The Pope’s first encyclical takes aim at AI warfare, tech monopolies and the industry’s obsession with power

Pope Leo XIV has released his first papal encyclical, and instead of focusing purely on theology, he’s gone straight for Silicon Valley.

Titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), the document clocks in at over 200 pages, making it the Vatican’s most definitive statement on artificial intelligence so far.

The Pope frames AI as one of the defining challenges of the modern era, comparing its impact to the Industrial Revolution. But rather than rejecting the technology outright, the encyclical argues AI is currently being shaped by dangerous incentives: geopolitical dominance, corporate greed, mass surveillance and automated warfare.

One of the strongest ideas running through the document is the Pope’s call to “disarm” AI. He’s not just talking about military hardware either. The phrase is used as a broader rejection of the global race toward more powerful algorithms, larger datasets and increasingly autonomous systems.

“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” the Pope writes.

A major target throughout the text is AI-driven warfare. Pope Leo explicitly condemns autonomous weapons, arguing that “it is not permissible to entrust lethal decisions to technology,” and pushes back against the traditional idea of “just war” in an era of automated conflict.

The encyclical also focuses heavily on the hidden labour behind AI systems, pointing to underpaid content moderators, mining workers supplying rare earth minerals, and communities carrying the environmental cost of massive data centres.

It’s surprisingly blunt stuff for a Vatican document.

The rollout itself was also unusually modern, with Pope Leo presenting the encyclical alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, who reportedly acknowledged that tech companies often operate under incentives that conflict with doing the right thing.

Alongside discussions of ethics and regulation, the Pope references Plato, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and even The Lord of the Rings while unpacking humanity’s relationship with technology and power.

Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas positions the Vatican less as an enemy of technology and more as a loud advocate for slowing things down before AI development outruns human oversight entirely.

Whether the tech world actually listens is another question entirely.