What the Pope got wrong
For all the good in Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, it failed to grapple with the biggest questions
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that confronted industrial capitalism, marked the beginning of Catholic social teaching, and provided moral backing for the modern labor movement.
135 years later, many hoped that Pope Leo XIV would emulate his namesake’s success. The AI era is as disorienting as the Industrial Revolution, posing big questions about humanity’s role and purpose in the face of potentially superintelligent machines. Religious or not, many millions are crying out for leadership that our own governments are failing to provide. The Church is ostensibly built for moments like these: with his long-awaited AI encyclical, the Chicago Pope had the opportunity to step up to the plate and provide direction.
Unfortunately, what he delivered was no home run.
Magnifica Humanitas is not, by any means, a bad document. It correctly identifies some of the big issues with AI, criticizing the “race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance,” and noting the very real problems caused by a few private companies making decisions about the future of AI on behalf of all of us. Elsewhere, the encyclical offers sage advice on the subject of autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
But as a whole, the document feels woefully dated. At times, it reads like an AI ethics paper from 2022: focused on issues of algorithmic bias, water use, and data sovereignty. These are all real problems, and the pope offers sensible solutions to many of them. But much ink has been spilled on them over the years. It is not clear why they should be the overwhelming focus of a landmark document in 2026.
Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas struggles due to its author’s failure to take truly transformative AI seriously. The problems are not so much what it does say, but all it doesn’t. Take the section on jobs, in which Pope Leo warns of the perils that would accompany AI-driven job loss. He offers retraining as a solution to this — a mechanism well-suited to dealing with small-scale unemployment, but utterly unequipped to handle widespread job loss on the scale AI companies hope to achieve. True, he does talk about the need for new taxation mechanisms, and gestures at the need to ensure wealth is spread globally. But he offers no specifics, and fails to convey the urgency or scale of the problem. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who appeared at the encyclical’s launch event, spoke of the need for a global redistributive mechanism more clearly than Leo did — a worrying sign.
More damningly, Leo does not even discuss the concept of “artificial general intelligence,” nor does he acknowledge the many catastrophic risks that leading scientists believe such technology poses. He does not engage with the fact that AI companies view their project as developing not just tools, but a new species. I did not expect the pope to make a case for AI welfare — but he should, at least, have contemplated “what humans should do as we are eclipsed as the smartest entities on the planet,” as Dean Ball writes.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. There are plenty of reasons to not expect a two-thousand-year-old institution to be capable of grappling with a rapidly changing technological advance. But the Vatican has done better before. In January 2025, the Church’s Antiqua et Nova discussed AGI and catastrophic risk. In Transformer, Vatican AI advisor Paolo Benanti warned that “the development of superintelligence cannot be permitted to proceed without sufficient oversight.” Magnifica Humanitas’s language looks soft in comparison.
But even if it was naive to hope for more than this, the end result is disappointing. Humanity faces truly gargantuan questions on the road to AGI. New technologies like AI “require a new spiritual, ethical and political framework,” Leo writes. He fell short of giving us one.
If you were an AI lab CEO, which version of this encyclical would you rather get? The one that lectures you about data sovereignty and water consumption, or the one that says no frontier model ships without independent pre-release evaluation? Leo delivered the first one.
It's a fair bit of extrapolation to go from the current state to that which you wanted the Pope to address, and it's not clear your view is more correct. Whether we're in the middle of an s-curve or an exponential is an unsettled question and warning about what many might see to be hyperbolic risks could prove to be counterproductive.