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The Pope wrote a book-length letter about AI this week. Not a tweet, not a press release, but a full 42,300-word encyclical, the most authoritative type of papal letter, called Magnifica Humanitas, which translates to "Magnificent Humanity." It is the most significant intervention on artificial intelligence by any religious leader to date, and it came with a historic apology that has nothing to do with technology.
Let's get into it.
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TODAY'S DEEP DIVE
Pope Leo XIV Released His First Encyclical, Calling for AI to Be Freed From the Logic of War and Domination
Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas on May 25, making it the defining document of his young papacy. The encyclical runs five chapters and 245 paragraphs. It applies Catholic social teaching to the age of artificial intelligence, covering everything from autonomous weapons to deepfakes in politics to the concentration of technological power among a handful of corporations.
The Pope signed the document on May 15, which marked the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark encyclical his namesake Pope Leo XIII wrote during the Industrial Revolution about workers' rights and economic inequality. The timing was deliberate. Leo XIV sees AI as this generation's version of the same disruption.
He also broke tradition by personally presenting the encyclical at the Vatican's Synod Hall, a role popes typically delegate to cardinals.
245 Paragraphs, One Warning
Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas on May 25, making it the defining document of his young papacy. The encyclical runs five chapters and 245 paragraphs. It applies Catholic social teaching to the age of artificial intelligence, covering everything from autonomous weapons to deepfakes in politics to the concentration of technological power among a handful of corporations.
Photo by Harper Swan on Unsplash
The Pope signed the document on May 15, which marked the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark encyclical his namesake Pope Leo XIII wrote during the Industrial Revolution about workers' rights and economic inequality. The timing was deliberate. Leo XIV sees AI as this generation's version of the same disruption.
He also broke tradition by personally presenting the encyclical at the Vatican's Synod Hall, a role popes typically delegate to cardinals.
The Nuclear Comparison
The central phrase of the encyclical is that artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. Leo acknowledged the word is strong but said he chose it deliberately because the moment demands language capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.
He drew a direct comparison to nuclear disarmament. The Vatican has long pushed for nations to abandon nuclear weapons, and Leo argued that AI now demands the same kind of moral reckoning. In his framing, disarming AI does not mean rejecting the technology but freeing it from the logic of competition, domination, exclusion, and death.
The Aerial Shot of the Vatican | Photo by Caleb Miller on Unsplash
The encyclical warned that AI amplifies the power of those who already have economic resources, expertise, and access to data. It called out the widening gap between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those left on the margins, and it urged governments, corporations, and individuals to slow the rate of technological development long enough to ensure the technology serves the common good.
The Church's Own Reckoning
Buried inside this AI document is something entirely separate and historically unprecedented. Leo issued the first-ever papal apology for the Vatican's own institutional role in legitimizing slavery.
Previous popes had apologized for the involvement of individual Christians in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever acknowledged that past popes gave European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave people deemed infidels. Leo called this record a wound in Christian memory.
The connection to AI is intentional. Leo linked the Church's historical failure to condemn exploitation to the present moment, warning that the world risks becoming comfortable with new forms of digital slavery and digital colonialism. He is the first American-born pope, and his own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, which makes the apology personal as well as institutional.
The End of Just War
The encyclical's sharpest language is reserved for autonomous weapons. Leo declared that the Catholic just war theory, which has been used for centuries to evaluate whether armed conflict is morally permissible, is now outdated in the context of AI. He argued that reducing human control over weaponry makes it harder to justify any war, and that no algorithm can make conflict morally acceptable.
He warned that AI-driven warfare risks becoming faster, colder, and more detached by reducing people to data points. The encyclical also discouraged an AI arms race between nations.
The Anthropic Co-Founder in the Room
Seated among cardinals and theologians at the Vatican presentation was Chris Olah, the 33-year-old Canadian co-founder of Anthropic. He is an atheist who builds AI for a living, and the Pope personally thanked him for being there, calling the moment a great sign of hope that people with differences can listen to one another.
Olah's remarks were unusually candid for someone representing a major AI company. He said every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates under incentives that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing, and he named three specific challenges that keep him up at night.
First, AI could displace human labor at a very large scale, and supporting those workers would be a moral imperative of historic proportions. Second, AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations, and there is no mechanism to ensure its benefits are shared globally. He called that an unsolved problem and the kind of problem the Church has historically refused to let the world ignore.
Photo by Benjamin Disinger on Unsplash
Third, and most unusually for a tech executive, Olah talked about what his research team is finding inside AI models. He said they keep discovering things that are mysterious and even unsettling, including internal structures that mirror results from human neuroscience and evidence of introspection that functionally resembles internal states. He did not claim AI is conscious, but he made clear that the questions are larger than the research community can answer alone.
He closed by asking for informed critics who will tell the labs when they are failing, and for moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.
A Commission Without Enforcement Power
Earlier in May, Leo approved the creation of the Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a new Vatican body made up of representatives from seven existing departments of the Roman Curia. The commission is tasked with continuing the work the encyclical started, but it remains unclear how much practical influence the Vatican can exert over an industry that moves faster than any institution can regulate.
The encyclical does not propose specific legislation or technical standards. It is a moral framework, not a policy document. But it positions the Catholic Church as perhaps the most prominent non-governmental voice calling for AI to be treated as a question of human dignity rather than just innovation.
The Bottom Line
Pope Leo XIV has made a bet that the most important thing anyone can say about AI right now is not about capability benchmarks or market share.
It is about whether humanity will repeat the mistakes it has made before with powerful technologies, from industrialization to nuclear weapons to the slave trade itself. The encyclical is long, the language is theological, and the Vatican has no enforcement power.
But the questions it raises are the ones the tech industry has been least willing to ask itself, and Chris Olah standing in the Synod Hall saying his own industry needs outside moral pressure suggests at least one person building this technology agrees.
AI PROMPT OF THE DAY
Category: Ethics and Policy Analysis
"I'm reviewing a new policy document about AI regulation. Help me break it down into its core arguments, identify the strongest and weakest points, and summarize the practical recommendations it makes versus the aspirational language. The document is [paste text or describe the document]. Focus on what is actionable versus what is purely rhetorical."
ONE LAST THING
It is not every day that a pope and an AI researcher sit in the same room and agree that the technology being built right now needs more scrutiny, not less. Whether or not you care about theology, the fact that both sides of that table are saying the same thing should tell you something about where we are. The hard part, as always, is what happens after the applause stops.
Hit reply, I read every response.
See you in the next one.
— Vivek
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