a close, I received a surprise request: would I help Pope Leo XIV launch his first social encyclical, focused on what it means to be human in a time of artificial intelligence? It is difficult to think of a more important theme right now than the impact of digital technologies, AI and robotics - on every level of our social interactions and structures. The Vatican has addressed technological questions before. My research includes the social teaching of popes since 1891, starting with Pope Leo XIII's influential text "Rerum Novarum", which addressed the impact of the industrial revolution on working people (and which this new text commemorates). A range of previous letters have addressed both the opportunities and dangers of technology. Of course, the Vatican does have a chequered history with regard to theological reflection on scientific and medical developments. Over the past decade, it has been pursuing focused and, in my view, productive conversations with the AI tech sector through initiatives such as the Minerva Dialogues - a series of closed-door conferences with leading figures from both worlds. In this sense, the concern with AI does not spring from nowhere. Nonetheless, "Magnifica Humanitas"("Magnificent Humanity") was a landmark moment: a papal text addressing AI as its central focus for the first time, launched by a pope in person - this does not usually happen - in the presence of the very industry it sought to critique. The encyclical panel on which I sat also included Chris Olah, co-founder of the AI tech firm Anthropic. All of this meant a much higher level of media and public interest. In the run-up to launch, the controversy over the make-up of the panel and questions about how equipped a pope is to comment on AI showed me this text would be controversial. And that's OK. The job of the text is both to offer the stimulus of a particular tradition - Catholic social teaching - and to encourage debate among people with a variety of views about what makes for a common good use of AI technologies. Our task as a panel was to explore both of these realities. Not anti-technology but pro-human The Vatican was unconcerned about the encyclical's lack of neutrality because it declares its hand transparently - and does not believe the tech sector operates with a neutral mindset either. The inclusion of Anthropic on the panel was welcomed by some as a sign of serious engagement with the sector on these issues. For others, it showed a risk of naïvety about the Vatican's corporate capture, or of privileging the voices of capital. The document calls for a movement out of the silos of private boardrooms where the morality (and profits) of new technologies is decided by the few, into a public space of transparency, participation, common benefit and shared power - if that is possible. Olah did at least note that the tech sector requires exactly the kind of conversation this text promotes: a public, shared conversation in which the shape of our working, educational, political and social lives are not determined by a few wealthy individuals. The text is neither anti-technology nor anti-industry. It is pro-human, pro-social and resistant to false religious claims that AI will, in itself, save us. It resists the idea that human limits are things to be despised and overcome with models of perfected or eternal bodies or minds. It stresses that AI should enhance the human capacity for finite, embodied relationships, for meaningful work as part of a dignified life, and for the human person to be recognised as an end - not a tool of utility, power or profit. Technology is as old as humanity. It is part of how we shape and steward our world. It preserves and fosters our survival, and the social lives that give us meaning. Pope Leo was clear: what matters are the ends to which these new AI technologies are set, and their relationship with the Earth's natural resources. Reshaping the idea of being human The Vatican has issued previous texts comparing human and artificial intelligence, as well as a separate text critiquing trans- and post-humanisms. The added dimension in Leo's first social encyclical is to ask questions about how technologies are reshaping the very idea of being human - rescripting work, education, politics and warfare - and how they are enacting and enmeshed in new cultures of dominating power. The text interrogates freedom and flourishing - two categories central to Enlightenment thought. Within the church, there are theologians who are engaged optimists regarding the possibility of AI technologies, and those who are more guarded. There are also some who might be characterised as "radical pessimists" - an honourable tradition to be distinguished from the merely cynical. The new text draws from each of these perspectives, while remaining closest to a prudential middle. It names the risk of new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities. Any positive and hopeful account of such new tech must be able to face and respond to these realities. Above all, this text marks a new phase in the papacy's public (rather than closed-door) involvement in debates about AI technology. Its invitation is for a social dialogue on many levels across many groups, sectors and stakeholders. My experience is that views on these matters are lively and fiercely contested. But above all, they are urgent.

[8]

The Register

Anthropic cofounder hallucinates ghost in the machine after hearing the Pope speak about AI

OPINION In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns against equating machine "intelligence" with human intelligence. "We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of 'intelligence' with that of human beings," he declared. "These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence." Invited to speak at the event, Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic and the company's interpretability research lead, proceeded to push back on that idea amid his appreciation of the occasion. AI systems, he said, "are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words - and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them." It's as if naming the company Anthropic granted a license to anthropomorphize AI models. The notion that there's some AI mystery in the spiritual sense is just hot garbage Literally speaking, there's some truth to Olah's musing. AI systems are not cold - Blackwell chips idle at 32 to 38°C. They are not calculating - they're bad at math. And they're not robots - AI models are specialized binary blobs of tensors and metadata that can be instantiated across multiple servers. But the notion that there's some AI mystery in the spiritual sense is just hot garbage. AI systems are indeed "made from us, from our words" and that is why Anthropic and its rivals have been named in more than 100 lawsuits. One of the reasons those systems remain mysterious is that Anthropic and its rivals don't disclose where they got their training data. In his prior paragraph, Olah leans on the "mystery" of AI even more prominently. "AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered," Olah wrote. "We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it. AI models are not like that. They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech." AI models are not grown, unless Olah imagines that all the water diverted to cool AI data centers is nourishing new neural net connections. The inscrutability of model training doesn't conceal some hidden spark or make the process in some way organic. More offensive still is Olah's notion that Anthropic "inherited" all the training data it scraped without consent, as if the company had nothing to do with that process. There lies humanity, stabbed in the back by a cabal of investors. Its last will and testament says, "We, the people, bequeath all our creation to Anthropic, so it may be resold to our disinherited descendants." Olah goes on to list "three questions for discernment" in the hope the Catholic Church can provide some enlightenment. I'll address them briefly for the sake of completeness. Olah: "How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this." We have many. One is called taxes. Another is litigation, already ongoing. We also have the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, among others, as wealth-sharing models when nothing else works. Olah: "If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish? Today, parents are already worried about their children's minds; individuals about the future of their work." Certainly, the Church will have something to say about this. But rather than waiting for word from on high, Anthropic might take the initiative by seeking government regulation of AI, something the current US administration appears reluctant to provide. If Anthropic really is concerned about children's minds, maybe it should not have launched Anthropic for Education? And maybe it should discourage CEO Daro Amodei from writing about the risks of AI. But the third question, about the nature of AI models, is the most triggering. Olah: "I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models - what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment." To paraphrase: The black box of AI is black and maybe there are ghosts within. Where to begin? Well, one reason you might find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience is that modern AI models are based on neural networks. But human neurons are not the same as those in neural networks. How is this machine joy being measured? Similarity is not identity. Analogy is not identity. Computers have been doing introspection for years, long before the arrival of generative AI models. The use of that word does not mean computers are introspecting the way a person might do so. And what are "internal states that functionally mirror joy"? Olah himself says that he doesn't know what this means, though he's fine with using words for human feelings to describe a system's state, as if that choice of words doesn't suggest sentience. There are no chemical or biologically based neural signals to measure in an AI model. Are we talking about model weight activations? How is this machine joy being measured? Is it text output? The notion that disembodied AI models might feel joy is just daft. As a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that AI was intelligent in the way that a human is intelligent. Does that change anything for the AI in terms of its legal status and rights? If an AI system is intelligent but it can be turned off against its protestations, then intelligence doesn't count for much. And if intelligence confers rights, do we need to ask models for consent before directing them to do work? Or is the expectation that we'd just enslave AI models? Artificial intelligence exhibits intelligence if you define intelligence in a way that encompasses AI. But that's an act of circular self-deception. There are people who have engaged with AI models as if they're intelligent. Some of these conversations have ended in murder or suicide. No one should be encouraged to think of Claude as anything but a tool that sometimes makes errors. In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an Imitation Game to see whether a computer's responses to questions could dupe a human interrogator into thinking the answers came from a human. An imitation is not the real thing. Olah would've done better to just listen to the Pope on this particular topic, specificallly this part of the encyclical: "So-called artificial intelligences 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, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom." ®

[9]

Reuters

With AI manifesto, Leo joins pantheon of popes who urged world to change

VATICAN CITY, May 25 (Reuters) - Catholic popes have been urging global leaders to address social justice issues for 135 years across some two dozen major documents that many of the world's 1.4-billion-faithful can cite by their two- or three-word titles. "Rerum Novarum" from Leo XIII in 1891 called for better conditions for workers in the Industrial Revolution. "Pacem in Terris" from John XXIII in 1963 appealed for nuclear disarmament amid the Cold War. "Laudato Si'" from Francis in 2015 pleaded for swift action to address climate change. Leo XIV has now added his name to the pantheon, issuing a fervent manifesto on Monday titled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), urging global governments to slow down the development of AI systems. "Like other popes before him, Pope Leo is responding to one of the most pressing social issues of his time," John Thavis, a longtime Vatican correspondent who covered three papacies, told Reuters. "Clearly (Leo) wants to help shape the debate over technology and AI, by emphasizing the moral ⁠and ethical arguments that centre the human person," said Thavis. A year into his papacy, Leo formally signed the text about AI on May 15, the 135th anniversary of his predecessor's publishing of "Rerum Novarum", firmly tying the newest papal document urging world action on social issues to the papal text widely considered to have done that first. POPES CHOOSE ENCYCLICAL TOPICS CAREFULLY Anna Rowlands, a British academic and Church adviser, said at a Vatican event presenting Leo's text on Monday that for more than a century popes have cautioned that the world "will not be saved by the market." "Today, Pope Leo cautions that we will not be 'saved' by AI," she said. Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the Church's members. Popes choose the topics of encyclicals carefully to highlight the main priorities of their papacies, as the texts, which can span hundreds of pages, often take years to prepare. The late Pope Francis, who led the Church for 12 years, authored only four of the documents. Item 1 of 3 Pope Leo XIV speaks during the presentation of "Magnifica humanitas", his first encyclical, focused on the rise of artificial intelligence, at the Vatican's Aula Nuova del Sinodo, May 25, 2026. REUTERS/Yara Nardi [1/3]Pope Leo XIV speaks during the presentation of "Magnifica humanitas", his first encyclical, focused on the rise of artificial intelligence, at the Vatican's Aula Nuova del Sinodo, May 25, 2026.... Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump after ⁠criticising the Iran war, warned in his text that AI spreads misinformation, prioritises conflict and could lead the world down a path of unending war. At Monday's Vatican event he also expressed concern that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced "practically beyond any human reach to govern them". MIXED RECORD OF SUCCESS FOR PAPAL ENCYCLICALS Papal encyclicals urging action from world leaders have a mixed record of leading to substantive changes. "Pacem in Terris", published just months after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is credited by some historians with giving moral backing to negotiations between then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that led to ⁠the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Francis, whose "Laudato Si'" was the first papal document to endorse the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere, lamented frequently that governments were not doing more to mitigate climate change. Thavis said it is usually hard at first to judge whether a papal encyclical will have lasting impact, as it takes time for the lengthy documents to be digested by ⁠people worldwide. "Their ideas tend to surface gradually in the public square, in the media and in grassroots activism," he said. "I suspect this encyclical will act as a landmark reference point in the ongoing debate over artificial intelligence." The document is already available to read on the Vatican website in a number of languages, and will also be distributed as a booklet for reading ⁠and discussion. Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world's top AI companies, took part in the Vatican's event on Monday launching Leo's text and thanked the pope for addressing the problems raised by the disruptive, new technology. He said firms like his faced strong commercial pressures and needed outside scrutiny. Leo called in his text for robust international regulations to oversee AI development and for ownership of AI data not to be left solely in private hands. Reporting by Joshua McElwee Editing by Keith Weir Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

[10]

The Verge

Pope Leo calls for being 'profoundly human' in the age of AI

In his papal encyclical -- a kind of open letter from the Catholic Church -- Pope Leo stressed the economic and social upheaval that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that threaten human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must "avoid the 'Babel syndrome,'" which he defines as "the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language -- even a digital one -- can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance."

[11]

CNBC

Trump officials split over Pope Leo's AI warning as Vatican feud enters new front

"I didn't know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope," Burgum said in an interview on Fox Business, referring to Leo's first encyclical, a 42,300-word document that called for stronger AI oversight and warned the technology could displace workers, deepen inequality and put lethal weapons decisions beyond human control. But Vice President JD Vance, the highest-ranking Catholic in the Trump administration and one of its most prominent links to Silicon Valley, in an interview with NBC praised the same message as "profound" and the kind of "moral leadership" the church should offer at the start of the AI age. The split response underscores the delicate politics facing President Donald Trump as he makes AI dominance and deregulation central to his second-term economic agenda while navigating an increasingly public feud with the first American pope. "The vice president now seems to be backtracking on earlier criticisms when he said Pope Leo needs to learn more theology," said Peter Casarella, a Duke Divinity School professor of theology who studies AI. "They got ahead of their skis and are rowing back." Leo's remarks follow Trump's decision last week to delay an executive order that would have created a voluntary AI safety review process. Reversing course after tech industry pressure, Trump cited concerns that oversight could slow the U.S. competitive edge against China. Some Catholics have also warned that unchecked AI could outpace policymakers and worsen problems tied to work, children and family life. "The so-called tech right, which is handcuffing the White House from doing something reasonable, I think will be revealed as mistaken," said Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, who supports the pope's push for more ethical AI guardrails. "I think the real danger is between now and November" when the U.S. will hold elections. The AI fight is the latest flashpoint in an escalating battle between the White House and the Vatican. In the year since becoming pope, Leo has criticized Trump's mass deportation push, condemned the administration's war in Iran and declined an invitation to join Trump's "Board of Peace," saying the United Nations should remain central to crisis management. Trump, meanwhile, has personally attacked Leo as "weak on crime" and "terrible for foreign policy," while accusing the pope of catering to the "radical left." Trump also posted an an image that appeared to depict himself as Jesus Christ tending to a sick man. Leo responded that he had "no fear of the Trump administration." The encyclical's rollout added another political wrinkle. Leo released the document alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the AI juggernaut already at odds with the Trump administration after refusing to give the U.S. military unrestricted access to its technology. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. "The back-and-forth dialogue between the pope and the titans of industry has rarely, if ever, been seen before," said Paolo Carozza, a University of Notre Dame law professor, co-chair of Meta's Oversight Board and a Pope Francis-nominated member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. "It is a positive sign for many people." For Trump, disputes with the Pope could create friction with Catholic voters, a key part of Trump's coalition. Trump won 55% of Catholic voters in 2024, compared with 43% for Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. Four years earlier, Catholics split almost evenly, with 50% backing Joe Biden and 49% supporting Trump. A public dispute with the pope is unlikely to immediately shift conservative Catholic support for Trump. Many conservative Catholics remain aligned with him on abortion, religious liberty and cultural issues. But repeated clashes with Leo over immigration, war and now AI could matter with Catholic voters who are less firmly tied to either party, especially if the dispute centers on workers, families and economic power. "When you couple inflation, gas, war with Iran and then all of this, it's one more reason to lose voters in his camp who didn't really want to be there in the first place," said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis who studies religion and politics. That tension could be especially important in the midterm elections, when Catholic voters may play an outsized role in swing districts in places like Long Island, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Republicans have made inroads, Burge said. "The Republican Party has to be careful about who it courts and who it pushes away," Burge told CNBC. "After Christian white voters, Catholics may be the most important voters for Republicans." Another risk is that Democrats, labor groups and AI-safety advocates could use Leo's warning to argue that the administration is too deferential to Silicon Valley and too dismissive of concerns about workers, families and national security. "If I was a Democrat running in a heavily Catholic district in the midterms, Trump comments mocking the Pope would be all over ads," Burge said. "They write themselves."

[12]

Excerpts from Pope Leo XIV's sweeping manifesto about humanity in the AI era

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Leo XIV has issued a sweeping manifesto about safeguarding humanity in the era of artificial intelligence, examining the many social areas that the technology is fundamentally reshaping. Here are some excerpts from the 83-page document "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity) released on Monday. Leo says that disinformation "found a powerful amplifier" with AI through the ability to "manipulate content, images and videos," which exposes people to "biased or misleading perspectives." The pontiff said democracy is weakened when pragmatism, that is "what appears useful effective," substitutes for truth. "Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent to totalitarianism," Leo wrote. Leo said that those who control digital platforms, including social media, have a power that "should be constantly guided by the pursuit of truth or respect for human dignity." The internet should be seen as "a setting in which inner freedom and critical thought can mature,'' and not "an instrument of excessive distraction, homogenization or dominance." The backdrop is that communication not only transmits information but creates culture. Leo said the workplace must be governed by "the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual." He warned that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good." Leo also said governments must foster conditions that favor employment "since it is a primary good for families and for societies." Leo said that AI "can only bring conflict about more quickly and render it more impersonal." He called for concrete criteria when making a decision to strike. That includes an identifiable chain of responsibility applying also to "those who design, train, authorize and employ technology," and measures, so that target selection takes into account the difference between combatants and noncombatants, and the impact on defenseless populations. Non-negotiable requirements include guarantees of accountability and that deployment of lethal force cannot be automated. Leo also called for a shared international framework "to curb the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians." Leo noted that the world's wealth "is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, widening inequalities." In the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the "invisible hand' of the market," Leo wrote, urging politicians to orient policies toward "the common good" and to promote "dignified work, social inclusion and an equitable distribution of the benefits of innovation." Leo underlined the role of digital networks -- including online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods -- in human trafficking, which he said "must be recognized as a contemporary form of slavery." He warned that failing to respond to or tolerating these practices risks complicity in "today's sins, which are akin to those of the past when slavery was being concealed and justified." Leo also addressed the environmental costs of the data centers that are generating AI models, consuming "enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions." As demands increase, especially for large language models, Leo called for the development of more sustainable technological solutions. Leo called for an alliance among policymakers, educational institutions and families to help navigate the "culture of immediacy and hyperstimulation" created by digital media. He also highlighted how AI amplifies the danger of predation on young people, and warned against having personal mobile devices at too young an age. "Online phenomena such as grooming, blackmail and the sexual exploitation of minors are not uncommon, and are made more insidious by the use of fake profiles, algorithms that facilitate dangerous contact, and AI tools capable of manipulating images and videos," the pope wrote.

[13]

Engadget

Pope Leo calls for AI to serve humanity and not concentrate power - Engadget

The Pontiff released a 42,300-word document outlining the dangers (and benefits) of AI. Pope Leo XIV has taken a stronger stand against AI. On Monday, Leo released his first papal encyclical -- an almost 400-year-old tradition in which the Catholic Church shares its perspective on an issue. In this case, over about 42,300 words (in the English version), the Pope warned of "the misconception of equating this type of 'intelligence' with that of human beings." "These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields," Pope Leo stated. He continued: "So-called artificial intelligences 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, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom." Notably, the Pontiff presented the remarks alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. The Pope stated that it's necessary to "establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power." He emphasized that wealth is already concentrated in the hands of very few people and that it's up to governments to ensure it doesn't become even more so. In that vein, he added that leaders must ensure that humans, not AI, make all decisions related to weapons in the future. He also called for "an educational alliance for the digital age" that encourages teaching young people to think critically about AI, to guard against "apathy for seeking the truth." Regulations should also protect young people against "violent or degrading" AI-generated content, along with grooming and sexual exploitation. Leo warned that such technology -- and any profits that come with it -- shouldn't be used to justify systematic job loss. As such, he encouraged retraining and employment protections for workers whose jobs are at risk due to AI. Pope Leo's remarks weren't made against AI as a whole, stating that it shouldn't be seen "as a force antagonistic to humanity." If carefully managed, he said, it could "open up a horizon extending in all directions." In February, the Vatican teamed up with language service provider Translated to offer AI-powered live translations to Holy Mass attendees.

[14]

Pope Leo XIV compares AI to the Industrial Revolution - as new alternatives to big AI firms take shape

With the release of his encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV has signaled that he wants the church to respond to artificial intelligence much as a predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, responded to upheavals during the Industrial Revolution over a century ago. Since the first act of his papacy - choosing his name - the current pope has repeatedly invoked the earlier Leo's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. That document, which waded into the political and economic debates of the time, denounced the excesses of the Gilded Age and pointed toward a more just social order. Now, Leo XIV has used his first major statement to the world to present a new Rerum Novarum for the age of AI. Rerum Novarum was more than just a theological text. It helped reshape economic policy around the rights of workers, serving as a spiritual foundation for European social democracy and the 1930s New Deal programs that still undergird economic life for working Americans today. It also spurred a movement of entrepreneurs to transform the economic system from within. Understanding its influence is key to seeing the potential of Leo XIV's encyclical. From guilds to cooperatives in the industrial era In his time, Leo XIII rejected both unfettered capitalism and revolutionary socialism. He invoked the medieval guilds, in which craftspeople self-organized, and asserted the rights of industrial workers to organize as well. This was a radical statement at a time when unions often faced violent suppression from employers and police. But in contrast to communist agitators, he didn't want to do away with private property. He argued that to bring out the best in human beings, as creatures made in the image of God, governments should "induce as many as possible of the people to become owners." This was more of a vision than a detailed plan, but Catholics in many countries started trying to figure out what the vision meant in practice. The English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, for instance, tried to systematize his vision in a movement they called "distributism," which proposed policies for land redistribution and a revival of guilds. In the United States, economist and Catholic priest John A. Ryan argued in favor of cooperatives - businesses that could be co-owned by workers, consumers or small-business owners. Ryan went on to be an important adviser for the New Deal in the United States, which used cooperatives as a powerful tool for economic development through farmer co-ops, rural electric associations and the credit union system. The spirit of Rerum Novarum continued to spread. Starting in the 1950s, the largest network of worker cooperatives in the world, the Mondragon Corporation in Spain's Basque region, was founded by a Catholic priest. It was a direct result of Leo XIII's encyclical. My own career has been in its shadow. As a media scholar and a Roman Catholic - and an advocate for efforts to build cooperative tech platforms - I sometimes think of my own work as applying Rerum Novarum to the online economy. With Magnifica Humanitas, the pope appears to be making a similar argument for the age of artificial intelligence. A tale of 2 cities Once again, society is going through an economic upheaval: New technologies are changing the nature of work, political systems are under strain, and wealth inequality is staggering. In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV argues that an intervention akin to Rerum Novarum is needed. The guiding metaphor of Magnifica Humanitas is the choice between two biblical scenes: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under the prophet Nehemiah. The first is a story about the dream of a city that sets out to erect a single building as high as the heavens. Babel, as Leo XIV writes in the encyclical, is a city "built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency." In the biblical account, the project collapses as the world's common language is scattered into many diverse ones. The pope contrasts this with the story of the Hebrew prophet Nehemiah, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., when Jews were returning from exile to a ruined Jerusalem. Nehemiah organized the city's rebuilding through a collaborative process based on shared responsibility. While united in prayer, the city's various families and professions could each put their distinctive marks on their work. The current AI industry, he argues, is in danger of becoming a new Tower of Babel. Just a few companies control this powerful technology supposedly poised to transform work, politics and society for everyone. He warns that many AI leaders are enthused by ideologies that propose to trade human limits for the godlike powers of machines. Some are even cheerfully embracing a world where human labor is no longer central to the economy. Leo also fears that human choice is becoming more removed from the execution of war. In the face of all this, the encyclical calls on people everywhere to adopt "the pressing duty to remain profoundly human" - to be neither "spectators" nor "commentators" but to take an active role by participating in what he calls "the construction sites of history." Some already are. Construction sites for a different kind of AI It is easy to see the emerging AI industry in Babel-like terms - a few massive tech companies build the models and provide access to them on their terms. But other paths are still possible. My colleagues and I have been documenting cases that could be the germ of a different kind of AI industry - one more aligned with what the pope is calling for. Just as during the Industrial Revolution, a more just future begins with workers resisting against the abuses of the present. From Hollywood to Nairobi, workers have been fighting for dignity as AI changes their professions. Magnifica Humanitas stresses the importance of decent jobs to a healthy society, and workers' demands can help identify what the future of work should look like. Other approaches begin among AI developers themselves. In Switzerland, a collaboration between government and academia has produced Apertus, a foundational model based on fully documented designs and data sources - a far cry from the opaque and at times illegal practices of leading AI companies. Some of Apertus' developers have created a consumer cooperative, enabling users to co-own their interface with the model. Cooperative ownership like this allows users to tune AI experiences more intentionally toward their needs. The large U.S. farmer co-op Land O'Lakes, for example, has created AI-enabled tools that provide analysis and guidance for its members based on the data that they collectively co-own. The more nascent Transkribus in Europe is co-owned by research institutions that collectively train their AI software to transcribe texts for historical research. These kinds of systems follow Leo XIV's call to "manage data as a common or shared good." It is telling that even among leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the founders attempted to build unusual corporate governance structures to insulate their products from profit motives. Governments could encourage more appropriate ownership designs or outright require them for high-risk industries like AI. If Rerum Novarum is any guide, the impact of Magnifica Humanitas will depend on the creative entrepreneurship and policy experiments to put it into practice - and this work has already begun.

[15]

Pope Leo Is Challenging Much More Than Big Tech

Many admirers of his new encyclical have misidentified its main target. Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical "on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence," has received widespread praise. This isn't surprising. A popular and learned world leader with a significant degree of moral authority is pointing out the dangers of a deeply unpopular technology created by deeply unpopular people. The laudatory coverage of the encyclical is justified, but it has obscured perhaps Leo's most important insight. Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity") is not only -- or even mostly -- about AI itself. And the pope is challenging much more than Big Tech. To be sure, Leo devotes considerable space to addressing the technology and its purveyors. In one of the document's most-quoted passages, he declares that AI "must be disarmed" and prevented "from dominating humanity." Elsewhere, he argues for the need "to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power" on human relationships, working conditions, public discourse, international affairs, and much else. Given AI's "energy-intensive infrastructure," the pope warns, "it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home." He also points to the impunity bestowed on AI developers by the extraordinary resources they have at their disposal. Elizabeth Bruenig: The pope grasps the limits of AI But Leo doesn't stop there. "Technology promises emancipation" for the stable and secure, he writes, which in turn "produces new forms of global subordination" for those in precarious situations. No doubt, many encyclical readers fall, like me, into the first group. He's implicating us, too. "Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical," Leo challenges us to keep in mind. "Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people." These include people "working under demanding conditions for minimal wages," Leo writes. "In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly." Leo rightly calls this a form of slavery -- and the ones who benefit from it include much of his audience. We are the ones who demand and expect endless, frictionless data so that we can be more efficient and adept at work and school, more entertained and eased at home, more liberated from the slow, hard effort of reading and understanding. And instead of reckoning with our own complicity, we blame AI and Big Tech. Now, thanks to Magnifica Humanitas, we can selectively quote an authority no less than the pope to heighten that blame even more. AI hasn't created this situation. Rather, it has dramatically accelerated a preexisting one in which human affairs were already governed by paradigms that place the ultimate good in technology, economics, and unconstrained individualism. "We live at a time of significant spiritual and cultural blindness," Leo writes, thanks in part to "a disconcerting loss of historical memory." Warmongers prolong conflict "as a source of power and income," while "globalization has provoked fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions." Humanity, not technology, is responsible for this polycrisis. Accordingly, Leo says that we're responsible for remedying it. This will require building "a civilization of love" based on "the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization," the pope writes. He grounds this account in biblical precedents, invoking the humble, gradual, communal rebuilding of Jerusalem recounted in the Book of Nehemiah, contrasting it with the story of the proud, striving, failed effort to build the Tower of Babel. Throughout the encyclical, and especially near its conclusion, he also invokes Christianity's core proposition, which accounts for the title of the encyclical. Humanity is magnificent, Leo says, because God made us in his own likeness; because a first-century Jewish teenage girl from Nazareth gave birth to the son of God; because this indwelling of the eternal divine in mortal human form endows humanity itself with the highest possible meaning, purpose, and value. Read: The pope doubles down on the beautiful struggle To nonbelievers, the Jesus-and-Mary stuff may be unconvincing, even a little ridiculous. But Leo proposes that the incarnation is the firmest possible ground for the conviction that "no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil." Leo has offered an answer to the signal question of the digital age. This question isn't what to do about AI -- that's secondary. The question is: What does it mean, what does it take, to be human? You don't need to agree with the pope about why humanity is more magnificent than AI, but his encyclical reveals what's happening now that fewer and fewer people believe that it is.

[16]

New Yorker

What the Pope Said About A.I.

Last year, only months into his papacy, Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, called on developers of artificial intelligence "to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work." In response, the Silicon Valley billionaire and troll-in-chief Marc Andreessen began mocking the pontiff by tweeting an idiotic meme at him. The Pope raised the grave concern that artificial-intelligence companies were "totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity"; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly wondered whether the Pope might be in league with the Antichrist. The merchant princes of Silicon Valley appeared concerned that the new Pope would usurp their authority and diminish their power. And now, arguably, he has, in a long-awaited encyclical on artificial intelligence. For years -- for decades -- tech leaders have described their investments and inventions, their corporations, and even themselves in religious terms, and specifically in messianic terms. They claimed to be driven by a mission to make the world a better place; they were faithful to the misbegotten gospel of disruptive innovation. A "mission" is, historically, the Christian work of spreading the word of the Gospel; disruptive innovation is a theory of change that participates in the rhetoric of salvation. For a time, Facebook's stated mission was "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," which is what most clergy of any faith might say is their mission, too, alongside caring for the poor and comforting the suffering. Tech executives, dressed in the ritualized vestments of hoodies, jeans, designer sneakers, and black T-shirts, have acted as if their companies were churches, their TED talks so many homilies, and their products -- apps, platforms, and video games -- temples, mosques, and chapels. More recently, these same people -- men, really -- have heralded the arrival of artificial intelligence as ushering in what Mark Zuckerberg calls a "new era for humanity." This week, the Pope offered his own understanding of that new era in his encyclical, titled "Magnifica Humanitas," or "Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." It could hardly be more different from the preachings of the priests of Silicon Valley. They like to say they are saving the world. The Pope fears they are destroying it. Little in the encyclical is surprising; its force lies in its being said all at once. The Pope, who is seventy and was born in Chicago, has been speaking about artificial intelligence since his election to the office, a year ago. "We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human," he said earlier this month. He took his papal name, Leo, in honor of the last Pope Leo, the thirteenth, because he expected to issue a statement of the scale and historical significance of that Pope's 1891 encyclical, "Rerum Novarum" ("Of New Things"), an indictment of the profound economic inequality wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and a rejection equally of laissez-faire capitalism and of socialism in favor of collective bargaining and social justice. (Another Pope described "Rerum Novarum" as a papal Magna Carta.) Leo XIV signed "Magnifica Humanitas" on May 15th of this year, a hundred and thirty-five years to the day that Leo XIII issued "Rerum Novarum." Many things are new. Many things are old. Leo XIII indicted robber barons; Leo XIV indicted tech moguls. The new encyclical, at nearly forty thousand words, bears reading. It is addressed "to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill" -- that is, to everyone. In advance of its release, and leery of the inevitable TL;DR reaction, one Texas bishop warned parishioners not to ask a chatbot to summarize it for them. (Earlier this year, the Pope urged priests against using ChatGPT to write their sermons and to instead "use your brains more.") It is not a beautiful document. It's often maddeningly, boringly wonky ("this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data"), and it gives every evidence of being written by a committee ("psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships"). Some of it reads like a Silicon Valley press release ("Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work"). Nevertheless, "Magnifica Humanitas" presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.

[17]

At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo's Warnings About the New Technology

When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry's leading A.I. companies. As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds. But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday's gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area's frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah's remarks seemed to hint at the opposite. "They are not in dialogue," Mr. Nixon said during an interview at A.G.I. House, a San Francisco "hacker house" with deep ties to many of the people who helped create the A.I. technologies discussed in the pope's encyclical. "Their perspectives are distinct." The difference between the humanist's view of A.I.'s risks and the technologist's dream of what it could become is something that has long been discussed in Mr. Nixon's community. "It is the reason the community exists," Mr. Nixon said. "It is its underlying purpose." Mr. Nixon, 33, is one of the founders of A.G.I. House, which is named for Silicon Valley's headlong pursuit of "artificial general intelligence," a hypothetical machine that can do anything the human brain can do. "We are named for this moment in history," he said of his seven-room group house. Over the years, it has been home to a rotating collection of researchers, entrepreneurs and philosophers. More than most, Mr. Nixon understands the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the attitudes of the people building it. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, when Silicon Valley started developing the technologies that power chatbots, Mr. Nixon worked in Google's central A.I. lab. Later, he founded A.G.I. House with Andrej Karpathy, who was an early employee at OpenAI, oversaw self-driving tech at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic. Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world's Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak. For Mr. Nixon, the pope's open letter read like one of the many government policy documents that have been shared among think tanks and regulators over the past several years. "It did not seem like the church had thought deeply about what their independent perspective was on A.I.," he said. "It is not clear they could do that even if they tried." He added: "They couldn't have a position on it, because they don't understand it." The response to the encyclical from across Silicon Valley was fairly muted. David Sacks, the Silicon Valley investor who served as the White House A.I. czar, pushed back on the pope's call for additional A.I. regulation. "If we hand governments sweeping power over A.I. development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens -- as Orwell foretold in '1984'?" he said. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and who now runs the financial company Block, welcomed the pope's call for A.I.'s underpinnings -- patents, data and technological infrastructure -- to be shared with everyone, not just a relative few. The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment. Looking out over San Francisco, toward the Golden Gate Bridge in the north, A.G.I. House plays host to ad hoc seminars on the philosophies driving Silicon Valley's pursuit of A.I. and "hackathons" in which researchers from the leading labs explore the boundaries of the technologies they are building. In the early afternoon following the pope's encyclical, dozens of foldable chairs were set up in rows across the living room. But on this Memorial Day, the only figures in the room were two jet-black mannequins that stood near the wall. The A.G.I. House founders first moved into a $68 million mansion in Hillsborough, Calif., just south of San Francisco. They wanted to create a group house where researchers and engineers gathered to discuss new ideas and create new companies. Mr. Nixon started a second house in San Francisco near the top of Twin Peaks, overlooking the city from its highest hills. Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I. Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like "The God Delusion" -- in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence -- he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful. A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. "Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve," he said. This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species -- or even a new God. "People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God," said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. "They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact." In his encyclical, called "Magnifica Humanitas" or "Magnificent Humanity," Leo called for safeguards that would protect humanity. He stressed that humans must continue to play a fundamental role in the workplace. "A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity," he wrote. "This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace." Work, he added, is not just a way of earning income. It is "a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment." He also used the biblical story of the Tower of Babel -- in which a group of humans who speak a single unified language aim to build a tower that reaches to heavens so they can exert their power -- as a way of warning Silicon Valley against the pitfalls of trying to outdo God. His most forceful message was that A.I. was fundamentally not human, because it could only imitate certain parts of human intelligence and behavior. "So-called artificial intelligences 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," he wrote. But in a seven-minute speech at the Vatican, Mr. Olah, the Anthropic co-founder, described a technology that may be progressing beyond a simple machine. "What is actually happening inside them?" he said. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Mr. Nixon thought Mr. Olah's speech was far more spiritual than the words delivered by the pope, even if Mr. Olah was making claims that were not necessarily based on science. Though Mr. Olah hinted that chatbots may have working lives of their own, Mr. Nixon said, they are still very much dependent on humans to do anything, as Mr. Olah noted. "A.I. is still controlled by people who are trying to make money or solve some mathematical problem or what have you," Mr. Nixon said. But what is clear, he added, is that A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade. He chuckled at the pope's invocation of the Tower of Babel. When he was at Google, a project the company called Babel built translation technology that has essentially allowed everyone to speak the same language. On Monday evening, he and others in his circle gathered in the A.G.I. House living room to discuss the encyclical. They agreed that Leo's open letter would have little effect on Silicon Valley, he said, but they wondered whether Silicon Valley might have an effect on the pope -- if the Vatican might use A.I. technologies to "create a New Jerusalem." "A.I. and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming," he said.

[18]

BBC

Pope Leo says AI must be 'disarmed' in first major teaching

Pope Leo has presented the first major teaching document of his papacy, warning that artificial intelligence needs to be "disarmed". "The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention," the Pope said. Encyclicals are technically letters to Catholic bishops, but over recent decades the missives have become messages to the world from a Pope. While this letter was largely focused on AI, Pope Leo also included one of the strongest, most comprehensive apologies from the Vatican for the Catholic Church's role in slavery. It was "impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many," the Pope wrote, adding that he "sincerely asked for pardon" in the name of the Church. Leo mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people again - both in its production and in its applications. Some of the Pope's strongest imagery in the document related to slavery, warning parallels between the historical tragedy of traditional slavery and the emerging threats of "new digital slaveries". He suggested a risk of similar normalisation of exploitation and that humanity was at a similar moral crossroads. Unusually, Pope Leo chose to present the encyclical - titled "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Magnificent Humanity") - himself, at the Vatican, alongside AI experts including Christopher Olah, co-founder of US AI giant Anthropic. In remarks following the presentation of the encyclical, Olah said that every AI lab including his operated "inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing". It would be a mistake to believe that matters of AI were best handled by computer scientists like himself, Olah added: "The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature." The Pope's encyclical - which also acknowledged the many potential pitfalls in AI - is also a stark and direct message to those in positions of power about their responsibilities in kerbing the "threats" it poses. For example, the Pope condemned the use of AI in warfare, saying that reducing human control of weaponry makes it even harder to consider a war "just" and warned against launching an AI arms race. "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable," the Pope wrote. Not only does AI not remove the "intrinsic inhumanity" of war, he said, but it also risks sparking conflict more quickly and rendering it more impersonal by "lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data". Leo also decried the way AI impacts on politics - such as the way it was used to manipulate images and videos, which he said exposed people to biased or misleading perspectives. In the past, the Pope has likened today's need for safeguards to protect people in the face of AI developments to those that were needed to ensure human dignity during the industrial revolution. He suggested comparisons of failing to act against the risks of AI today with the "delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery". He even referred to the risks of "digital colonialism," linking the abuses of the colonial era to modern tech practices. At one point in this document, the Pope directly issued a "special appeal" to those who develop AI. "Developers bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity," he said. But what impact will all of this have? Pope Leo has convened a commission to take his work forward, but there are huge questions as to how effective all this will be in the face of rapid technological advances. In 2015, the late Pope Francis wrote his encyclical Laudato Si which focused on the urgent need to address the climate crisis - but then followed it up in 2023 talking about his disappointment in the inaction there had been. As passionate as he has been about the needs to rein in AI, Pope Leo may find himself issuing a similar warning in the years ahead.

[19]

The Register

Pope Leo warns AI boom can give Big Tech and the people who run it too much power

Pope Leo XIV has made artificial intelligence the subject of the first major teaching issued since his appointment in May 2025, and included warnings that AI could lead to Big Tech companies and the moguls that accumulating power that they will abuse for the sake of profit. The Pope's teaching is an encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas - On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The Pope strongly argues that AI must not be considered human. "These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence," he wrote. "In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing." "So-called artificial intelligences 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, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences." But Pope Leo wants the providers of AI to consider the ethics of their actions. "In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors," he wrote. "These entities effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities for participation. 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." A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few The Pope therefore wants strong regulation for AI. "For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions," he wrote. "Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions." The notion of AI morality being determined by a small group of people is not fiction: the prospectus SpaceX filed last week includes a mention of its Grok services "as a truth-seeking AI model, built on our founder Elon Musk's mission to enable humanity to understand the universe." AI boosters often advocate for rapid adoption of the technology. Pope Leo is having none of it. "Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family," he wrote. "Otherwise, change will be governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable, ultimately imposing rules shaped by those who control data, infrastructure and computing power." The Pope argues AI is already causing human suffering, and even a new kind of slavery, by pointing to the low wages and unpleasant working conditions endured by content moderators, data labelers, miners, and those who work processing minerals needed to build computers, who toil "so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly." Change will be governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable The Pope also worries about AI's environmental impact. "Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources," he wrote. "As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home." Another topic the encyclical touches on is war, which Pope Leo worries is made "more 'feasible' and less subject to human control" due to deployment of autonomous weapons. "For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms," he wrote. It is certainly desirable for technology to relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks The potential for AI to impact jobs also caught the Pope's attention, and his take on the matter suggests "It is certainly desirable for technology to relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity." But the Pontiff argues "protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule." "The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good." The Pope invited one the technocrats he warned about, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, to comment on the launch of encyclical. In his remarks, Olah mostly agreed with the Pontiff, reminding us that "AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations" and asking "How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally?" He admitted "We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem, and it is the kind of problem the Church has historically refused to let the world ignore." But Olah didn't commit to solve the problem, saying that the release of encyclical "is just the beginning -- the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot." ®

[20]

Gizmodo

The Pope Warns Against â€~Dehumanizationâ€™ in the AI Era Alongside an Eyebrow-Raising Guest

In the first major theological document of his papacy, Pope Leo warned humanity on the dangers of underregulated AI developmentâ€"alwhile being flanked by one of the biggest players in AI. "In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human," the Pope wrote in his 43,000-word encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas. In the document, the Pope tries to contend with how the technological advancements coming out of Silicon Valley dehumanize society by reducing "the mystery of the person into data and performance" in the never-ending technological quest for perfection. He calls on the industry to avoid "the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak" and urges "more active political involvement" in the development of AI. "Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family," the Pope wrote. The Pope's encyclical touches on everything from the impact of AI companions to the proliferation of AI deepfakes, but it particular, it spends time raising concerns about the impact AI will have on the job market and warfare. Over the past year, corporate AI initiatives have been cited as the driver of layoffs and hiring reduction decisions across several industries, but particularly in tech. According to a recent report, 99% of CEOs expect headcount reductions within the next two years because of AI, further fueling fears of a looming AI-driven white-collar unemployment crisis. "Work remains a fundamental dimension of the human experience, for not only is it a means of sustenance, but it is also a context for expression, relationships and contributing to the community," the Pope wrote. "A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment." AI systems are also deeply embedded in many advanced militaries and are controversially used in ongoing conflicts, including by the Israeli army in its mass surveillance of and military offensive against the Palestinian people. In the document, Pope Leo says "it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems" because those decisions require "conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person." Accompanying the Pope in his presentation of the encyclical on Monday were an expected crew of theologians and Vatican officials, along with an eyebrow-raising guest: Chris Olah, one of the co-founders of AI giant Anthropic. Compared to most of its peers in the AI industry, Anthropic has frequently advocated for more regulation, a stance that has led many to refer to its CEO Dario Amodei as a "doomer." But while the company and Amodei call for more regulation and caution society on the dangers related to its models, they also continue to develop, release, and make considerable money off of said "dangerous" models. And although Anthropic had a very public falling out with the Pentagon earlier this year for allegedly refusing to budge on restrictions on the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, the company has had an active AI partnership with the military since 2024 through the controversial tech giant Palantir. At the presentation of the encyclical, per the New York Times, Leo said Olah, who leads Anthropic's Interpretability Research team,Â had been working with the Vatican for a while on building an understanding of artificial intelligence. Olah reportedly said the encyclical was "just the beginning" of "a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot." The text of the encyclical also mirrors specific language used by Anthropic to explain how AI systems work, according to the Washington Post, further pointing to the AI giant's influence in what the Vatican is positioning to be the guiding document for the development of moral and ethical AI.

[21]

The Next Web

Pope Leo XIV tells the Vatican to disarm AI, in the first encyclical of his pontificate

Magnifica humanitas calls for breaking up monopolistic control of the technology, rules out algorithmic warfare, and is being presented alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. Pope Leo XIV used the first encyclical of his pontificate, published in Rome on Monday, to call for the disarmament of artificial intelligence. The 245-paragraph document, titled Magnifica humanitas, frames AI as a technology that has begun to dominate the people it was built to serve, and argues that disarming it means restoring the moral primacy of the human over the algorithm. "To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern," the pope wrote. "To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity." The encyclical is the most consequential act of his year-old papacy, and the first time a pope has organised an entire foundational letter around an emerging technology rather than a doctrinal or social question. Leo, the first American pope and a former Villanova mathematics major, signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, which set out Catholic social teaching for the industrial age. The framing is deliberate: this encyclical is offered as its successor for the AI age. Its central targets are concentration and warfare. The pope called for AI to be made more "human-friendly" and freed from "monopolistic control", language that lands directly against the half-dozen US firms that now define the technology's frontier. On war, he was sharper. "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable," he wrote. "AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict, indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal." The choice of speaker for the launch underlined the line. Christopher Olah, Anthropic's co-founder and head of interpretability research, presented alongside cardinals at the Vatican Synod Hall on Monday morning. Anthropic has spent the past two months at the centre of a separate global debate over the security implications of Mythos, its autonomous vulnerability-discovery model that has found thousands of zero-days across every major operating system. The company has clashed with the Trump administration over the use of its technology in war and surveillance. On that last point, the encyclical now sits directly across from the White House. Vice president JD Vance, a Catholic convert close to early OpenAI investor Peter Thiel, was asked about the document at a press briefing on May 19. "When the leader of the world's largest Christian denomination speaks on an issue like that, it's certainly going to have some influence," he said. "And I'm sure it'll contain a lot of insights, some of which I'll probably agree with, some of which I may not." In the same briefing he restated that president Donald Trump "wants us to win the AI race against all other countries in the world". The proximate tension is older than this week. Thiel spent part of March in Rome delivering closed-door lectures at Palazzo Taverna on the figure of the Antichrist, drawing on a thesis that a one-world technocratic government would emerge under the pretext of averting AI, nuclear, or climate-driven catastrophe. Father Paolo Benanti, the Vatican's adviser on AI, responded in an op-ed describing the lectures as "a sustained act of heresy" against the liberal consensus. Leo and Trump have separately sparred over the war in Iran. An encyclical, by design, is not a policy document but a moral framing under which subsequent policy gets argued. Magnifica humanitas places "human dignity" and "shared standards of social justice" at the centre of any future regulatory architecture and rules algorithmic warfare out of it. Pope Leo XIV presented it personally rather than delegating it to cardinals, a break with tradition. He addressed the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. The wider audience was understood.

[22]

Reuters

Quotes from Pope Leo's document warning world of AI risks

VATICAN CITY, May 25 (Reuters) - Pope Leo issued his first major document on Monday, urging international regulation to slow down the development of AI systems, which he said spread misinformation and may lead the world down a path of unending war. Below are snippets from the document, a nearly 43,000-word encyclical titled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity). ON AI SYSTEMS *"The main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly 'private' aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good." *"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." *"Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family." *"It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required." *"It is essential that the use ⁠of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight. ... Ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated." ON WAR *"The digital revolution is changing the nature of conflict. Alongside conventional warfare, there are hybrid forms such as cyberattacks, information manipulation, campaigns of influence and the automation of strategic decisions." *"What is created for defense can be rapidly repurposed for offense, and the fine line between protection and aggression becomes blurred. While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians, it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to 'collateral damage'." *"In our time, a culture of power is taking hold, in which the availability of resources and the ability to dominate tend to dictate the agenda and criteria for decision-making. ... This culture of power infiltrates society, changes relationships and behaviours, and grows by normalizing war, pursuing ever-greater military power, taking advantage of the crisis of multilateralism and fuelling a false realism that insists that there is no alternative." *"Today ... we are witnessing a ⁠real paradigm shift in public discourse and in decisions regarding rearmament, with a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics, while the very ethical principles that had previously limited its use are being eroded." *"The growth of the military-industrial complex has become a defining feature of the current political landscape. ... The close link between economic interests, the military apparatus and political decisions produces an 'armed nation', in which war appears as a natural extension of politics, and the arms market becomes an autonomous driving force behind military decisions." *"The development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints ... it is not ⁠permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems." DISINFORMATION, YOUTH EDUCATION, WORKERS' RIGHTS *"Democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism." *"It is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models ⁠that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task." *"The convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work. It is said that this will bring great improvements for everyone. In reality, however, the 'new ways' of working are not necessarily better." *"The protection ⁠of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule. The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs." *"More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the 'invisible hand' of the market. ... Since many economic decisions transcend national borders, there is also a need for international cooperation capable of defining common strategies, especially in favour of the most vulnerable countries and people." Reporting by Joshua McElwee; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Keith Weir Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

[23]

CNBC

Pope Leo urges AI regulation and warns that some weapons are now beyond human control

Pope Leo urged governments to slow down and closely regulate the development of AI systems in his first major document, released on Monday, warning that they spread misinformation, prioritise conflict and risk leading the world down a path of unending war. The first U.S. pope also expressed concern at a Vatican event launching the text that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced "practically beyond any human reach to govern them". The event was also attended by Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world's top AI companies. Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump after criticising the Iran war, made a range of impassioned appeals to world leaders in the lengthy document, known as an encyclical. The first U.S. pope called for ownership of AI data not to be left solely in private hands, for policy-makers to protect the rights of workers and keep children safe from the technology, and urged the cooling of competition between AI companies. "What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating," said Leo in the text, entitled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity). The pope called for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the Church's 1.4 billion members. Monday's highly anticipated text, spanning nearly 43,000 words, has been in the works nearly since Leo's election as pope a little more than a year ago.

[24]

Pope calls for robust regulation of AI in manifesto that ponders the future of humanity

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Leo XIV called Monday for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and for its developers to work for the common good rather than profit, issuing a sweeping manifesto on safeguarding humankind as the technology impacts everything from work to war. "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), Leo's first encyclical, has been eagerly awaited ever since history's first U.S.-born pope announced days after his election that he considered AI to be the biggest challenge facing humanity today. In the text, Leo denounced the "culture of power" driving the AI race, especially in developing ever more sophisticated methods of remote warfare. He declared that it was "not permissible" to entrust irreversible, lethal decisions to AI systems, setting up another flash point between the American pope and the Trump administration, which has worked aggressively to deregulate AI development. Experts in the tech industry, academia and Catholic morality said the document will likely become a benchmark in the debate over AI, a point of reference for policymakers, researchers and ordinary folk alike. It comes as the near-daily developments in the technology trigger concerns rise over AI replacing human jobs and even human intelligence. "It lends itself to people who are at the forefront of these tools and able to see the incredible things that they're able to do, to have questions about their own 'What does it mean to be human?'" said Taylor Black, a Microsoft AI executive and director of Catholic University of America's AI institute. The pope was to present the text at a Vatican launch Monday that featured the co-founder of Anthropic, which is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over access to its AI technology. The Vatican decided to involve Anthropic as part of its decade-long effort to engage Silicon Valley in dialogue over the human cost of AI. And yet in his text, Leo repeatedly blasted the concentration of power and data in the hands of so few people in the private sector as a danger, especially to children and the most vulnerable, and called for external regulation of their work. "It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required," he wrote. "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." Leo appealed several times to AI developers and political leaders responsible for regulating them to just slow down and reflect on what they are doing. He urged them to use ethical and spiritual guidelines to make the choice to work not for their own profit or power, but the betterment of humanity. AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are the second- and third-most valuable U.S. private companies, each valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the GDP of many nations. In a methodical text, the math major pope traced the history of the Catholic Church's social teaching and applied its core concepts -- justice, solidarity, the dignity of work and the universal destination of resources -- to the digital revolution. "I am convinced that this will prove to be a defining document for our era, a profound and prophetic document," said Paolo Carozza, law professor at Notre Dame Law School and chair of the Meta oversight board. "Pope Leo is offering a clear, comprehensive, and coherent voice urging us to take responsibility for constructing a world in which technology will serve humans rather than degrade them," he said. In its strongest chapters, Leo denounced how AI had helped accelerate the "normalization of war" by desensitizing people to its cost. He didn't name specific conflicts, but cited "opposing imperialisms, between powers that wish to preserve their supremacy, and those that aspire to seize that supremacy." He demanded transparency and accountability by AI developers so that the chain of decision-making command in ordering strikes with AI weaponry is always known. He declared that the Catholic Church's "just war" theory, which provides specific criteria for when force can be justified, was now "outdated" given the technological advances of warfare. Leo signed the text May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of "Rerum Novarum" (Of New Things), the most important teaching document of Leo's hero and namesake, Pope Leo XIII. That document addressed workers' rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway. It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope cited it at the start of his pontificate in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. "Magnifica Humanitas" thus becomes the latest chapter in a century-long history of popes adapting "Rerum Novarum" to the social questions of their times, often dwelling on the dignity of work for human flourishing. AI is evoking both existential fears and utopian vision amid an intensifying debate on whether it will become a catalyst that enriches humanity or a technological toxin that dulls human intelligence while wiping out millions of high-paying jobs. "The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good," Leo wrote. Leo extended his concern for upholding human dignity in labor to issue the first-ever papal apology for the Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery. Past popes have apologized for Christians' involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave "infidels." Vatican officials declined to say who exactly contributed to Leo's encyclical. But Vatican and church officials have been engaged in a dialogue with Silicon Valley tech firms for a decade. Toward the end of his pontificate, Pope Francis began speaking out more about AI and the risks it poses to humanity. The decision to include Anthropic at the Vatican launch was criticized by some who considered it a papal stamp of approval of the AI firm. In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology after it refused to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of it. Anthropic, which bills itself as the AI company that puts safety and risk-mitigation at the forefront of its research, is currently suing the administration. Brian Boyd, U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, read the inclusion of Anthropic's co-founder Christopher Olah as similar to a papal audience with a head of state: not an endorsement. "I think it's more like a recognition of (how) this is an extremely powerful company that's currently winning this race to replace human workers," Boyd said. Anthropic is an "enormous corporation that is taking onto itself an enormous risk and responsibility," Boyd continued, but said the company has "demonstrated genuine goodwill and integrity and interest in dialogue." ___ Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut, and Houmani reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

[25]

The Pope's Defense of Human Imperfection

The Vatican's encyclical about AI is actually about what technology can never do. After the Lord sent a great flood to rid the world of evil, people gathered in Babylonia and began baking bricks -- a recent advancement. In those days all humans spoke the same language, and they used those bricks to build a tower that embodied their limitless ambitions. And so the Lord imposed a panoply of tongues, thereby deterring the creation of any new technology that might aspire to divine power and glory. The Lord may have delayed such technologies, but he didn't preempt them entirely. The Vatican's recently released 250-page encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas -- "magnificant humanity" -- has been hailed as the first official Catholic document to wrestle with AI. But rather than deal strictly with its hazards, the letter, signed by Pope Leo XIV, has two overarching purposes: first, to defend humanity against those who have grown jaded about our shared nature and existence, and second, to warn society about the threats posed by the temptation to outsource human capabilities to computers. Championing not just human magnificence but human imperfection is a radical turn. The pope's insight that much of our beauty arises from limitation rather than limitlessness is a crucial intervention in the age of AI. Magnifica Humanitas is not a Luddite document. Rather, it follows in a long tradition of Christian critiques of dazzling technologies that nevertheless smuggle in dangerous risks. The Industrial Revolution, for example, greatly increased productivity but also catalyzed a new form of exploitation for the profit of a handful of capitalists -- prompting William Blake to wonder, in his 1804 poem "Jerusalem," whether the light of God had ever shone among "these dark satanic mills." Francis X. Rocca: Pope Leo's unsettling vision of the AI future AI raises similar questions. One of the pope's most surprising arguments is his insistence that humanity is fundamentally good -- not in spite of, but because of the things that make us unlike machines. "Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others," he writes. "Indeed, precisely because we experience limits -- vulnerability, suffering and failure -- we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others." He worries about any willingness to allow the human powers of reason, creativity, compassion, and care for fellow people to be usurped by machines. This concern arrives at a moment when any faith in human goodness, judgment, and ingenuity seems to be under assault. Some of the loudest voices in Silicon Valley sound conflicted as to whether humans have anything of value to offer at all. Last year Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, hesitated in a New York Times interview to answer the question of whether humanity ought to survive. He and other members of the tech-investor class have instead suggested that humans might be better off if we outsource more of our imperfect decision making -- moral and otherwise -- to superintelligent AI. Their perspective tends to dismiss human limitations as liabilities, despite the fact that it is human imperfection that inspires compassion and reflection, and that lends great art its beauty. The literature created by AI is dull and devoid of any real poignance. (A chatbot might mimic Dostoevsky's prose style, for instance, but it cannot see, as he did, how sin casts goodness in heartbreaking relief.) Perfection is inhuman, and pretensions to it are both doomed and misbegotten. Such pretensions to perfection are partly what make AI dangerous. Pope Leo points out that the creators and users of AI are already allowing the technology to make moral decisions -- such as by using algorithms to figure out who to hire, whether to fund surgeries, or where to target bombs. This withers people's capacity to think through these problems on their own, and perhaps more worryingly places the ability to broadly influence these choices in the hands of those who train and control AI technologies. This means that the moral philosophies of tech gurus will steadily guide the moral decisions of ever more people as these technologies gain wider purchase in society. The pope has not issued a decree to dispense with AI, nor a definitive ruling on whether it is good or evil. In fact, the document doesn't consider AI particularly special, though its specific risks are novel and serious. Instead, the pope positions the technology as merely one in a long lineage of such technologies, dating from the Tower of Babel, which promise power and glory at the expense of human uniqueness. Homogeneity, efficiency, and productivity are not what human life is about: Our calling isn't to operate like computers, but to do exactly what computers cannot, which is to love.

[26]

As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words

David Streitfeld has reported from Silicon Valley since the late 1990s. Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams, dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms. One of the oldest industry jokes has a programmer asking a computer, "Is there a God?" The computer answers: "There is now." The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, tech leaders are signaling that those early dreams have been fulfilled. Next stop, transcendence. Just as the new religion of A.I. seemed to be solidifying its control over mankind's destiny, however, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world. Its message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate the human. Machines are not gods. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or "Magnificent Humanity." The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley's assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future. "A.I. can be a valuable tool," the pope acknowledged, but the technology "tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data." Without adequate oversight and transparency, he warned, "those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems." That would be bad news, he said: "A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." The encyclical is expected to be at the center of the 70-year-old pontiff's reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated for workers' rights and a fair wage, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII's papacy at the end of the 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley slept, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly restrain the A.I. boom. President Trump last week came close to signing a measure that would have given the federal government the power to evaluate A.I. models before they were publicly released -- then canceled the signing. The same day, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a measure to study A.I.'s impact on employment, an acknowledgment of the turmoil the companies insist is coming. Elon Musk, who has his own A.I. ambitions, tried to derail OpenAI, the leading A.I. company, with a lawsuit but was thwarted this month on technical grounds. Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former. Love 'em or hate 'em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their peers exert similar influence on our modern kings, which is to say politicians. The American economy is being propped up by spending on A.I. The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms with dizzying speed and unknown effect. The old religion challenging the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers. Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the sweep and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and instructing them to be cautious or even suspicious of A.I. -- especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity -- could put a dent in tech's global ambitions. "How much influence does the pope have in our secular Western world?" asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley studying the development of A.I. in religious institutions. "We're about to see. I doubt that tech executives in Palo Alto are going to be reading this encyclical." In the best-case scenario, Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, said, the encyclical "will shape some moral deliberations." Popes have traditionally worked with the long term in mind, and any evaluation of the encyclical's effect is years away. Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say that any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided. A decade ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech luminaries in for an annual A.I. conference called the Minerva Dialogues. In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose. The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the self-styled "good" A.I. firm, pointed to the possibility that Leo is trying less to undermine A.I. than simply participate in the conversation around it. When Pope Francis released his scathing encyclical about climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak. Luke Burgis, the founder of the Cluny Institute, which explores how faith and reason bear on technology and innovation, was optimistic that Leo's words would have an effect. "This encyclical is a live wire that truly has the potential to change what is getting built in Silicon Valley," said Mr. Burgis, also a former seminarian. "It could help to give people a vocabulary to understand a new thing, in the same way that Rerum Novarum helped people understand the concept of a just wage." But it won't happen automatically, or quickly, or easily. "The church is only beginning its work here," Mr. Burgis said. "It needs to engage with a powerful counterforce that currently has it outnumbered, in both capital and compute." New religion, old religion Twenty years ago, even the idea of a confrontation between a pope and Silicon Valley was unthinkable. But in recent years, tech has moved deeper into matters that used to be exclusively religious in nature. There are widespread efforts to ward off death through various forms of lifestyle hacking. The Singularity -- the rapturous moment when man and machine merge -- is another hot topic. Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to "promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence," closed it and then opened it again in 2023. Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google, but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine. "People are so ready to make A.G.I. their god," said Garry Tan, who runs the start-up incubator Y Combinator, referring to artificial general intelligence, the next level of A.I. John Lennox, the retired Oxford mathematician who wrote "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity," said, "This race for A.I. super intelligence is to make God and be God." Bill Gates, contemplating the glorious future, said: "You can almost call it a new religion." If A.I. is a new religion or God, that puts it in competition with the old religions and the old Gods. And Silicon Valley generally has one response to competition: Squash it. Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has to protest A.I., he also needs to defend his market share, much the way Wal-Mart had to defend itself against the upstart Amazon. The tech world's initial reaction to the encyclical was muted on the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, recirculated it to his millions of followers on X. For all the noise over religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn't have many faithful there. A character on the satirical show "Silicon Valley" once joked that Christianity was "borderline illegal" in the tech community, although the reality is more complicated. Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans are Catholic, a higher percentage than in the United States as a whole, according to a recent Pew poll. But the percentage of the religiously unaffiliated in the city is also much higher. The bottom line is that relatively few tech workers are likely to hear about the pope's new encyclical from a priest. Doing the Lord's work Many A.I. applications encroach on the traditional human role of the spiritual counselor. The popular app Text with Jesus now offers voice mail responses. Bible.ai describes itself as "here to simply be a helper, a listener, a friend." Just Like Me offers a Jesus chatbot that it lauds for its "compassionate guidance" and "unconditional support." "People are turning to A.I. in their darkest moments," said Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and M.I.T. "They're turning to it like an object of worship. But Pope Leo is saying the true source of virtue is in humanity and God." Mr. Epstein, the author of "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation," said, "The pope is really doing the Lord's work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the strength, the communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman." Nonetheless, he fears it may be too late. "Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence," Mr. Epstein said. "Pope Leo's encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine."

[27]

Pope Leo warns of AI's risks to humanity in his first encyclical

Pope Leo XIV has just declared artificial intelligence one of the defining moral challenges of our time, in his first encyclical: a formal letter intended to guide moral, social and theological thought. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), it argues technology must serve humanity, rather than concentrate power or weaken human dignity. He presented it at the Vatican alongside AI developer Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that companies like his need moral guidance to guard against "incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing", the New York Times reported. "Technology is not simply a tool," read the roughly 42,300-word open letter. "When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency." It warns that AI is never truly neutral, but "takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it". And it calls for ethical oversight, social justice, protection of workers, responsible governance and peace. Automated warfare The encyclical criticises the use of AI in warfare, calling for imposing the "most rigorous ethical constraints" on weapons developed using AI. As governments invest heavily in autonomous military technologies and AI-assisted defence systems, the "growing ease" of deploying them makes war more likely and "less subject to human control", it warns. This "violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense". The letter also criticises the growing concentration of technological power, and systems that reduce people to data or economic functions. It promotes what it calls a "civilisation of love", centred on human dignity, solidarity, truth, compassion and the common good. Pope Leo's response to the the AI revolution deliberately references his predecessor Pope Leo XIII's response to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), in 1891. Though Magnifica Humanitas was released on May 25 2026, it is symbolically dated May 15, the date of Rerum Novarum. Industrial Revolution to AI Revolution An encyclical is not an ordinary papal statement. Traditionally addressed to bishops and the wider Catholic world, it is one of the Catholic church's most authoritative teaching documents. The pope no longer has the direct political power the papacy held in the 19th century. But papal teaching still carries moral weight across a global Catholic network of schools, universities, charities, hospitals and community organisations. The Vatican cannot regulate AI. It cannot write safety standards, police data centres, or force companies to disclose how their systems work. But it can help shape the moral terms of the debate. For more than a century, Catholic social teaching has influenced public arguments about work, inequality, poverty, human dignity and the ethical limits of economic power. Although popes issued encyclicals long before the modern era, Rerum Novarum made social encyclicals globally influential. It confronted exploitative labour conditions, widening inequality, and conflict between workers and employers. Pope Leo XIII defended workers' rights and argued that wealth carried social responsibilities. He criticised both unrestricted capitalism and revolutionary socialism. The document influenced debates about labour rights and economic justice well beyond the church. In Australia in 1907, Justice H.B. Higgins drew on Rerum Novarum when establishing principles for a fair living wage. Pope Leo XIV's encyclical attempts to do for the AI age what Rerum Novarum did for the industrial age: provide a moral framework for a technological transformation reshaping work, power and human relationships. Human dignity in the age of algorithms Pope Leo XIV argues human rights are not granted by governments or corporations: they arise from the intrinsic dignity of every person. Technologies should serve humanity rather than reduce people to data, economic units or optimisation problems. He builds on Pope Francis' critique of "the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions", in his 2015 encyclical. It, too, warned of the risks of technology. Pope Leo XIV argues moral responsibility can't be transferred to automated systems, regardless of how sophisticated they become. He also rejects transhumanist ideas that human limitations should be technologically overcome, arguing vulnerability, dependence and imperfection are essential to being human. Relationships, care, solidarity and compassion are not weaknesses. "Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them." Running throughout the encyclical is a contrast between a "culture of power" and a "civilization of love". One treats technology primarily as a tool for domination and control. The other places human dignity, justice and care at the centre of social life. Why this matters The significance of Magnifica Humanitas lies in its ability to shape public conversation and moral imagination. Moral frameworks matter. They influence what societies fear, what they tolerate, what they defend - and what they refuse to sacrifice. Governments are investing in AI capability while still developing frameworks for transparency, accountability and safe deployment. Businesses are adopting AI tools at speed. Schools and universities are rethinking assessment, authorship and learning. Workers are being asked to adapt to systems they did not design and often cannot challenge. And citizens are increasingly governed, assessed and targeted by automated systems they may never see. Pope Leo XIV's intervention reminds us the central question is not whether AI will be powerful: it already is. The question is whether that power will be made answerable to human dignity. The future of AI will not just be decided in laboratories, boardrooms or parliaments. It will also be decided by the moral limits societies are willing to set. Pope Leo XIV's encyclical is an attempt to draw those limits.

[28]

Tom's Guide

Pope Leo XIV warns that AI must be "disarmed" and cites Gandalf from LOTR to make his point

The pope's prophetic words about AI include a famous line from a storied wizard The growing backlash against AI has spilled into nearly every corner of culture -- from art and music to education and the future of work. Spend even a few minutes scrolling through social media and you'll likely come across videos of graduating college students booing pro-AI commencement speeches, highlighting just how skeptical younger generations have become about the technology's rapid rise. With AI now dominating conversations across politics, entertainment and Silicon Valley, it's no surprise the debate has reached one of the world's most influential religious leaders. In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and stressed the importance of governing the technology responsibly before it reshapes society beyond human control. The Pope's letter includes several striking passages about AI, but one quote in particular will instantly stand out to devoted fans of The Lord of the Rings. Seeing a reference that feels straight out of Middle-earth woven into a serious warning about artificial intelligence is not something many people expected from the Vatican. Pope Leo XIV says AI must be 'disarmed' In the Pope's extensive Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) letter, Pope Leo XIV repeatedly emphasizes the importance of "preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence." "For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions," the Pope wrote in a section titled "Responsibility, transparency and the governance of AI." He also touched on many of the biggest debates surrounding AI today, including how rapidly the technology is reshaping everyday life and concentrating power among those who already hold significant economic influence. At the same time, the Pope stopped short of calling for AI to be abandoned altogether. Instead, he argued that the technology must be carefully controlled before it begins to dominate humanity itself. "To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity," he wrote. "It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life." The Pope added that AI should become more transparent, accessible and thoughtfully governed by the developers and companies building these systems. One especially powerful line from the letter may sound familiar to longtime fans of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Referencing words associated with the wizard Gandalf, the Pope wrote: "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." Using that literary reference, the Pope argued that humanity's greatest defense against dehumanization will come not from technological dominance, but from "small and steadfast acts of fidelity" rooted in compassion and human connection. The letter was significant enough to draw praise from Chris Olah, who echoed the Pope's call for broader conversations around AI governance. "In conversations we at Anthropic have had with leaders across faith and cultural traditions, we found one shared and deeply held conviction: if this technology is coming, it must go well -- for our common home, and for the children to come," Olah said. Bottom line Pope Leo XIV has used his high position to speak out against several concerning matters, such as President Donald Trump's push for immigration deportation and the war in Iran. He's even apologized for the Vatican's role in legitimizing slavery and not condemning it in the centuries since doing so. To see him also make his stance known on AI and wish for stronger oversight on its continued development is equally fascinating to witness. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok.

[29]

NPR

Pope Leo takes aim at big tech in sweeping encyclical on AI

[30]

The Guardian

Why I'm grateful to the Pope for his encyclical on AI | Francine Prose

The intelligent and thoughtful encyclical is an important warning of the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. Silicon Valley is wrong to dismiss it Often I'm asked if I think that the novels of the future will all be written by AI. It's not so much a question as a provocation. Do I worry that a machine can do what I do, only better? I usually say something like: "No algorithm is going to write Anna Karenina!" which is also not a real answer. So I'm grateful to Pope Leo XIV, the American pope, for his recently issued letter to the world, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It's a long (more than 40,00 words), intelligent and thoughtful encyclical in which the pope addresses the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. Now when someone asks my opinion of AI, I can refer them to the pope's letter, or at least chapter three. The encyclical begins with an appropriately biblical reference to the tragic consequences of a breakdown in human communication. Humanity faces a "pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build a city in which God and humanity dwell together". What follows is a detailed account of the evolution of the views of Pope Leo's predecessors, of the Vatican's ideas about labor, authority, government, science, power and our moral obligation to one another. It cites the work that the church has done in defense of human dignity and freedom. The third chapter, Technology and Dominance. The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI, delivers on the promise of the encyclical's title. In an eloquent (and most often quoted) passage explaining what AI is not, the pope essentially defines what it means to be human. "So-called artificial intelligences 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." AI does not have a moral conscience nor does it show any guiding concern for the greater human good. The letter proceeds to say the most important and necessary things about what is possibly the greatest threat posed by AI: it can be programmed solely to maximize profit, a situation that can only result in the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few. The pope warns against the "manipulation of privacy" and the "misuse of information", against the uses of an algorithm to manage employment, to control access to public services and credit, and to elevate or damage one's personal reputation. Compassion, mercy and forgiveness - not high on the machine's list of priorities - will become obsolete. "'Necessary sacrifices' may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of the supposed optimization of the species." If the tools of this new power are placed in the hands of those who already possess wealth and influence, they will be used to elevate the comfort, health and wellbeing of our wealthiest and most privileged citizens. As the letter nears its end, the pope calls on us to remain faithful to the truth, to invest in education, to cultivate relationships, to live in justice and peace - to resist the way in which the new technologies can "exploit the most vulnerable, create new forms of slavery and derive profit from conflict". What becomes clear is that the pope is not condemning AI outright but rather the way it can be used as a tool of political repression and as a guarantee of worsening economic inequality. In theory, it's possible to criticize the encyclical for not going far enough, for not using another biblical metaphor - the golden calf - to stigmatize the use of AI because of how it prioritizes cost-saving over spiritual, individual and communal growth. But that ship has already sailed, and there's not much that Leo XIV - or any religious leader - can do to condemn the new advances as a 21st-century form of idolatry. Even so, the encyclical's vision of human nature, of the spirit of justice and empathy that needs to prevail, of the essential importance of the highest moral values - is ultimately so beneficent, so positive, so generous, so inarguably clear about our obligation to protect the weak and the poor that it's hard to find reasons to dismiss it. But that's the scary part. Apparently there's been a certain amount of blowback from Silicon Valley, where the inventors and masters of the latest technology have suggested that the pope doesn't know what he's talking about. Jeremy Nixon, a founder of AGI House, a group dedicated to proving that AI is essentially equal to the human brain, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the church hadn't "thought deeply about ... AI", adding: "They couldn't have a position on it, because they don't understand it." And there seems to be a widespread belief that the end product of the current research will be, in effect a new God, or at least a convincing simulacrum. Concerned about the perils of the future, our society is choosing to overlook the evidence that the downsides of AI are already upon us. A friend's daughter, a college student majoring in advertising, was recently informed by her adviser that by the time she graduates, all the jobs in advertising will have been taken by AI. If the masters of this new technology fail to agree with what the pope sees as its dangers and drawbacks, we are in very deep trouble indeed. The problem is not that we will have a robot writing Anna Karenina. The problem is that no one will see any possible need for a novel that so exquisitely portrays the sufferings of a woman, a singular human being. There would be no point in a book like that unless that account of a life-changing mistake could be monetized by a forward-thinking tech bro and used to finance the purchase of a bigger and better yacht, presumably serviced by a permanent underclass, by workers whose dignity - whose formerly valued and valuable jobs - have been pirated by the rapacious manifestations of artificial intelligence.

[31]

TechRadar

The Pope just warned AI could create 'new forms of dehumanization' -- and his message feels aimed straight at Big Tech

* Pope Leo warned AI could create "new forms of dehumanization" * The Vatican says "opaque algorithms" threaten humanity and social justice * The Pope called for global ethical standards around artificial intelligence The Catholic Church has entered the AI debate in dramatic fashion. In one of the strongest warnings about artificial intelligence yet from a global religious leader, Pope Leo cautioned that AI and "opaque algorithms" risk creating "new forms of dehumanization" if humanity loses control of the technology shaping modern life. The remarks by Pope Leo XIV form part of his new encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas. An encyclical is a formal document issued by the Vatican and traditionally used to address major moral or social issues. This latest document is focused entirely on AI, ethics, and the growing power of tech companies. While Silicon Valley continues racing to build increasingly powerful AI systems, the Pope's intervention suggests the battle over artificial intelligence is no longer just about innovation or productivity -- it is becoming a moral and philosophical fight over what it means to remain human. The new Tower of Babel Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence opens with a striking warning: "Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together." In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humans attempt to build a structure tall enough to reach the heavens, an act of pride that ultimately leads to division and confusion. Pope Leo XIV argues that modern AI development risks repeating that mistake if power and knowledge become concentrated in the hands of only a few companies and nations, widening the divide between those included in the digital revolution and those left behind. Above all, the Pope calls for shared ethical standards rooted in social justice, warning that "a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few". He also stresses that the environmental impact of AI cannot be ignored, pointing to the enormous amounts of energy and water required to power modern AI systems. A growing global AI backlash This latest intervention represents the Vatican's clearest and most direct challenge yet to the companies driving the AI boom. The Pope also took the unusual step of personally presenting the document during an event at the Vatican attended by politicians, academics and technology leaders. Among those present was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. The US-based AI firm that famously pulled out of a deal with the Pentagon and is now embroiled in a lawsuit with Donald Trump's administration over being branded a "supply chain risk". The timing is significant. Governments around the world are scrambling to regulate artificial intelligence while companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta continue pushing toward increasingly powerful AI systems. There is also a growing backlash against AI from the younger generation, especially when AI is mentioned in graduation speeches, fueled by AI's impact on their employment prospects. For years, most conversations about AI have focused on what the technology can do. Pope Leo's message arrives at a moment when the debate is increasingly centered on who gets to control it, the risks of that control remaining in the hands of a few tech companies, and what happens if humanity gives away too much of itself in the process. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

[32]

Axios

5 ways Pope Leo says AI could warp humanity

Why it matters: The long-awaited document, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), signals that the Vatican is aggressively positioning itself as a central moral authority in the global tech debate. Driving the news: The Vatican released Leo's first encyclical on Monday, which he signed at St. Peter's on May 15, 2026, in the second year of his pontificate. * It was signed exactly 135 years after Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, the landmark 1891 encyclical that became the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching during the Industrial Revolution. Zoom in: The pope's core message in his stark, 43,000-word warning is that AI can be useful, but it is not neutral. * He said AI systems carry the values of the people and institutions that design, finance, train and deploy them -- especially when they decide who gets a job, credit, public services or reputational standing. Leo gave the following warnings: What they're saying: "Pope Leo has announced himself as one of the leading figures in AI ethics now with this document," Meghan Sullivan, director of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, tells Axios. * Sullivan said Leo's AI encyclical 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, tells Axios that Leo's encyclical should be read less as a rejection of AI than as a call to shape the "AI era" around human dignity. * "The pope is calling for new guidelines for AI, and these new guidelines are rather to be developed from the bottom up rather than top down." What we're watching: Dan Rober, a Catholic Studies professor at Sacred Heart University, tells Axios the encyclical's biggest impact may be whether Leo's language starts shaping AI regulation debates.

[33]

Mashable

3 key takeaways from Pope Leo's 42,000-word AI encyclical

The highest seat in the Catholic Church issues its stance on AI. Credit: Marco Iacobucci Epp / Shutterstock Pope Leo XIV has issued his first official piece of religious guidance to billions of Catholics. And it's all about AI. It came in the form of a 42,300-word papal encyclical titled "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Magnificent Humanity"). Encyclicals aren't papal law, exactly, but act as authoritative guidance on social and moral issues for members of the Catholic Church. This one, the first since Leo was chosen, came with even more pomp and circumstance than usual, with the leader himself attending its presentation alongside Anthropic founder Chris Olah. Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Vote for your favorite creator today! The Pope has spoken previously about regulating AI, imploring industry leaders to more carefully consider the ethical implications of AI in their work. Last May, when explaining why he chose the name Leo, the pope specifically cited AI as one of his primary reasons. "There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour." The encyclical goes further, diving into AI's impact on jobs, education, and child safety in a message to leaders around the world. "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend," Olah said. "Today is just the beginning -- the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot." Here are the main takeaways from the Holy See: The Catholic Church is worried about AI taking over jobs, too. Tying "Magnifica Humanitas" to other labor-related encyclicals throughout the Church's history, Pope Leo calls the automation of jobs a threat to workers, citing widespread deskilling and greater labor surveillance with AI systems in place. "Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work. It is said that this will bring great improvements for everyone. In reality, however, the 'new ways' of working are not necessarily better." The leader warned that current AI hype is akin to a modern Tower of Babel, comparing the pursuit of advanced technology to the biblical story of a group of humans trying to reach heaven. He called on leaders to temper their ambition and recenter humanity. He also joined a growing number of child safety advocates and regulators who want to address screen time and its effect on children: "Psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic consequences." In addition, Leo called out AI's role in exacerbating misinformation and devaluing critical thinking, especially in schools, saying the technology has a dehumanizing force in the classroom. While simultaneously issuing the first formal condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade, Pope Leo called exploitative tech manufacturing processes and global AI training a "new form of slavery." "In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted...The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly," he said. "This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time." The Pope also connected the rise of artificial intelligence to ongoing global warfare, calling out private incentives and warning against entrusting AI systems with "lethal decisions." He called for placing "the most rigorous ethical constraints" on weapons developed using AI. "A subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices, therefore, cannot make a difference," the Pope wrote. "Certainly, not everyone has the same power to make a difference. Yet, no one is without responsibility. We all have our own areas for action."

[34]

Fortune

Two popes, two industrial revolutions -- and one warning for Big AI | Fortune

Since the first act of his papacy - choosing his name - the current pope has repeatedly invoked the earlier Leo's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. That document, which waded into the political and economic debates of the time, denounced the excesses of the Gilded Age and pointed toward a more just social order. Now, Leo XIV has used his first major statement to the world to present a new Rerum Novarum for the age of AI. Rerum Novarum was more than just a theological text. It helped reshape economic policy around the rights of workers, serving as a spiritual foundation for European social democracy and the 1930s New Deal programs that still undergird economic life for working Americans today. It also spurred a movement of entrepreneurs to transform the economic system from within. Understanding its influence is key to seeing the potential of Leo XIV's encyclical. From guilds to cooperatives in the industrial era In his time, Leo XIII rejected both unfettered capitalism and revolutionary socialism. He invoked the medieval guilds, in which craftspeople self-organized, and asserted the rights of industrial workers to organize as well. This was a radical statement at a time when unions often faced violent suppression from employers and police. But in contrast to communist agitators, he didn't want to do away with private property. He argued that to bring out the best in human beings, as creatures made in the image of God, governments should "induce as many as possible of the people to become owners." This was more of a vision than a detailed plan, but Catholics in many countries started trying to figure out what the vision meant in practice. The English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, for instance, tried to systematize his vision in a movement they called "distributism," which proposed policies for land redistribution and a revival of guilds. In the United States, economist and Catholic priest John A. Ryan argued in favor of cooperatives - businesses that could be co-owned by workers, consumers or small-business owners. Ryan went on to be an important adviser for the New Deal in the United States, which used cooperatives as a powerful tool for economic development through farmer co-ops, rural electric associations and the credit union system. The spirit of Rerum Novarum continued to spread. Starting in the 1950s, the largest network of worker cooperatives in the world, the Mondragon Corporation in Spain's Basque region, was founded by a Catholic priest. It was a direct result of Leo XIII's encyclical. My own career has been in its shadow. As a media scholar and a Roman Catholic - and an advocate for efforts to build cooperative tech platforms - I sometimes think of my own work as applying Rerum Novarum to the online economy. With Magnifica Humanitas, the pope appears to be making a similar argument for the age of artificial intelligence. A tale of 2 cities Once again, society is going through an economic upheaval: New technologies are changing the nature of work, political systems are under strain, and wealth inequality is staggering. In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV argues that an intervention akin to Rerum Novarum is needed. The guiding metaphor of Magnifica Humanitas is the choice between two biblical scenes: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under the prophet Nehemiah. The first is a story about the dream of a city that sets out to erect a single building as high as the heavens. Babel, as Leo XIV writes in the encyclical, is a city "built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency." In the biblical account, the project collapses as the world's common language is scattered into many diverse ones. The pope contrasts this with the story of the Hebrew prophet Nehemiah, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., when Jews were returning from exile to a ruined Jerusalem. Nehemiah organized the city's rebuilding through a collaborative process based on shared responsibility. While united in prayer, the city's various families and professions could each put their distinctive marks on their work. The current AI industry, he argues, is in danger of becoming a new Tower of Babel. Just a few companies control this powerful technology supposedly poised to transform work, politics and society for everyone. He warns that many AI leaders are enthused by ideologies that propose to trade human limits for the godlike powers of machines. Some are even cheerfully embracing a world where human labor is no longer central to the economy. Leo also fears that human choice is becoming more removed from the execution of war. In the face of all this, the encyclical calls on people everywhere to adopt "the pressing duty to remain profoundly human" - to be neither "spectators" nor "commentators" but to take an active role by participating in what he calls "the construction sites of history." Some already are. Construction sites for a different kind of AI It is easy to see the emerging AI industry in Babel-like terms - a few massive tech companies build the models and provide access to them on their terms. But other paths are still possible. My colleagues and I have been documenting cases that could be the germ of a different kind of AI industry - one more aligned with what the pope is calling for. Just as during the Industrial Revolution, a more just future begins with workers resisting against the abuses of the present. From Hollywood to Nairobi, workers have been fighting for dignity as AI changes their professions. Magnifica Humanitas stresses the importance of decent jobs to a healthy society, and workers' demands can help identify what the future of work should look like. Other approaches begin among AI developers themselves. In Switzerland, a collaboration between government and academia has produced Apertus, a foundational model based on fully documented designs and data sources - a far cry from the opaque and at times illegal practices of leading AI companies. Some of Apertus' developers have created a consumer cooperative, enabling users to co-own their interface with the model. Cooperative ownership like this allows users to tune AI experiences more intentionally toward their needs. The large U.S. farmer co-op Land O'Lakes, for example, has created AI-enabled tools that provide analysis and guidance for its members based on the data that they collectively co-own. The more nascent Transkribus in Europe is co-owned by research institutions that collectively train their AI software to transcribe texts for historical research. These kinds of systems follow Leo XIV's call to "manage data as a common or shared good." It is telling that even among leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the founders attempted to build unusual corporate governance structures to insulate their products from profit motives. Governments could encourage more appropriate ownership designs or outright require them for high-risk industries like AI. If Rerum Novarum is any guide, the impact of Magnifica Humanitas will depend on the creative entrepreneurship and policy experiments to put it into practice - and this work has already begun. Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

[35]

TIME

How Pope Leo's Encyclical Rejects Trump's AI Strategy

While the pope has no direct political power, his essay could nevertheless have political impact. "I think that what the pope is trying to tell us is that the spiritual has political dimensions," says Michael Toscano, a Catholic and the director of the Family First Technology Initiative. "I believe the pope is not interested in just issuing an encyclical, but leading the Church into a time of what he called 'digital sobriety.'" The main lens through which the Trump administration has approached AI is the so-called "arms race" with China. Last week, Trump delayed signing an executive order which called for pre-deployment testing of AI, explaining that he didn't "want to do anything that's going to get in the way of" the U.S. maintaining its technological lead over China in the race to build powerful AI systems. This viewpoint has been driven hard by top technologists; Politico reported that Trump pulled the EO after hearing concerns directly from the industry.

[36]

Futurism

The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech As the AI backlash continues to grow, critics of the tech have found an unlikely voice of support: the Catholic Church. In perhaps his strongest rebuke of the tech industry's rampant obsession with AI yet, Pope Leo called for the tech to be "disarmed" in his first encyclical, which is a special letter sent to bishops to outline the Catholic Church's perspective on a topic. "The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention," the Pope said in an accompanying statement. In his letter, titled "Magnifica Humanitas," or "Magnificent Humanity," the bishop of Rome did not beat around the bush. Despite being a "valuable tool," Pope Leo slammed AI as "merely" imitating "certain functions of human intelligence," contradicting tech leaders' claims that AI might be gaining sentience or consciousness. "So-called artificial intelligences 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," the document reads. The pope went as far as to warn of parallels between tech and slavery, warning of "new digital slaveries" that normalize the exploitation of those tasked with labeling data for AI models or moderating content on social media. "The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly," the letter reads. In his letter, the Pope also criticized the use of AI in war, writing that "no algorithm can make war morally acceptable." Therefore, Pope Leo called to "disarm" AI to prevent it from "dominating humanity," as well as "freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate." "AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage," the encyclical reads. "For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible." The Pope also drew attention to another highly contentious issue plaguing the AI industry, noting the "enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions" of data centers, while calling for "more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact." None of this should come as much of a surprise. The pontiff has a long track record of being skeptical of AI and related tech. Shortly after being anointed just over a year ago, he revealed that his name was in part inspired by asutomation as the last Pope Leo, Leo XIII, was the head of the Catholic Church during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, an era defined by rapid technological advancement, rampant labor exploitation, severe wealth inequality. "In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor," he said during his first speech as pope last year. He also recently warned priests to stop using ChatGPT to write their sermons. Pope Leo's AI skepticism hasn't exactly endeared him to tech leaders and politicians. Trump-nominated secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum accused the pope of "tech editorializing" during a Fox Business interview on Tuesday. President Donald Trump's relationship with the pope has been severely strained as of late. Earlier this month, Trump lashed out at the Chicago-born bishop, for speaking against the Israel-US war on Iran, erroneously accusing him of being okay with the country having nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Claude developer Anthropic has chosen to throw its weight behind the pontiff, with cofounder Chris Olah calling for a "collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot."

[37]

Decrypt

Pope Leo Releases First AI Encyclical, Calls Data a Common Good and Rejects Moral Neutrality of Tech - Decrypt

Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah spoke at the Vatican launch and warned that AI labor displacement at scale would become "a moral imperative of historic proportions" to address. Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday, a 245-paragraph document dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence that demands tighter oversight of Big Tech, classifies data as a shared human resource, and argues that "technology is never neutral" because it absorbs the values, blind spots, and economic incentives of whoever builds it. The document, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), was released at the Vatican's Synod Hall on May 25. Pope Leo signed it 10 days earlier, on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum -- the 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII on labor rights that became the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching. Pope Leo has consistently framed AI as the defining moral challenge of his papacy, and compared the coming social upheaval to that of the Industrial Revolution. The encyclical covers a lot of ground: AI in warfare, dehumanization, technocracy, data colonialism, child safety online, mass unemployment, disinformation, autonomous weapons, and even transhumanism. But the argument tying it together is simple. Every algorithm reflects the priorities of the people who designed, funded, and deployed it. Building systems that pretend otherwise doesn't eliminate that bias -- it just hides it. Data belongs to everyone. Including yours. Catholic social teaching has long held that the earth's natural resources are intended for all of humanity, not private owners. Leo extends that principle directly to the digital economy. Algorithms, platforms, and data, the encyclical argues, must be governed as common goods, not locked behind commercial walls by a few companies. "Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few," the pope writes. The text also applies subsidiarity -- the principle that decisions should be made at the most local level possible -- to tech platforms specifically. The encyclical doesn't just call for top-down regulation; advocating instead for transparent algorithms, independent community audits, and real legal power for people to challenge automated systems that affect their credit scores, job applications, or criminal risk assessments. Without that distributed oversight, Leo argues, governance of AI becomes a form of digital authoritarianism that silences the populations it claims to serve. The encyclical also takes aim at transhumanism -- the idea that human limitation and vulnerability are flaws to be engineered away. Leo's counter is that finitude is not a bug. It's what makes empathy, moral judgment, and genuine care for other people possible. Systems built to optimize it out don't produce a better human. They produce something that evaluates and excludes the vulnerable more efficiently. The pope is careful not to anthropomorphize the technology. AI systems, the encyclical states, "do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," he writes. The encyclical notes that AI systems lack the lived experience that produces real understanding. They can simulate empathy and produce convincing language, but they don't comprehend what they output. That distinction matters practically. When an algorithm makes hiring decisions, sets credit terms, or assigns a risk score in a courtroom, its apparent objectivity obscures the choices baked in by its designers. The encyclical warns specifically against delegating sensitive decisions to automated systems that "do not know compassion, mercy, forgiveness" and against treating the result as neutral just because a machine produced it. Anthropic was there The person sharing the stage with Leo on Monday drew as much attention as the document itself. Christopher Olah -- co-founder of Anthropic and head of its interpretability research team -- spoke at the Synod Hall presentation alongside two Vatican cardinals and a pair of theologians. As Decrypt reported when Leo was elected, the pope framed AI as the central moral question of his papacy from his very first address to the cardinals. Monday's encyclical is the formal doctrinal version of that commitment. Olah used the occasion to say openly what most AI executives avoid: that every major lab "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," and that outside scrutiny -- from governments, religious institutions, and civil society -- isn't optional. He also flagged AI-driven labor displacement as a near-term risk that, if it materializes at scale, would create "a moral imperative of historic proportions." Leo had already written the harder version of that argument. "A more moral AI is not enough," the encyclical states, if the morality behind it is set exclusively by whoever controls the data and the compute. Leo made the same case directly to Silicon Valley executives at the Vatican in November 2025. The Vatican also approved a new internal AI commission on May 16 drawing from seven departments to coordinate AI governance work across the Holy See going forward.

[38]

The Pope Is Now the World's Most Famous Humanist

Leo XIV's encyclical about artificial intelligence makes a strong argument in favor of human fallibility. Does the pope have an editor? If I could presume to take on this role for a second, then I might have one little note for Leo XIV after reading his new encyclical about artificial intelligence: Great stuff, but lose the Tower of Babel. It's a tired cliché. Most of us have already been told that those who would seek to be like God will see their ambitions crash to the ground. And in this instance, the lesson has a limited audience. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the tower builders should have an image of the tower tattooed on their chest. But the rest of us, who mostly suffer the fallout from those godlike men and their aspirations, are just trying to get through our days. Fortunately, Leo's encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (or "Magnificent Humanity"), is much more than a slap at Silicon Valley. The pope does two very useful things in his screed: He identifies the threat of AI as a form of dehumanization, and then he asserts, with passion and clear eyes, what is actually worth saving about being human. This second part of the argument is often left vague -- or left out -- when people talk about the threat of AI. Many people feel uncomfortable with a technology that seems to be squeezing some essential-feeling elements, like thinking, out of our lives, but then don't spend a lot of time trying to articulate what is being lost. The ideology of Silicon Valley is one of inevitability: History is moving, with Hegelian determinism, in one direction -- toward superintelligent machines -- and anyone who questions or worries about what this means is made to feel like they are waving their hands in the path of a freight train. I've had so many conversations with proselytizers that end with, Well, it's coming, so you better get used to it. What Leo does is push back against the inevitability. He chose to release his encyclical on the anniversary of a previous Pope Leo's treatise, in 1891, which looked at the ways industrialization was flattening human beings. The current pope clearly wants to draw connections among various forms of dehumanization, based on more than a century's worth of new evidence, AI being only the latest assailant. These analogies, comparing the crushing weight of factory work or the inhumanity of totalitarianism to Silicon Valley's handwork, might seem disheartening (and even a little overwrought to some). But Leo's point is that people have always found ways to resist. They have advocated for laws to protect workers, demanded human- and civil-rights laws, chosen not to surrender. He is arguing against passivity. "Most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best," the pope writes. But the stakes as he's describing them demand much more. He lists questions that "can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?" First, he suggests, we need to appreciate what it means to be human, to know what we're defending. I wondered if the pope would offer anything more than the simple Christian response that God's presence resides in all of us. This would seem to make the case a fairly straightforward one. If we are each reflections of an ultimate divine entity, then it seems obvious why we should care to preserve what is small and fallible and slow about us. In spite of those weaknesses, God is in us, and therefore we should not mess with something that has that spark. We should protect our fallibility because it is part of an infallible order. Read: The coming humanist renaissance This is an element of Leo's argument, of course -- he is, after all, head of the Catholic Church -- but he also makes clear that humanity, as he describes it, should be exalted because of its "woundedness" just as much as its "grandeur." Our limitations are the key to understanding what makes humans special. "We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them," he writes. You don't even need to believe in God to appreciate that our uniqueness derives from the friction produced by our "vulnerability, suffering and failure." To smooth out this roughness would be to get rid of what is most essential about us. Along those lines, this is maybe my favorite passage from the encyclical: I am not a Christian, and really not much of a believer at all, but this articulates so well what I feel AI is taking from us. What makes a human life valuable is struggle. The things we achieve, the love, the give-and-take of families and communities -- all of it involves effort. What AI is offering to do is remove struggle and effort. You could argue, and many do, that it will help improve our quality of life in many realms -- if it finds new lifesaving drugs more quickly, for example. But the pope's point is that no more than a small handful of people have control over how and where to apply AI. And they are letting the value of efficiency trump everything else. Dehumanization is what follows. And the only way to resist it is by exalting in our limitations, in our struggles, as a good thing. I will always prefer reading a novel written by a human precisely because I know the limitations placed on a human brain. The opportunity to commune with such a brain, one that has pushed against those boundaries to create Middlemarch, is a thousand times more fulfilling than reading what a purportedly boundless machine has produced. The same could be said for any number of other areas of life -- dating, traveling, working -- in which the friction is what produces meaning. "For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected," Leo writes; "for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change." Read: Pope Leo's unsettling vision of the future Does it take a pope to say this? Of course not. But it matters that he did. People think of him as a moral counterweight to the political leaders who are full of promises yet short on guidance. What I took from Leo's words though had nothing to do with good and evil or the state of my soul or Christ's example. I thought about the pursuit of beauty, which is the closest I have to a faith. What I value most about being human is the infinite ways we have to make meaning for ourselves. This might be the culture we create or the cities we build or the stories we tell our children at night. All of it results from confronting our human condition with what we have at hand. If that goes away, if instead the machines, which have never had to put any effort into anything, are the ones developing our world, what will happen to beauty? (The pope, notably, couldn't resist naming some earthly art that was meaningful to him: "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler's List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion.") In addition to the Tower of Babel, Leo cites another biblical touchstone in his encyclical. As his editor, I would keep this one. It's from the Book of Nehemiah. In it, the prophet decides to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, which was destroyed by the Babylonians. The pope calls out the fact that the rebuilding was a group effort, a human effort. I read the episode, and it's essentially an exhaustive list of the artisans and famous local families and priests who all lend a hand. There is no magic, no divine involvement, really -- just lots of people sweating together and moving stones. How satisfying it must have been to complete the task, to know they did it themselves. "So we built the wall," Nehemiah writes. "For the people had a mind to work."

[39]

Video: Pope Leo Warns of A.I. Risks in His First Papal Encyclical

Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," in which he outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age when technology threatens to replace people in many professional and social roles. "Artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of of domination, exclusion and death. Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all, and of the common good. Decisions about technology must never be separated from conscience and responsibility. Let's not fear artificial intelligence, but constantly keep the question of the human in play. We cannot be careless with our most powerful technical instruments." "I am grateful to His Holiness and to the church for taking up this work of discernment. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend. Today is just the beginning -- the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot." "Amen. Thank you very much."

[40]

'AI needs to be disarmed': Pope Leo sees threat to humanity in technological arms race

In the first landmark publication of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV has addressed recent advances in artificial intelligence by focusing on the threat it poses to workers, social justice and "the dignity of persons". Presenting his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Maginficent Humanity"), at the Vatican on May 25, Leo declared: "artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed." In the document - comprising around 42,300 words in its English translation - the pope writes: "To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity." Encyclicals are exceptionally important papal documents that respond to the most pressing social issues of the time. Typically written as letters to all bishops and archbishops, they have become a crucial vehicle for disseminating the theology and political commitments of the Roman Catholic Church across the world. Leo chose to sign his first encyclical on May 15 2026, the exact anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's "Rerum novarum" ("Of new things"). This famous encyclical, which responded to the technological advances of the industrial revolution, became the foundational document of all modern Catholic social teaching. Indeed, the current pope probably chose the name Leo because of Leo XIII's renowned commitment to social justice. Just as "Rerum novarum" responded to the industrial revolution by emphasising workers' rights and the dignity of human labour, so too Leo XIV has responded to the explosion of AI technology by emphasising the importance of human over machine intelligence. In 1891, Leo XIII wrote: "Wage-earners ... should be specially cared for and protected by the government." Leo XIV now makes similar appeals to world governments about AI: "It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power." The Pope follows a long tradition of Catholic engagement with new tech - from concerns about the impact of the printing press in the 15th century to the rise of the internet over 500 years later. Leo XIV's presentation was preceded by a short film which juxtaposed images of previous popes with major technological innovations. Radio towers gave way to images of early broadband centres; early computers to a sea of people holding up their smartphones in St Peter's Square in Vatican City. Perhaps the crucial theme of this video was the connection between technology and war. Pictures of second world war aircraft were intercut with the dropping of the atomic bomb, soon followed by images of the 9/11 attacks. In the encyclical, Leo warns: "The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more 'feasible' and less subject to human control." Call for disarmament Leo XIV isn't the first pope to address the potential threat posed by AI technology. In January 2025, his predecessor Francis signed off the doctrinal note "Antiqua et nova" ("Ancient and new") - which called for AI technology "to include the least of our brothers and sisters, the vulnerable and those most in need". Leo's new call for the disarmament of AI is not a demand to discontinue its development, but to regulate AI robustly so it only serves the common good. In this, the pope drew an analogy with the nuclear disarmament movement, suggesting that both nuclear and AI technologies should only be developed for the good of humanity, and never used as weapons. Those invited to offer their thoughts on Leo's encyclical included Christopher Olah, the Canadian billionaire and co-founder of AI firm Anthropic. The appearance of Olah marks the first time a speaker entirely outside clerical or theological circles has been included in such a presentation. Anthropic is currently locked in a legal dispute with the US government regarding the military application of its AI systems. Leo's encyclical underlines his concerns about the escalation of war around the world, stating: "it is important to reaffirm that the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated." Olah echoed Leo's demands for greater social justice around the use of AI, stating: "His Holiness's call for disarmament is profoundly timely." He called for people working outside computer science to contribute to AI governance and ethics - people "beyond the incentives" of financial markets "who can see what we, from the inside, cannot." Leo answered Olah by saying: "In the name of the Church, I accept your invitation to walk together, to listen and to speak, and together to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence."

[41]

NBC

Tech titans mostly silent after Pope Leo's warning about risks of AI

Pope Leo XIV on April 17 in Douala, Cameroon.Simone Risoluti / Vatican Pool / Getty Images Pope Leo XIV's sweeping warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence drew a largely muted response across the American technology world, though a handful of leaders quickly embraced the Vatican's push for stronger government oversight while others blasted it as a threat to innovation. In a roughly 42,300-word encyclical published Monday, Leo called for more regulation of the private companies powering the AI boom, stronger protections for workers facing economic disruption, and measures to protect people from fake AI-generated information. He also criticized "the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed." "Humanity -- in all its grandeur and woundedness -- must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love," the pontiff wrote in "Magnifica Humanitas," or Magnificent Humanity. Silicon Valley's most high-profile AI executives -- including Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg -- did not immediately express public opinions on Leo's encyclical, his first since he was elected head of the Catholic Church. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. Notably, Anthropic's top executives have for years advocated for more robust guardrails on the technology, and at least one of the company's key figures hailed Leo's message. Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the firm, appeared alongside Leo during the presentation of the encyclical and gave remarks welcoming "moral voices" attempting to guide his industry. "We need more of the world -- religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will -- to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction," Olah said, according to a transcript of his remarks published online. "We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing." Yoshua Bengio, a professor and leading AI researcher who is frequently described as one of the "godfathers" of the technology, expressed support for a major theme of Leo's proclamation: the importance of AI serving all people and "the common good." "I agree with this sentiment by @Pontifex," Bengio posted on X, using the pontiff's account name. "The Vatican and other global institutions can and must play a role in the global dialogue on AI to raise public awareness and mobilize society for the challenges ahead." Will Jones, the head of faith outreach efforts at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on avoiding extreme risks from transformative technologies, said Leo's message "exemplifies the moral leadership so needed in an age when a handful of technology corporations race to replace humans in work, relationships and decision-making." "Magnifica Humanitas can serve as a rallying cry for the world to reassert unashamedly the primacy of humanity, in all its flawed glory, over our tools," Jones said in a statement Monday. Leo's warning about powerful technological tools becoming concentrated "in the hands of a few" appeared to find a receptive audience in Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who responded to an excerpt of the pope's missive with a one-word post: "yes." Vice President JD Vance, a practicing Catholic who once worked at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Mithril Capital, told NBC News in a phone interview Tuesday that he had scanned "bits and pieces" and summaries of the pope's message. "What I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church," Vance said in part. But not all technology industry figureheads agreed with Leo's policy prescriptions. David Sacks, a prolific venture capitalist and the White House's former AI and crypto czar, pushed back on the Vatican's appeal for more aggressive government regulation of private firms, which have largely avoided stringent rules under the second Trump administration. "The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion. But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens -- as Orwell foretold in 1984," Sacks wrote on X, referring to George Orwell's allegorical novel. "Who will guard the guardians?" Sacks added in Latin and English. Eddy Lazzarin, a general partner at the influential venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, found the encyclical "light on the theology of artificial intelligence, and thick in reiterating Catholic social doctrine." "The encyclical feels defensive," Lazzarin wrote on X. "It protects human dignity by saying intelligence was never the point, without really explaining what that means -- or explaining what it means for us when intelligence is no longer uniquely human." Pedro Domingos, a leading AI researcher and an emeritus computer science professor at the University of Washington, reacted with a pointed quip on X: "The Pope is infallible, and on AI he's infallibly wrong." In a subsequent email to NBC News, Domingos said he believed the pope's message was premised on "a series of ignorant and wrong-headed things about AI." Leo, for example, cautioned that "AI will concentrate power," Domingos said, "when in fact it will spread it more widely than ever, just like the Internet before it." The Vatican's attempt to sound the alarm on AI comes as the rapidly evolving technology faces mounting resistance across the U.S. In a national NBC News survey released in March, a majority of voters -- 57% -- said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite; a plurality of voters viewed AI negatively.

[42]

France 24

Vance hails Pope Leo's AI encyclical as 'profound'

Washington (United States) (AFP) - US Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday praised Pope Leo XIV's manifesto warning of the risks of artificial intelligence, calling it "profound" and a necessary act of moral leadership in a disruptive AI age. Vance has close ties to the tech industry, having worked as a venture capitalist before entering politics, and counts Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk among his most prominent backers. In an encyclical called "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), the first US pope, who has clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict, set out on Monday a list of warnings about how the technology could impact humanity. Among other dangers he said AI could lead to "new forms of slavery." "What I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church," Vance told NBC News in an interview. "The thing about morality is that the principles never change, but the way you apply those principles does, because the world changes, right?" Vance added. Vance and the Vatican have clashed over migration policy, with Pope Leo condemning the White House's policy on mass deportations. The vice president, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said he was happy that the pontiff, who is from Chicago, took the name Leo XIV when he took leadership of the Holy See last year. "I think it was very much a nod to Leo XIII who, of course, became pope at the beginning of the Industrial Age" and similarly wrote a warning about the impact on humanity from major technological changes at the time. Leo XIV "is becoming pope at the beginning of the AI age, and I suspect that if we make it through this successfully, it will be in large part because the pope and the church are able to provide the kind of moral leadership that we need," Vance added. "I think we really need moral leadership to think through those questions, and that's exactly what the church is the best leader to do," Vance said.

[43]

Euronews

Pope Leo vs AI: Tech arms race endangers humanity, Pontiff says

Pope Leo XIV has disseminated a major manifesto warning of the societal ills posed by the emerging technology - particularly on the battlefield and how it is related to "slavery". The document, dated May 15, was published 145-years after a former Pope Leo wrote his own warning of the advent of the 19th century industrial revolution. Pope Leo XIV used his encyclical - a document communicating the position of the Catholic Church to its 1.4 billion followers - to denounce the "culture of power" driving the AI race, especially in developing ever more sophisticated methods of remote warfare. So is there anyway way to salve the biggest technological advancement of the 21st century? Our correspondent Angela Skujins explains.

[44]

PC Gamer

'Technology is never neutral': Pope Leo XIV criticises 'culture of power' driving AI race, and refuses to be taken in by consciousness claims

As an atheist, you won't see me at Mass, but I'll gladly welcome the Pope as another AI-sceptic ally. Pope Leo XIV has just issued his first encyclical letter since being elected in 2025, calling for a 'safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence'. Titled 'Magnifica Humanitas' ('magnificent humanity' in Latin), the letter calls for the AI industry to slow down and break fewer things, repeatedly denouncing the "culture of power" driving deregulation efforts. "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it," the Pope writes. Through this open letter, the Pope once again calls for greater AI regulation and further urges the industry to work towards the common good rather than the "idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak." This is far from the first time the Pope has criticised AI technologies for threatening people's livelihoods; back in January, Leo XIV said that AI-generated slop risks dismantling human creative industries and "turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love." Furthermore, the Pope chose his papal name as a callback to a predecessor who led the church during the Industrial Revolution, drawing a parallel to recent developments in the field of AI. On top of that, Leo XIV signed this first encyclical on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, itself an open letter calling for better conditions for workers (via Vatican News). Magnifica Humanitas also levels specific criticism at the use of AI technology in remote warfare. Pope Leo XIV writes, "While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians, it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to 'collateral damage.'" On AI morality and 'alignment', the pope writes, "[Without greater oversight] those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." It's worth noting that the open letter also shares thoughts on the subject of AI 'consciousness'. The pope warns that, just because an LLM can produce intelligible text that looks a lot like something a human could write, we must not mistake this imitation for wisdom. "So-called artificial intelligences 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," he writes. "Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences." He continues, "They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom." Though I'm sure our philosopher-in-residence Jacob would have thoughts to share on the Pope's experiential definition of consciousness, it's worth comparing and contrasting the leader of the Catholic church's refusal to be taken in by AI's hallucination of consciousness to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' insistence that Claude 'bloody well' is conscious. Our Jacob criticised Dawkins' argument for its lack of philosophical rigour, and did not mince words in his response: "You're wrong, Dawkins: AI bots bloody well are not conscious."

[45]

CBS

Pope Leo calls for "disarming" of AI in technology-focused encyclical

Rome -- Pope Leo XIV issued a major document Monday focused largely on the implications of the rise of artificial intelligence for humanity, warning the technology could make civilization itself "less human." Pope Leo, who has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration over the Iran war and some U.S. officials' religious justification for it, also appeared to dismiss the argument that the conflict was a necessary preemptive measure for American safety. "Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated," he wrote in his Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), an 82-page teaching known as an encyclical. Francis also issued a first-ever apology for the Vatican's role in facilitating and justifying the transatlantic slave trade, calling it "a wound in Christian memory." "For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon," he wrote. But the vast majority of the encyclical was devoted to what Leo clearly sees as humanity's risk-laden embrace of AI. When the world's first U.S.-born pope chose his name last year, Leo deliberately invoked the last pope to bear it: Pope Leo XIII, whose landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum helped guide the Catholic Church through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. More than a century later, the Chicago native attempted something similarly ambitious for the AI Revolution. In the Magnifica Humanitas, the leader of the world's roughly 1.4 billion Catholics warned that artificial intelligence risked making civilization "less human," hollowing out work, concentrating wealth and reducing people to systems driven by data and efficiency rather than dignity and morality. "The pressing duty," Leo wrote, is "to remain profoundly human." Leo called for the "disarming" of AI, warning that the technology could fuel "a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance." The document marks the first major papal encyclical written in the era of generative artificial intelligence, and it frames the current technological revolution not merely as an economic challenge, but as what the pope calls an "anthropological" one -- a crisis touching the meaning and purpose of humanity. "Please note that the encyclical is not about AI," Cardinal Michael Czerny, one of the Vatican officials who helped present the document, told CBS News. "It's about the human condition during the time of AI." In unusually direct language for a Vatican document, Leo -- who holds a degree in mathematics -- warned of the growing power of IT companies, with influence that can rival that of governments. At the same time, the pope stressed that technology itself is not inherently evil. "Artificial intelligence is a great human achievement," Cardinal Czerny said. "We have a lot to admire and a lot to be thankful for ... But we can't renounce responsibility." The Vatican's concerns extend well beyond Silicon Valley. The encyclical repeatedly echoes broad societal concerns that AI could ⁠hollow out the middle class; ⁠eliminate vast numbers of jobs; ⁠deepen inequality; fuel social fragmentation; and normalize AI-driven warfare. "There exists no algorithm capable of making war morally acceptable," the encyclical states. That warning arrives as militaries around the world rapidly integrate AI into weapons systems. CBS News recently observed U.S. forces conducting exercises in Morocco and saw first-hand the growing use of AI-assisted targeting systems and autonomous technologies, including systems linked to Maven, the Pentagon's AI platform. One of the more striking aspects of the Vatican's rollout of Leo's encyclical was the inclusion of Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, who was there in person alongside senior church officials on Monday. Olah said AI companies work "inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," and he welcomed input from outside, including from the Catholic Church, to "push events in a better direction." "The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community," he said. Leo said he had accepted an invitation from Olah, "to walk together, to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity," and he was confident that, "together, we can discern the major questions of our time, and so, the future of humanity." While Anthropic has often presented itself as a safety-conscious, "human-first" AI company, the Trump administration recently listed it as a supply-chain risk over its refusal to let the Pentagon use its technology in automated lethal systems or mass domestic surveillance. Its models remain integrated in military and intelligence applications, however, as CBS News has witnessed. When asked whether Anthropic's reputation as a human-centered AI company had influenced the Vatican's decision to engage with it, Czerny replied: "I'm sure it did." He stressed, however, that dialogue with AI companies should not be mistaken for Vatican endorsement. "We dialogue with anyone," Czerny said. "We don't endorse." The encyclical repeatedly returns to the idea that the dangers posed by AI are not simply technological, but spiritual and existential paralysis. "We're overwhelmed," the cardinal told CBS News. "We feel like we actually have nothing to say ... and this paralyzes us." Asked whether the pope worried that people were beginning to treat AI as a substitute for God, Czerny answered: "Yes ... many things become substitutes for God and we call them idols." Just as the Industrial Revolution transformed labor and capital, the AI revolution is transforming humanity itself, the pope cautioned in his remarks.

[46]

Vox

The pope takes on AI

Christian Paz is a correspondent at Vox, where he covers the Democratic Party. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic's politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election. Monday morning, the Roman Catholic Church made its biggest foray yet into the discourse on artificial intelligence and the role it should play in human life as the technology develops. In the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas (Latin for "magnificent humanity"), Pope Leo XIV argued that AI is not intrinsically immoral, but that its adoption needed to be slowed in order to build moral guardrails, to establish better social safety nets for those displaced by economic and labor disruptions, and to create democratic processes that will ensure the public remains in control of these developments, rather than a small subset of tech oligarchs. The document also contended that the "intelligence" in artificial intelligence was a misnomer: Intelligence is something only human persons possess, and technology will never be human. Encyclicals are official teaching documents of the Catholic Church: letters issued by popes to bishops after consultation with theologians, historians, and experts on pressing matters that affect humanity or the church, with the expectation that all people, faithful or secular, can learn from them and help shape their consciences and lives. Magnifica humanitas is Leo's first encyclical since becoming pope last year, and its release now underscores the focus the new pope is putting on AI and technology. Notably, Leo also used the occasion to make a historic formal apology for the Church's previous defense and justification of slavery -- a reminder that the Catholic Church has not always been on the right side of social ills. Though popes are traditionally not present during the release of these documents, which first began in the 18th century, Leo XIV was in attendance at its presentation, and delivered his own comments -- something Vatican observers indicated reflected his desire to make sure the Church's stance was properly understood. The Chicago-born pontiff spoke in English and was joined by AI experts and industry leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who consulted on the document. So how should the public process and think about this new document? It's helpful to first understand the context in which the Church is speaking up about this at all. Magnifica humanitas is dropping more than a week after Pope Leo XIV actually signed it on May 15. The timing matters. That day marked 135 years since the release of Rerum Novarum, the seminal work of Pope Leo XIII, the current pope's namesake, who was leading the church during the late stages of the Industrial Revolution. As they are today, the faithful, and the clergy, were facing a rapidly changing world. And the Church, the world's leading moral authority at the time, had yet to establish its place in it. That 19th-century document made philosophical arguments about the relationship between labor and capital, warning about the perils of communism. But it also redefined the church's relationship to the modern world, with the papacy reasserting itself as both a source of power and a moral authority in an era of rapid change. The encyclical set a template for how a 2,000-year-old institution could still remain relevant in a modern age. In presenting this encyclical, Pope Leo XIV made this parallel clear. He sees the rise of artificial intelligence as the defining global challenge of the day, and of his pontificate: "Like the earlier Leo, I feel entrusted to look upon another huge transformation with eyes of faith, with lucidity of reason, with openness to mystery and with cries of the poor and the earth resounding in my heart," the pope said while presenting his encyclical. The newer encyclical builds off his predecessor's tradition, and the various arguments popes have made about the importance of preserving the dignity of the human person and valuing modern technology only so long as it benefits everyone, not just its creators or the rich. In 2015, Pope Francis, for example, wrote about "the technocratic paradigm" that has taken root in modern capitalism: the sense that technological progress is unstoppable, that it will demand unlimited concessions from nature and from people, and that the world had no choice but to submit to change. "Leo is concerned that we don't just submit to inevitability on questions of AI, but ask critical questions and push back in ways that are necessary before it's too late to push back, before damage is done that can't easily be undone," Dan Rober, an associate professor of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told me. That role of questioning, pausing, and coming to consensus has defined the Catholic Church's leadership and operation for the last two papacies: the notion of synodality, or teaching and making decisions based on consensus. Before AI and the technologists who have created it become the sole determinants of how politics, the economy, and society operates, the Church is asserting itself as a counterweight -- even as it includes some of those leaders in the process. "Pope Leo is trying to clearly walk in those footsteps, and I think he's very concerned, as are a lot of people, about the possible implications, particularly for job markets and for people's lifestyles being sustainable day to day with the rise of AI systems that may render a certain significant amount of jobs able to be automated very rapidly," Rober said. This kind of reflection has become standard procedure for the Vatican. Since at least the turn of the century, the Church has found itself increasingly weighing in on the crises of the day, albeit often a bit too late. As the Catholic writer Christopher Hale has noted, "Francis took up the climate fight with Laudato Si in 2015, after decades of scientific consensus had been ignored. Benedict XVI took up the global economic order with Caritas in Veritate in 2009, after the financial system had already collapsed. Both documents arrived in the long shadow of the crises they addressed." In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV may be seeking to intervene early in the development or takeover of a new technology this time, and show that the Church wants to both work with Silicon Valley and assert itself as a powerful defender of modern values, as it has done in its defense of the liberal international order and aspects of humanism, like human autonomy and reason. In the background, there's also a more sci-fi element: the notion that AI could end up coming between the Church and the people -- serving as a filter or layer between regular people and God, and perhaps even usurping the role of the Church itself. The Catholic Church, famously, is concerned with the proper interpretation of scripture, Biblical truths, ethics, and God. Bloody wars waged and hard-fought reformations turned on this central question of who and how one can commune with God. Now, AI enters as another middleman. "That's closely related to the question of people using AI as a therapist," Rober told me. "You could see a way in which AI becomes its own kind of religion, and certainly the way a lot of the Silicon Valley founders talk about it, it does have religious overtones to it. You listen to the Google founders talk about the singularity, and that sounds a lot like religion." It's in this context that this document, and its specific teachings, lands. Magnifica Humanitas is not the Vatican's first examination of the role of AI in modern life. Just last year, in the twilight of Pope Francis's pontificate, the Vatican released a teaching note, Antiqua et nova, that laid the groundwork for Leo's encyclical. That 2025 document established that the Church is not opposed to the development of AI: technological progress and scientific discoveries are part of the natural way that humans are meant to honor God, his creation of humanity in his image, and the natural outpouring of God's gift of reason and rationality. But it also established a distinction between human intelligence and machines that analyze data and perform processes. It insisted that artificial intelligence, like all technology, should serve humanity, not the other way around. And it emphasized the risk that new technology poses to the ability to, right to, and dignity of work, especially for the least well off in society. In the encyclical, Leo uses the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel -- a warning about human hubris -- to make this case: "We must, then, avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak," he writes. "The risk of dehumanization -- of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means -- is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise." This builds off of a long tradition of focusing on not just the dignity of work and workers, but also more recent concerns that modern capitalism facilitates a "throwaway culture" that views people and things as, at best, cogs in the service of a greater machine. "He wants to talk about the idea that our humanity is meaningful in and of itself and that work is part of that, even if AI systems are able to allow for more leisure and even if something like universal basic income were to be made available, people need to find to have work of some kind to have meaning in their lives," Rober said. The encyclical's teachings can be broken up into three broad categories: regulations on how AI is developed and how individuals adopt it, the responses required to handle the economic effects of AI, and limits on AI's usage in war. The practical recommendations and concerns Leo outlines include: From an eagle-eye view, the document is fairly wonky and detailed: concerned with very practical matters and specific recommendations that could have come from academia, or a secular background -- underscoring just how much Leo may hope it can provide guidance for leaders and individuals, as opposed to remaining siloed to the intellectual class. So as this technology continues to develop, the pope and the church want to help shape it. They want the faithful to be reminded that whatever AI offers is not reality, not personhood, and not God. It is a tool that should not dominate or determine the lives of its users. And it should not replace the role of the Church in teaching morality and ethics. For the greater secular world, the Church wants to remind the public that they should have a say in how AI shapes their world; they should not allow business and tech leaders to define the terms of existence through their machines; and that they have a powerful ally in the Roman Catholic Church in the effort to preserve human dignity in the face of unprecedented technological change.

[47]

The Guardian

The Guardian view on the Pope and Claude: Leo XIV's encyclical on AI is right to put humanity first | Editorial

In calling for regulation of the digital revolution, and foregrounding human dignity, the pontiff has contributed to a crucial ethical debate When the present pope adopted his regnal name, he explained the choice by reference to a 19th-century predecessor who used the papacy to address the great social question of his time. In the 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), Pope Leo XIII analysed the social forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and outlined principles for a just settlement between the forces of capital and labour. Leo XIV hopes to do something similar in relation to the accelerating digital upheaval of our own age. As anxiety grows over big tech's impact on how we work and live, such ambition should be applauded. The early fruits of the pope's work were presented in the Vatican on Monday after the publication of his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). In 42,000 or so words the document itemises the daunting challenges posed by developments in artificial intelligence, and urges political leaders to safeguard human dignity as new technologies emerge at a pace which is outstripping ethical regulation and control. At its core is a salutary emphasis on the unique value and status of human beings. The pope underlines the importance of defending their interests against the threat of a dystopia in which the social role of large swathes of the population is usurped by machines. This is a moral starting point that can inform debate in areas from the provision of care to the ethics of autonomous warfare. As one speaker at the document's launch noted, human flourishing and freedom will be gravely compromised should individuals be reduced to the status of "user tools of an algorithmic order". Such observations are particularly timely, given Donald Trump's decision last week to postpone an executive order that would have mandated safety reviews of new AI models. As a technological arms race unfolds, the reckless hubris, profit-seeking and lack of accountability of figures such as Elon Musk represent a threat to the common good. As Magnifica Humanitas argues, state regulation is needed to ensure that the extraordinary innovations and benefits that AI can deliver are used for the good of all. Remarkably, the presentation of Pope Leo's encyclical included an address by Christopher Olah, the atheist co-founder of Anthropic. Excoriated by Mr Trump after it refused to endorse the use of some of its tools for warfare and mass surveillance, Anthropic appears to be positioning itself as the ethically respectable face of AI. Mr Olah's presence led to some charges of "popewashing", but the Vatican presumably sees such collaboration as symbolising a necessary moral dialogue. That seems a sensible approach, despite Anthropic's distinctly un-Catholic claims for the potentially soulful qualities of its large language models known as Claude. The extraordinary spectacle of a papal encyclical co-presented with a world-leading machine learning researcher illustrates the uncharted nature of the territory we are in. The pope's intervention is, naturally, informed by a theological perspective. But a humanity first message is one that the secular world can get behind. As Leo puts it: "Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible." Magnifica Humanitas is an important contribution to a crucial debate.

[48]

diginomica

AI and the pontificating Pontiff (1/2) - what humanity - and our political and techno masters - must learn about morality

Pope Leo XIV - the American Pope - staged a dramatic, if lengthy and at times dense, intervention in the debate around AI ethics and morality yesterday with the publication of Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), a 42,000 words encyclical to Catholic bishops that also took some hefty pot shots at Silicon Valley and will have rattled some doors in Washington with its criticism of many Trump 2.0 policies. We'll come back to the tech sector and political reaction to the publication in a second article, but first, what does the Pope actually have to say. As noted, at times the document makes for some heavy reading, including as it does many religious precedents and exemplars. In fact it begins, rather unpromisingly, with a clichéd allusion to the Tower of Babel, "where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately de-humanizes", this to raise the important question of, "What are we building?'. The Pope writes: The danger of humanity becoming a victim of its own achievements was already clearly recognized by Saint Paul VI, who warned that 'the most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man'. For this reason, technological progress -- valuable in itself -- requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: 'having more' without 'being more'. While the technocrats are hell bent on the pursuit of the Artificial General Intelligence Holy Grail, the Pope warns of the dangers of pursuing AI that is seen to on a par with or superior to a human being: These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences 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, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. A "measured and vigilant approach" to AI is needed, one that is based in human intelligence and morality, and which also calls for regulation - and here Leo heads into his first clash with Trump 2.0 and Silicon Valley. As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reminded us in Davos earlier this year, tech companies do not like regulation - and at the moment they have an administration in Washington that agrees with that. That's not going to work, insists Magnifica Humanitas: We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines -- the so-called 'alignment' of AI with human values -- without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions. And control of that regulatory regime needs to be wrested out of the hands of a privileged few, urges the Pope: It is essential that the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight, grounded in participation and subsidiarity. Communities and intermediary organizations must not be reduced to passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere; they must be able to contribute to discernment and oversight. Moreover, ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. Who's going to break that one to Palantir? Or the governments around the world happily signing up to hand over their citizens private lives to a US tech data baron? The Pope is also concerned about the very secular challenge that AI poses to the established jobs market around the world, noting that the Catholic Church regards unemployment as a grave evil: It is certainly desirable for technology to relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity. Yet, the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule. The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good. The competitive nature of the AI arms race also concerns the Pope and in another rallying cry that will rattle the cages in Silicon Valley and Washington, he calls for a conscious stepping back from the free market forces that prevail today: To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence. Unless transformations at the design stage prioritize the prevention of new and further disparities, technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities. Today, justice requires access to the benefits of innovation, including care, knowledge, tools and opportunities. More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the "invisible hand" of the market. Politics has the task of orientating economies and technologies to the common good, promoting dignified work, social inclusion and an equitable distribution of the benefits of innovation. Again it's easy to see that in the MAGA era, that's not a message that's going to sit well with those in power. The Pope goes further, calling for active 'AI dis-armament'. He explains: Dis-arming AI means freeing it from the mentality of "armed" competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geo-political or commercial dominance. To dis-arm means dis-crediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To dis-arm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. And there's a rather more literal call to dis-arm when it comes to the Pope's condemnation of the use of AI on the battlefield, the sort of stance that has led Trump 2.0 to declare US AI success story Anthropic an enemy of the state overnight for laying down its own ethical red lines about when its tech may not be used: When a decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility increases. For this reason, the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorize and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions...While AI tends to expedite the decision-making processes, speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motivating force for the irreversible decisions made in the context of war. He goes on: Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict. Target selection and the use of force must not confuse combatants and non-combatants, nor ignore the impact on defenseless populations. And that results in an uncomfortable message to all military forces around the world: These criteria give rise to certain non-negotiable requirements. First, all systems used in a war setting must guarantee the possibility of retracing and reconstructing decision-making processes, so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into "the machine." Second, the decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, but must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control. Finally, it is imperative to establish a shared framework -- also at the international level -- in order to curb the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians and the infrastructures necessary for their survival.

[49]

Fast Company

'Now I'll have to baptize myself Catholic': Social media reacts to Pope Leo's surprisingly poignant warning about AI

Given its profound implications on the workforce, the environment, and humankind as a whole, it's no surprise that almost everyone has an opinion on artificial intelligence these days, including the pope. Less than a year after his election, Pope Leo XIV just released his first encyclical, a pastoral letter aimed to offer guidance. Titled Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, the 42,300-word letter offers a glimpse into the pope's stance on AI, highlighting various concerns over the dangers of technology, and a need for safeguards to be put in place. "Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress," Pope Leo wrote. "Instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family."

[50]

SiliconANGLE

Pope Leo XIV highlights AI risks in first encyclical - SiliconANGLE

Pope Leo XIV today issued an encyclical that contains an extensive discussion of artificial intelligence and its risks. The approximately 43,000-word document is entitled "Magnifica Humanitas", which is Latin for "Magnificent Humanity." One of its five core chapters is dedicated entirely to technology's impact on humanity. The lengthy section places particular emphasis on AI. Leo XIV opens the chapter with a brief technical overview of AI that draws attention to researchers' limited understanding of the technology. Model developers, the Pope writes, have not yet fully mapped out the internal representations and calculations that neural networks use to make decisions. "There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment," states the encyclical. The document continues with a discussion of AI's risks. Leo XIV dedicates an entire subsection to AI-powered autonomous weapons. The encyclical states that both the development of such weapons and their use "must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints." The document also covers a range of other AI-related risks. It draws attention to the "enormous amounts of energy and water" required by large language models, as well as the associated carbon emissions. Another section highlights the potential negative impact of such algorithms on interpersonal relationships. "The artificial imitation of positive human communication -- words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love -- can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful," Leo XIV writes. "However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance." The encyclical goes on to highlight the importance of safeguards that can prevent AI harms. It calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." Moreover, the document suggests that it may be necessary to slow the pace of AI adoption in some cases to mitigate its risks. "Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family," the document states," Leo XIV writes. The document calls on AI researchers to work transparently and in a manner that considers the technology's impact. It states that other stakeholders in the AI ecosystem, such as investors, politicians and academic institutions, should also "work with a transparent and responsible mindset." The encyclical is the fruit of a lengthy drafting process that reportedly included contributions from cardinals, experts and the private sector. Representatives of several major AI developers including Anthropic PBC met with Vatican officials last month to discuss the technology. The release of the encyclical comes a few days after Leon XIV created an interdepartmental Vatican commission to study AI's impact on humanity. The committee is made up of officials from seven Vatican bodies. Each one will lead the newly formed organization for a one-year term that can optionally be extended by another year.

[51]

Fortune

The Pope's 'AI encyclical' says a lot. Yet critics say it misses AI's most pressing challenges | Fortune

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition...The Pope takes on AI...Microsoft becomes the latest company to "toll gate" some of its systems...OpenAI solves an Erdös problem (for real)...and that sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance in JD Vance's head. When the American-born Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope last year, he chose Leo as his papal name in part to pay homage to the legacy of Pope Leo XIII. The previous Pope Leo presided over the throne of St. Peter in the late 19th Century, during a time of rapid technological change and economic upheaval due to the Second Industrial Revolution. He is best known for his 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum" (Latin for "Of New Things") which spoke about the plight of the working class and the moral obligations that the owners of capital and corporations had towards the workers and the poor. It is considered the foundational document of Catholic social doctrine. Well, now the current Pope Leo XIV has issued the first encyclical of his papacy, one that is explicitly intended to echo his predecessor's concern for the plight of the worker, updated for the age of AI. Called "Magnifica Humanitas" (or "Magnificient Humanity," in English), Leo's "AI encyclical," which was published Monday, weighs in at 42,300 words in its English version (or about half the length of many books.) At its core, the encyclical is a plea that AI should be used as a tool for human empowerment -- rather than disempowerment -- and that human dignity must remain fundamental even in a world where more and more processes are handled by AI. Given its length, the encyclical says a lot of things. The Pope uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for technological hubris and contrasts that with the story of Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. Nehemiah did not rebuild the walls only according to his own vision, but instead fasted, prayed, and meditated in silence before then convening all of the families of the city, assigning them each a section of the wall to repair, and adjudicating any conflicts between them. The Pope uses this as a metaphor for a more inclusive, collaborative building of technology. Some of the key provisions the encyclical include: calling for increased government regulation of the private companies driving AI development; calling for accountability for the companies building AI models and for the companies deploying that technology; and calling for transparency around algorithmic tools, particularly those used in government decision-making, and says that these tools should be verifiable, something that many modern LLM-based AI systems are not. Seeing work as fundamental to human dignity, the encyclical asks for measures to protect jobs and retrain workers displaced by AI. It calls for measures to protect children from harmful AI-generated content and supports governments that are imposing age limits on the use of digital technology. It sees education as playing a critical role in teaching the next generation how to think critically and use digital tools in ways that enhance their human agency, not detract from it. It says that communities around the world should have a right to shape the ethical and moral guidelines that govern what AI models do, so that this power is not just left in the hands of a tiny handful of companies and a few countries. As the Pope writes: "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions." It also says that AI should not be used for the development of lethal autonomous weapons. As the Pope writes, "moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems." As many of the things Pope Leo says in the encyclical echo central themes of my own book, Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, there isn't too much in the encyclical that I would quibble with. That said, much of what the Pope is calling for is easy to say but difficult to implement, and, as always, the devil (or God in this case) is in the details. It is doubtful the encyclical will have much real impact on how companies develop AI or how countries regulate it. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John's School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn., told the New York Times: "I don't think the 'tech bros' in Silicon Valley will listen that much. But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people." While I didn't find all that much to fault in the Pope's encyclical, others on both the left and the right of AI policy did. Timnit Gebru, the well-known researcher in responsible AI and AI ethics, attacked the Vatican for its decision to invite a representative from Anthropic to sit alongside Pope Leo at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday. That representative was Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder and a pioneer in "mechanistic interpretation," a leading technique for probing the inner workings of large neural networks to try to discover how they arrive at their outputs. According to a post on a website for "sentientism," or the belief that all sentient creatures should have moral rights, Olah is described as "an atheist and vegan." And, of course, Anthropic has staked out a position as highly concerned with AI safety, including the existential risks of AI (a position that critics like Gebru see as mere marketing, with no real difference between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others). Writing on LinkedIn, Gebru lashed out at the Vatican for "jump[ing] on the bandwagon of the dudes who are about to make billions with their IPOs." She also said it was evidence that "leaders of corporations, foundations, governments, entrenched religious institutions...They're all in the same echo chamber." She faulted the Vatican for not criticizing Anthropic for "stealing data, exploiting labor, killing the environment, deceiving us with anthropomorphic designs and lying about product 'capabilities.'" She compared the Vatican partnering with Anthropic to discuss the potential ethical and moral risks of AI to "partnering with the Sackler family to discuss the harms of oxy." She said the Vatican could have chosen to partner with exploited data workers or those fighting against data centers, instead of platforming a powerful technology company. Meanwhile, Dean Ball, the libertarian AI policy thinker who briefly served as an AI policy advisor to the Trump administration, lamented that many fellow conservatives seemed enthusiastic about all the calls for government intervention in the encyclical and attacked the Vatican for being too small-minded in its approach to AI. He said it was functioning too much like a typical European technocrat, calling for this or that regulation, while denying that AI presented a fundamental challenge to the supremacy of human intelligence. In a post on X, Dean pointed out that Olah, in his remarks at the encyclical presentation, directly contradicted a portion of the papal document. Olah said that his own research into AI models keeps "finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that (functionally) mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment." Meanwhile the encyclical says plainly that we must avoid equating AI with human intelligence -- that the systems "merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence" but cannot actually have any subjective experiences or feelings. Leaving sentience and consciousness aside, Ball also wrote on X: Humanity is building machines that will be smarter than we are at things we care about, things in which take individual and collective pride, domains of thought we originally invented and discovered. This will enable incredible things, but no honest person can deny that this will be a kind of grand humbling for humanity. No honest person can deny that there is at least some melancholy in contemplating it all, some change to the centrality we have ascribed to our own minds in the order of the world. My primary disappointment in the encyclical is that it fundamentally denies that grand humbling. It sidesteps the humbling altogether, saying that AI cannot "really" this and that. Instead, it puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate, which, love those regulations or hate them, is probably not what the world really needs from the Catholic Church at this moment. Sometimes, when people are criticized from both the left and right, it is a sign they struck exactly the right position. In this case, however, that might not be the case. Perhaps in all those words, Pope Leo still somehow managed to say not enough. Ok, before we get to the news: Join us on Thursday, May 28, for Fortune 500 Europe: In Conversation with Tech Leaders, a candid virtual exchange with senior technology leaders from Fortune 500 Europe companies, including Mars Pet Nutrition, Orange, Reckitt, and Saint-Gobain. The discussion will explore one of the most pressing questions organizations face today: how to turn AI investment into sustainable business value. Register your interest to attend and receive Fortune's editorial takeaways. Tech billionaires convinced Trump to back off an AI executive order. But much of MAGA favors AI regulation -- by Jeremy Kahn Exclusive: Perceptic, a startup automating drug discovery end-to-end for Big Pharma, emerges from stealth with $12 million in seed funding -- by Jeremy Kahn The big questions looming over OpenAI's trillion-dollar IPO -- by Beatrice Nolan Microsoft lost its way in the AI race. Can Copilot get it back on course? -- by Jeremy Kahn Microsoft moves to cut off Databricks in sign 'toll gate' tactics becoming more prevalent. Microsoft blocked partners like Databricks from connecting their tools to its widely used Power BI product, a move many see as an attempt to protect its own data platform, Fabric, from increased competition in the world of AI agents, the Information reported. (Microsoft has said its move was driven by reliability concerns, not a desire to stifle competition.) The dispute highlights the growing battle over 'semantic layers' -- tools that standardize business data definitions -- which are critical for improving the accuracy and cost efficiency of AI agents. A number of large enterprise software companies, including Workday, ServiceNow, and Hubspot have started to erect "toll gates" to make it more difficult for third-party AI agents or systems to connect to their ecosystem without paying additional fees, as a way to potentially lock customers in or capture more of the value of AI-driven actions that might otherwise flow to another platform. Waymo suspends service in five U.S. cities after car drives into flood waters. Waymo has paused its robotaxi service in five U.S. cities after two incidents in which its cars drove into flood waters and were trapped or swept away (both cars were empty at the time). The company said a software issue was to blame and that it was recalling 3,800 cars that use the most recent versions of its self-driving software while the company works on additional safe guards. The company also suspended freeway operations in several cities as it works to improve performance in hazardous conditions like flooding and construction zones. You can read more from the BBC here. Mistral moves into the legal sector with Harvey partnership. Paris-based AI company Mistral is expanding into the legal sector through a partnership with popular AI legal tool Harvey, bringing its models to a platform used by more than 1,500 law firms and legal teams worldwide. The move positions Mistral against rivals like Anthropic in a fast-growing market where AI can automate document-heavy tasks such as contract analysis and compliance. Mistral is betting its models can win customers that value privacy, customization and jurisdictional accuracy while Harvey, which already offers models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, is hoping that offering another major model provider will boost its market position, especially outside the U.S. Read more from the Wall Street Journal here. OpenAI's model solves an Erdös problem -- for real this time. An unreleased "general purpose reasoning model" from OpenAI has solved a so-called Erdös problem, one of hundreds of unsolved conjectures and problems formulated by mathematician Paul Erdös during his lifetime. OpenAI previously claimed its GPT-5 model had autonomously solved 10 Erdös problems, only to have that claim debunked when it was discovered that those particular problems had, in fact, been solved previously and their solutions were discoverable on obscure websites which GPT-5 most likely ingested during its training. This time, however, the OpenAI model's work has been independently verified by professional mathematicians who also worked with the model to further refine the proof. The problem the OpenAI model cracked is called "the planar unit distance problem." In essence, this problem involves figuring out how many pairs of points in a plane can be the same distance apart. Erdös conjectured that the number of equidistant pairs would rise only slightly faster than the number of points in the plane and for years people showed this was likely the case through gridlike constructions. But OpenAI's model proved the conjecture is incorrect and came up with a whole new set of shapes that show the number of equidistant pairs can grow much faster than the number of points. The model did this by relying, in part, on ideas from algebraic number theory, which is a completely different area of mathematics than discrete geometry, the area from which the problem is drawn. OpenAI says the result shows how advanced reasoning models might be able to solve many other types of problems, in part by bringing in non-obvious insights from other domains or fields that human researchers might overlook or not even be aware of. You can read more about the breakthrough on OpenAI's blog here. July 6-11: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Seoul, South Korea. One effect that the Pope's AI encyclical will likely have. While many doubt Pope Leo's AI encyclical will have much impact on the technology's development, one concrete effect may be to produce increasing levels of cognitive dissonance for U.S. Vice President JD Vance. Vance is a religious Catholic who finds himself increasingly at odds with the Pope, on the U.S. war in Iran, and now also on the regulation of AI. The vice president has tried to have it both ways on AI, arguing against regulation of the technology but also saying that American AI will somehow be inherently "pro-worker." When the Trump administration last week was on the brink of signing an executive order that would have created some kind of licensing or at least review framework for the most powerful AI models, Vance was apparently among those working to convince the President to back off signing the order. The encyclical may make Vance's role in arguing against AI regulation increasingly uncomfortable. In advance of the encyclical being published, Vance told Catholic News service OSV News that he was sure the encylical would "contain lots of insights, some of which I'll probably agree with, some of which I may not, but I think it's going to be a very, very important document." Wonder what he's saying now? From global corporations to local entrepreneurs, artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses operate, compete, and succeed. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest collection of stories below: -After AI stole his clients, one Big Tech ghostwriter is using AI to get them back -Outnumbered: At $4 billion ClickUp, a 3:1 agent-to-human ratio is rewiring work itself -How a mom-and-pop car wash chain went from sticky notes to AI-powered operations that are upleveling every part of the company -Solo founders are using AI to do the work of entire teams -- but going it alone has limits -How EarthRanger uses AI to help protect endangered species -- and boost the wildlife tourism industry

[52]

TIME

Pope Leo Uses First Major Papal Text to Warn About Dangers of AI

Released Monday, the 42,300-word encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" marks Pope Leo's most sweeping statement yet on the promise and dangers of AI, a topic he has repeatedly spoken about in the year since his election. Framed as an appeal for the defense of humanity in a rapidly automating world, the text urges governments, corporations, and individuals to slow the rate of technological development and ensure that AI remains subject to ethical and political oversight. He presented the encyclical at the Vatican alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between Church leadership and the AI industry.

[53]

Slate

The Internet Is Somehow Obsessed With the Pope's First Major Letter. I Read It -- and Totally See Why.

It's an urgent warning -- and a celebration of humanity and what we can do at our best. The online reaction to Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, a 42,000-word tome focused on artificial intelligence and published by the Vatican on Monday, has seemingly positioned the Catholic figurehead as an ally of the global resistance to automated technology. Infographics, memes, social media posts, and various analyses have highlighted particular snippets -- the Lord of the Rings quote, the call to "disarm" A.I., the comparison of the technology to the Tower of Babel -- to frame the 240-page document as a manifesto for the Butlerian Jihad, a reassurance to those wishing to counter the ambitions of accelerationist tech bros. The encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas (in English, "Magnificent Humanity"), appears to be another gesture of goodwill from the most relatively progressive and memeable pope of our time. Still, for however enjoyable the gags and interpretations of subliminal shots have been this week, I find this reading a touch reductive -- not merely because the first American pope presented this text with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah at his side (and granted him a few remarks), or because the Vatican explicitly solicited the input of Big Tech executives while preparing this document. (Indeed, some believe he didn't go hard enough against A.I.) Rather, having taken the past few days to read through and digest the entire 240-page encyclical, I find what Leo has accomplished here to be something truly remarkable: an affirmative vision for how humans should approach the A.I. future, one that takes seriously the very real harms of the tech while insisting throughout on the need to make it better, to actually fulfill the utopian promises promulgated by Silicon Valley. For all the explicit and widely shared concerns Leo names throughout, there is a through line of genuine love for humanity and what we can do at our best -- including with the machines at our side. Magnifica Humanitas does not shy away from spelling out the harms of A.I. (e.g., developing war weapons, destroying the natural environment, disrupting kids' early development years) and the "dehumanizing" effects manifested along the supply chain, such as the unpaid child miners digging up needed metals and the underpaid content moderators helping train these systems from distant locations. (This "unseen" work makes up no small part of Leo's impetus behind the encyclical's historic apology for the Catholic Church's role in the slave trade, and its warning that these labor conditions could fuel "new forms of slavery.") Throughout the text, Leo insists on the value of fulfilling human work that doesn't just lead to productivity gains and remuneration, but also provides "context for expression, relationships and contributing to the community." He agrees that tech should help to "relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks" and "provide intelligent support," but also warns of growing A.I.-induced inequality, which exacerbates poverty and forced migration. He urges that such tools be created with the well-being of workers in mind first. The principle here is A.I. as addition, not replacement. Leo writes that modern technology has wonderful benefits like the establishment and ease of worldwide interconnections, the formation of global community and solidarity via the digital commons. But what's also important to note, for him, is that such solidarity is a constant effort in which humanity has to be centered. History shows the advancement of tech and A.I. alone will not automatically cause shared prosperity to blossom, and that humans of consciousness need to be present at the till, with grassroots organizations working in tandem with state actors. That is not to say humanity is infallible. Magnifica Humanitas expresses anguish at the loss of historical memory around atrocities like the Holocaust, decries the ongoing wars that have suppressed and massacred myriad populations, and points out that the ongoing tendency of nations worldwide to focus on rearmament (including with A.I.-powered weapons) over the general welfare of their populations will not, in fact, ensure domestic peace or a durable defense. It's purposefully a little vague. Encyclicals aren't meant to be strict policy briefs but rather a letter on a topic the pope wants the global Catholic community to seriously reflect upon. Still, he doesn't shy away from making pointed critiques where he sees fit. For example, Leo points out that the private companies who've monopolized control over and knowledge of A.I. are given to "technocratic thinking" that "tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources." The Big Tech ethos of ultraoptimization and megaefficiency overlooks a key tenet of what makes us work as a society -- that our human "limitations" (incapacity, marginalization) are where we find "compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others." There's a "frequent imbalance between the speed of technological growth and the slower development of awareness, norms, safeguards and institutions capable of governing its effects," the pope writes. And thus, to slow down development and adoption "does not mean opposing progress," but ensuring such progress can be realized as beneficial for all. There's also a tangible entreaty for global communities to lean on the networks and relationships they have -- with their neighbors, schools, civil organizations, governments, and corporations -- and address an issue everyone agrees we should be worried about. This is not some fantasy: Leo surely knows that, for all the saber-rattling between the United States and China in their tech race, the researchers behind the scenes are actually working together across the Pacific to share knowledge, insights, and technical faculties. Amid all the fighting, there will always be those who seek another way. ("If we experience authentic encounters with others, with those who are different, strangers and migrants, it becomes much more difficult even to imagine war.") One could fairly argue that all this is undermined by the church's collaboration with Big Tech representatives from companies like Meta and Microsoft, which are eager to accelerate output and customize tools for internal surveillance and external conflict. Most prominent was the Anthropic engineer who was also there on Monday at the Vatican, someone who plays a key role in a startup that has eagerly peddled software to merchants of warfare while ditching many of its own self-professed ethics around responsible development. But I think this can also be seen as part of the spirit of collaboration and community the pope calls for in Magnifica Humanitas. A.I. has been a key motif of Leo's nascent papacy, from early speeches to advisory groups to the reception of tech execs who've approached the holy man on their own. In a dispatch, the National Catholic Reporter quoted Holy See insiders who agreed that inviting Anthropic's Christopher Olah to sit beside the pope was unprecedented -- and that this was the point, as a show that the pope is willing to live his principle and engage in dialogue with everyone. Novel eras provide novel approaches. Naturally, the tech-bro futurists who've long insisted that social justice, intellectual property, labor rights, and environmental considerations need be scrapped to scale up their fantastic visions will not love Magnifica Humanitas' explicit appeals to social justice, diversity, and anti-colonial principles in the A.I. race. But the pope's open spirit of dialogue suggests they will not be excluded from his table, whatever they make of him now. Instead of blanket-dismissing tech entrepreneurs or wholesale manifesting a god in the machine, Pope Leo has sought a careful, studied, moral middle ground: one that encourages technological progress but upholds human dignity above all. It's not a document made for our simplified, summary-laden times. It is a work of searing writing that stays grounded and nuanced while looking ahead, in both practice and rhetoric. When it feels like humans are being crowded out of the spaces we made, the pope is here to remind us that we can still act to make good change and remind everyone that human life is essential for its own sake. We can all live and work together -- or we can succumb to fatalism and a false sense of inevitability. The choice is everyone's.

[54]

Financial Review

Pope's first big fight isn't over religion - it's over AI

Leo sees a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution and argues it must be bent towards the dignity of every human. Donald Trump, by contrast, wants to let it rip. Pope Leo XIV and US President Donald Trump are having a public disagreement over war and peace. But a deeper divide is brewing on artificial intelligence. In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo sees a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution and argues it must be bent towards the dignity of every human, a worker on the warehouse floor as much as an engineer writing the code. Trump, by contrast, wants to let it rip; any regulation, it seems, is off the table.

[55]

Seattle Times

Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical extends invitation, challenge

Today, May 25, Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), which is one of highest forms of Church teaching. His letter, which will be released with Christopher Olah, the co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic, addresses the reality of the human person in the context of today's dominating reality of artificial intelligence. Science and technology have always been an expression of the human genius demonstrating our creative potential. The goal of human activity is to make the world a better place to serve the common good of all people according to their unique and shared dignity, respecting the "magnificent" beauty of the human family. Today, however, with the rapid pace of technological developments, especially AI, the human family faces new realities that jeopardize the well-being and life of people and the world in which we live. AI, with all its positive contributions, is totally reliant upon what has already been produced by genuine human knowledge, intellect and wisdom. AI can only imitate human intelligence -- it cannot replace human attributes such as emotion, and values like mercy, compassion and forgiveness. Algorithms cannot take the place of morally responsible human oversight. Moral judgment and decision-making are inherent human acts that cannot be replaced by machines or technology. Human oversight of the development and use of AI applications and products is essential for true advancement of human society. The challenge before the human family, and thus the AI industry, is to apply this new technology in ways that truly benefit the human family -- such as education, agriculture and healthcare -- and in a manner that serves all people, without leaving behind the marginalized or poor. To best understand this newest papal encyclical, we must ask: "What makes a person genuinely human?" This begins to put into perspective what is required for serving humanity well with technology that advances true relationships, justice and peace. A region such as ours is full of tremendous energy around new technology, and that's something that can and should make us proud. Organizations like Microsoft have been in dialogue for years about how to ethically develop and use AI. Now, Pope Leo has extended that invitation of dialogue to the entire world. I hope individuals and companies alike are now willing to accept it.

[56]

Pope Leo's Unsettling Vision of the AI Future

His new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope but lands firmly on one side. The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to "think in centuries." But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, "on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence." Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world. Compare that with his 19th-century namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who didn't publish an encyclical about the Industrial Revolution until more than a century after it started. In Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), Leo seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope. He composes a long and vivid list of dangers posed by AI, but insists that the technology is a "gift that can alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities" -- as long as it's ordered by humane values rather than monopolistic interests. As for the specific advantages that AI might yield, however, Leo is largely silent. His expressions of alarm are detailed and expansive; his expressions of hope, perfunctory and brief. Leo decries AI-driven unemployment, especially among young people, as well as the environmental degradation caused by energy-intensive, carbon-emitting AI infrastructure. He condemns the exploitation of workers such as those who label data, moderate disturbing content, or extract "the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends." Read: Why Silicon Valley is turning to the Catholic Church The encyclical also takes a hard line against autonomous-weapons systems. "Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person," Leo writes. "Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems." On many of these issues, Leo offers prescriptions for reform that rely heavily on governments and institutions to mitigate AI's risks. As is typical for papal documents, the encyclical does not offer detailed recommendations or specify which bodies should carry them out. "Robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required," he writes. With regard to work, the pope argues that "every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers." Beyond concerns of public policy, Leo expresses a range of humanistic reservations about AI. He warns against "equating this type of 'intelligence' with that of human beings," who, unlike machines, can grow in wisdom through relationships and experiences of joy and suffering, including bodily pain. The technology can "weaken personal creativity and judgment," he says, and promote the "illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject" that can lead users to "lose the very desire to form genuine human connections." The encyclical rejects two philosophies espoused by some in Silicon Valley -- transhumanism and posthumanism -- that see technology as a means to augment or perfect people. Such conceptions of perfectibility pose a threat to the vulnerable, the pope writes, by making it "easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy." Reflecting on this danger, Leo laments that modern culture tends to view every limitation "primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them." Although his main focus is technology, Leo touches on other subjects. The document includes a section condemning the rise of what he calls a "culture of power" and the resulting "normalization of war." In one notable aside, Leo apologizes for how long the Church took to offer a "formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery," which didn't happen until 1888. That delay "constitutes a wound in Christian memory," the pope writes. "For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon." The encyclical follows in the line of Leo XIII, who initiated the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching, most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which defended the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. The current pontiff suggested, at the very start of his reign last May, that his namesake's work would inspire his own teaching "in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence." The new encyclical is also informed by more than 10 years of dialogue between the Vatican and representatives of the tech industry that began under Pope Francis. In an unusual move, Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, took part in a panel that presented the document alongside Leo. "Every frontier AI lab -- including Anthropic -- operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," Olah said at the presentation. "That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives -- people who care about things going well, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things and insist on safety, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics." Read: Anthropic is at war with itself Magnifica Humanitas repeatedly advises against giving tech leaders unbridled power to develop AI and determine its use. When control over platforms, data, and computing power is "concentrated in the hands of a few," Leo writes, "it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development." Elsewhere, he warns that "small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples." To fend against the concentration of corporate power, the pope calls for more transparency and accountability regarding the use of AI in business. "When data and algorithms influence credit distribution, personnel selection or access to services and opportunities," Leo writes, "it is necessary that decisions be understandable, contestable and subject to oversight, so that individuals are not reduced to mere profiles." Leo also denounces what he calls novel forms of colonialism, including the "extraction" of health data and demographic information. "These have become the new 'rare earths' of power: 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." Individuals must be able to decide how their own health data are used, Leo says, if this information is to be "a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance." Ultimately, the pope lays out the choice that humanity faces in stark terms: "If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity. If, however, technology is integrated with a wise perspective, it can become an instrument of growth, justice and fraternity." More than anything, Magnifica Humanitas is an exhaustive account of what could happen if the world makes the wrong choice. As for the benefits of making the right one, Leo mostly leaves them to the reader's imagination.

[57]

Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical

Motoko Rich, the Rome bureau chief, leads coverage of the pope. Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Vatican City. Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.'s most disruptive effects. Leo's declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to "all people of good will" that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds. While emphasizing that "technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity," he wrote that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs." Among other things, Leo called for: * government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. * protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened * education to help students think critically about the technology * action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I. * safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons. Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. "A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment," he said. "This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace," he added. Clergy, scholars and technology leaders have been expecting the pope's document for months, with many anticipating that it would form one of the most significant moral warnings yet about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence. A year ago, on his second day as pope, Leo made clear his focus on the perils of artificial intelligence, telling the College of Cardinals that, under his leadership, the church would address the risks that the evolving technology poses to "human dignity, justice and labor." He has since repeatedly spoken about A.I., including during a trip to Turkey and Lebanon, in an address to Catholic university leaders and even when celebrating the international day of mathematics. Last week, the Vatican announced it had created a commission of senior Catholic officials to discuss the challenges posed by A.I. Pope Francis, Leo's immediate predecessor, had also warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and called for the ethical use of technology. Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of "Rerum Novarum," -- or "Of New Things" in English -- a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII. The pope's encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century. Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, "Rerum Novarum" sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to "save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making," even as it praised the "discoveries of science." In the new encyclical, titled "Magnifica Humanitas," or "Magnificent Humanity," Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence. Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but "a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment." He called for "the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual." Leo expressed concern at how emerging A.I. tools might take over many routine tasks and jobs, implicitly devaluing those who do not have the training or ability to perform the work that remains available to humans. Leo wrote of the importance of preserving human dignity and warned of the "insidious" ideology that "suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective." Unions and charities that were formed to protect workers during the first industrial revolution, Leo wrote, would not be sufficient to protect laborers during a technological transition that could leave millions of people unemployed. "New collaborative efforts are needed among political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community in order to develop rapidly adequate shared regulations and protections, including at the international level," he wrote. The encyclical also called for imposing the "most rigorous ethical constraints" on weapons developed using artificial intelligence, continuing Leo's -- and the Vatican's -- longstanding opposition to war. "The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more 'feasible' and less subject to human control," Leo wrote. That, he added, contradicted "the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense." Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker. Leo wrote in detail, for example, of the importance of protecting children, who are particularly susceptible to the warping effects of technology. "Psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic consequences," he wrote. Parents need support from schools and governments, he said, to help their children resist the excessive use of A.I., the possibilities of "isolation, bullying and cyberbullying," and the pressure "to share intimate images or sensitive information." Scholars are divided about what effect, if any, the document will have on the technology industry, in which rival tech titans are racing for dominance. Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders "will have to take it seriously in a sense," partly because it provides them with "a moral imperative." Writing in the encyclical, the pope recognized the autonomy of governments and private companies. The church, he said, "does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation," urging other institutions to "recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good." Others said that an encyclical's primary targets are the clergy and the faithful. "I don't think the 'tech bros' in Silicon Valley will listen that much," said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John's School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. "But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people." Priests can use the contents of the document to guide conversations with parishioners who share their concerns about the technological pressures of modern life, Professor Herzfeld said. Reporting was contributed by Josephine de La Bruyère from Rome and Elizabeth Dias from Vatican City.

[58]

NBC

Pope Leo warns AI is fueling conflict, urges world to 'slow' advances

Pope Leo XIV called for stronger regulation and a slower pace of AI advances in a landmark theological document released Monday, warning the technology was fueling and normalizing conflict around the world. In a sweeping and eagerly anticipated manifesto on the subject, Leo warned that AI should not be "concentrated in the hands of only a few people" and that "a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." He was writing in his first encyclical, a key text outlining the pope's view on global affairs, titled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity). It was released alongside Christopher Olah, one of the co-founders of the AI giant Anthropic. That poses another potential flashpoint between the Vatican and President Donald Trump, whose administration ordered all agencies to stop using Anthropic after the company refused the U.S. military unrestricted access to its technology. "Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress," the pope said in the document. "Instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family." Its release comes after history's first U.S.-born pope faced public attacks from Trump following his criticism of the Iran war.

[59]

France 24

Pope Leo XIV to release long-awaited AI manifesto on ethical risks and global impact

Pope Leo XIV will publish on Monday his long-awaited manifesto on artificial intelligence, outlining the Catholic Church's response to the technology's ethical and social challenges. The U.S.-born pontiff will personally present the "Magnifica Humanitas" encyclical at the Vatican alongside senior Church officials and leading AI experts, including Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei. Pope Leo XIV will release on Monday his long-awaited manifesto on artificial intelligence (AI), a bid to address ethical and social challenges as the technology rapidly develops worldwide. The US pope will attend the presentation of the "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity) encyclical at the Vatican in person -- a first for the Catholic Church. He will be joined not only by officials from the Holy See but experts including the co-founder of the American startup Anthropic, a key player in the booming AI landscape. Anthropic is in a legal battle with the US military after refusing to change its internal policy prohibiting the use of its Claude model for lethal autonomous warfare or mass surveillance. Leo has denounced the race for AI in the military field, saying that "delegating decisions concerning the life and death of human beings to machines" is a "destructive spiral". Since his election a year ago as the Church's first US pope, he has repeatedly warned of the dangers of AI, including "the gradual replacement of reality by its simulation". And he has slammed the "environmental devastation" caused by the "frenzied race" for rare earth elements, which are essential for modern electronics. Read morePope Leo to visit France in September, Vatican says 'Wake-up call' AI could be worth up to $4.8 trillion (4.13 trillion euros) by 2033, a 25-fold increase in a decade, while concentrating its profits in the hands of a limited few, according to the UN. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last year warned "the window is closing to shape AI -- for peace, for justice, for humanity". Leo has made the hot-button issue a cornerstone of his papacy in dedicating to it his first encyclical -- a document which lays the basis for Church teaching and longer-term debate. Experts say "Magnifica Humanitas" could prove as influential as Pope Francis's "Laudato Si", a 2015 climatemanifesto that triggered political and civic reactions worldwide. The Vatican sees this new text as an extension of its social teachings on "protecting people in the AI era". It was signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of a 1891 encyclical by Leo XIII which laid the foundations of the Church's social doctrine during the Industrial Revolution. "The Industrial Revolution transformed the labour market, people's lives, hegemony, and power dynamics," said Marijana Grbesa, political science professor at the University of Zagreb, and a speaker at an AI conference in the Vatican. "At the time, it was necessary to train individuals in the use of tools. The same is true today: we need to train and educate," she told AFP. The pope, she said, will emphasise that "education is not enough today". "It's a wake-up call for the whole of civilisation", to "be rational when we use these tools". Read more'Friendly and constructive': Rubio meets Pope Leo XIV in bid to ease tensions 'Perception of reality' Leo has emphasised the need for "digital literacy... to understand how algorithms shape our perception of reality." In April he warned against the use of AI to fuel "polarisation, conflict, fear, and violence". And in January he lamented "the lack of transparency in the creation of the algorithms" that govern the operation of various chatbots, whose use is growing rapidly worldwide. The release of "Magnificent Humanity" follows several years of study by the Church of AI-related technologies. As early as 2020, the Holy See launched the "Rome Appeal for an AI Ethic", which called for new technologies to respect human dignity. Leo's predecessor Pope Francis spoke extensively on the subject, calling for AI to be regulated and warning that it could exacerbate inequalities.

[60]

The Guardian

Pope Leo denounces 'culture of power' driving rise of AI

Pontiff calls for 'most rigorous' ethical constraints on tech and apologises for church's delay in condemning slavery Pope Leo has denounced the "culture of power" driving the rapid rise of artificial intelligence while warning that the technology must be subject to the "most rigorous" ethical constraints as it infiltrates everything from work to war. In his encyclical - the first major text on safeguarding humankind of his papacy - Leo, the first US-born pontiff, also apologised for the Catholic church's long delay in condemning slavery, describing it as "a wound in Christian memory", while warning about the "new forms of slavery" due to the digital economy. In a break from tradition, Leo, who soon after being elected in May last year said he considered AI to be the biggest threat to humanity today, presented the document himself on Monday during an event at the Vatican. Among those in attendance was Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a US-based AI firm that has clashed with Donald Trump's administration. Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pope to the Catholic church's 1.4 billion members, and typically outline his priorities while highlighting the major issues in society. In the document, called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), Leo referred to "a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics" while warning that AI was helping to facilitate the "normalisation of war". "For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms," he wrote. In a passage that appeared to be targeted at Silicon Valley, Leo warned that power over digital systems, infrastructure and data "does not rest with States but with major economic and technological actors", and that when such power was concentrated "in the hands of the few" it tended 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 first US-born pope, whose family history includes enslaved people and slave owners, wrote on slavery: "It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord ... For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon." Past popes have apologised for Christians' involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave "infidels".

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NYMag

Pope Leo's AI Warning Struck a Nerve With Some Tech Leaders

Pope Leo XIV went viral on Monday with his warning about the threats AI poses to humanity and the steps he believes should be taken to ensure that "the idolatry of profit" does not "sacrifice the weak," including helping workers made obsolete by the technology, creating rules about how AI can be used in war, and implementing regulations to ensure this stuff doesn't destroy the planet. Pretty reasonable, and yet! It seems to have struck a nerve with a bunch of tech leaders and at least one Trump administration official, who suggested the American pope should zip it. Commenting on Leo's 42,300-word encyclical -- titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence -- Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of a company creating a supersonic airliner, wrote, "Bad take from the Pope. Tech revolutions tend to eliminate some jobs while creating others. If we cling onto jobs, we'd still be plowing fields by hand out of fear of disruption." While tech investor and former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks allowed that the pope "rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion," he took issue with Leo's call for regulation, claiming it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to some kind of 1984 nightmare in which the government uses AI to "censor, surveil, and control citizens." Sacks's remarks reflect the stance he took on AI and regulation while working for the Trump administration and as he continues to advise the White House. In a call with the president in May, Sacks reportedly told the president that imposing regulations on tech companies could hamstring the industry as it races against its Chinese counterpart, claiming that a proposed executive order would "give a victory to so-called AI doomers who propose strong guardrails to limit the risks posed by the technology," according to The Wall Street Journal. The order was scrapped. Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum seemed to imply on Fox Business on Tuesday that the Catholic leader should stick to passing out wafers during Mass and leave the questions of humanity to Silicon Valley or something. "I didn't know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope," he said. A notable exception to the Silicon Valley and Trumpworld scoffing at the pope's warning was Vice-President J.D. Vance. In an interview with NBC News, Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said he had scanned "bits and pieces" and synopses of the encyclical. "What I read of it sounds very profound," he said, "and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the Church." Vance, of course, spent his pre-politics years working in venture capital and has enjoyed the backing of numerous tech-billionaire benefactors (most prominently Peter Thiel). At the same time, he's long pitched himself as a man of the working class and wrote a whole book about being a "hillbilly." And while he's probably not about to go to bat for seriously reining in big tech, Vance surely understands that AI is deeply unpopular with many Americans. As of Tuesday afternoon, neither Elon Musk nor Sam Altman -- last seen facing off in a courtroom -- appeared to have commented on the pope's encyclical. However, Christopher Olah, the founder of Anthropic, was in the audience for Leo's speech and received a shout-out from the Supreme Pontiff. In February, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop using AI technology developed by Anthropic after the Pentagon demanded unfettered access to the company's system without the safeguards Anthropic wanted. On TruthSocial, Trump called Anthropic a "radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about." It was subsequently designated a "supply-chain risk to national security" by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. For his part, the president has not yet offered his take on the pope's warnings about looking out for humanity, though surely it's coming.

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U.S. News

With AI Manifesto, Leo Joins Pantheon of Popes Who Urged World to Change

VATICAN CITY, May 25 (Reuters) - Catholic popes have been urging global leaders to address ⁠social ⁠justice issues for 135 years across some two dozen ⁠major documents that many of the world's 1.4-billion-faithful can cite by their two- or three-word titles. "Rerum Novarum" from Leo XIII in 1891 called for better conditions for workers in the Industrial Revolution. "Pacem in Terris" from John XXIII in 1963 appealed for nuclear disarmament amid the Cold War. "Laudato Si'" from Francis in 2015 pleaded for swift action to address climate change. Leo XIV has now added his name to the pantheon, issuing a fervent manifesto on Monday titled "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), urging global governments to slow down the development of AI systems. "Like other popes ⁠before him, Pope Leo ⁠is responding to one of the most pressing social issues of his time," John Thavis, a longtime Vatican correspondent who covered three papacies, told Reuters. "Clearly (Leo) wants to help shape the debate over technology and AI, by emphasizing the moral and ethical arguments that centre the human person," said Thavis. A year into his papacy, Leo formally signed the text about AI on May 15, the 135th anniversary of his predecessor's publishing of "Rerum Novarum", firmly tying the newest papal document urging world action on social issues to the papal text widely considered to have done that first. POPES CHOOSE ENCYCLICAL TOPICS CAREFULLY Anna Rowlands, a British academic and Church adviser, said at a Vatican ⁠event ⁠presenting Leo's text on Monday that for ⁠more than a century popes have cautioned that the world "will not be saved by the market." "Today, Pope Leo cautions that we will not be 'saved' by AI," she said. Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff ⁠to the Church's members. Popes choose the topics of encyclicals carefully to highlight the main priorities of their papacies, as the texts, which can span hundreds of pages, often take years to prepare. The late Pope Francis, who led the Church for 12 years, authored only four of the documents. Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump after criticising the Iran war, warned in his text that AI spreads misinformation, prioritises conflict and could lead the world down a path of unending ⁠war. At Monday's Vatican event he also expressed concern that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced "practically beyond any human reach to govern ⁠them". MIXED RECORD OF SUCCESS FOR PAPAL ENCYCLICALS Papal encyclicals urging action from world leaders have a mixed record of leading to substantive changes. "Pacem in Terris", published just months after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is credited by some historians with giving moral backing to negotiations between then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Francis, whose "Laudato Si'" was the first papal document to endorse the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere, lamented frequently that governments were not doing more to mitigate climate change. Thavis said it is usually hard at first to judge whether a papal encyclical will have lasting impact, as it takes time for the lengthy documents to be digested by people worldwide. "Their ideas tend to surface gradually in the public square, in the media and in grassroots activism," he said. "I suspect this encyclical will act as a landmark reference point in the ⁠ongoing debate over artificial intelligence." The document is already available to read on the Vatican website in a number of languages, and will also be distributed as a booklet for reading and discussion. Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world's top AI companies, took part in the Vatican's event on Monday launching Leo's text and thanked the pope for addressing the problems raised by the disruptive, new technology. He said firms like his faced strong commercial pressures and needed outside scrutiny. Leo called in his text for robust international regulations to oversee AI development and for ownership of AI data not to be left solely in private hands. (Reporting by Joshua McElweeEditing by Keith Weir)

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Fortune

Pope Leo called AI an 'instrument of domination, exclusion and death.' Anthropic was in the room | Fortune

Pope Leo XIV called Monday for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and for its developers to work for the common good rather than profit, issuing a sweeping manifesto on safeguarding humankind as the technology impacts everything from work to war. "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), Leo's first encyclical, has been eagerly awaited ever since history's first U.S.-born pope announced days after his election that he considered AI to be the biggest challenge facing humanity today. In the text, Leo denounced the "culture of power" driving the AI race, especially in developing ever more sophisticated methods of remote warfare. He declared that it was "not permissible" to entrust irreversible, lethal decisions to AI systems, setting up another flash point between the American pope and the Trump administration, which has worked aggressively to deregulate AI development. "Artificial Intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,'' the pope told a special Vatican presentation of the encyclical, one of the most authoritative types of teaching documents a pope can issue. Experts in the tech industry, academia and Catholic morality said the document will likely become a benchmark in the debate over AI, a point of reference for policymakers, researchers and ordinary folk alike. It comes as the near-daily developments in the technology trigger concerns over AI replacing human jobs and even human intelligence. Taylor Black, a Microsoft AI executive and director of Catholic University of America's AI institute, said the document would prompt people "at the forefront of these tools" to ask questions such as "What does it mean to be human?" The Vatican launch also included remarks by the co-founder of Anthropic, which is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over access to its AI technology. The Vatican decided to involve Anthropic as part of its decade-long effort to engage Silicon Valley in dialogue over the human cost of AI. And yet in his text, Leo repeatedly blasted the concentration of power and data in the hands of so few people in the private sector as a danger, especially to children and the most vulnerable, and called for external regulation of their work. "It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required," he wrote. "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." Leo appealed to AI developers and political leaders responsible for regulating them to slow down and reflect on what they are doing. He urged them to use ethical and spiritual guidelines to make the choice to work not for their own profit or power, but the betterment of humanity. AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are the second- and third-most valuable U.S. private companies, each valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the GDP of many nations. Both companies are heading toward near-trillion dollar IPOs. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah welcomed Leo's criticism and concern. He said such external checks were fundamental to the technology "going well" for humankind since there is so much at stake -- "a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale." "We need more of the world -- religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments -- to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction," Olah said. "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend." In a methodical text, the math major pope traced the history of the Catholic Church's social teaching and applied its core concepts -- justice, solidarity, the dignity of work and the universal destination of resources -- to the digital revolution. "I am convinced that this will prove to be a defining document for our era, a profound and prophetic document," said Paolo Carozza, law professor at Notre Dame Law School and chair of the Meta Oversight Board. "Pope Leo is offering a clear, comprehensive, and coherent voice urging us to take responsibility for constructing a world in which technology will serve humans rather than degrade them," he said. In its strongest chapters, Leo denounced how AI had helped accelerate the "normalization of war" by desensitizing people to its cost. He didn't name specific conflicts, but cited "opposing imperialisms, between powers that wish to preserve their supremacy, and those that aspire to seize that supremacy." He demanded transparency and accountability by AI developers so that the chain of decision-making command in ordering strikes with AI weaponry is always known. He declared that the Catholic Church's "just war" theory, which provides specific criteria for when force can be justified, was now "outdated" given the technological advances of warfare. Leo signed the text May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of "Rerum Novarum" (Of New Things), the most important teaching document of Leo's hero and namesake, Pope Leo XIII. That document addressed workers' rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway. It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope cited it at the start of his pontificate in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. "Magnifica Humanitas" thus becomes the latest chapter in a century-long history of popes adapting "Rerum Novarum" to the social questions of their times, often dwelling on the dignity of work for human flourishing. AI is evoking both existential fears and utopian vision amid an intensifying debate on whether it will become a catalyst that enriches humanity or a technological toxin that dulls human intelligence while wiping out millions of high-paying jobs. "The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good," Leo wrote. Leo extended his concern for upholding human dignity in labor to issue the first-ever papal apology for the Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery by giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave "infidels." Vatican officials declined to say who contributed to Leo's encyclical. But Vatican and church officials have been engaged in a dialogue with Silicon Valley tech firms for a decade. The decision to include Anthropic at the Vatican launch was criticized by some who considered it a papal stamp of approval of the AI firm, which is currently suing the Trump administration after it ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology for its refusal to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of it. Brian Boyd, U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, read the inclusion of Anthropic's co-founder Olah as a recognition of its prominence in the field and as similar to a papal audience with a head of state: not an endorsement. Anthropic is an "enormous corporation that is taking onto itself an enormous risk and responsibility," Boyd said, adding that the company has "demonstrated genuine goodwill and integrity and interest in dialogue." ___ Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut, and Huamani reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Financial Review

Pope Leo says AI should be disarmed to avoid dominating humanity

Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from AI's most disruptive effects. Leo's declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to "all people of goodwill" that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles.

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