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Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical<\/a> on Monday, dubbed Magnifica Humanitas, <\/em>on \u201csafeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.\u201d And while AI is the hook, the problems Leo focuses on are older and more pervasive: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the concentration of power in the hands of those who don\u2019t necessarily care whether humanity writ large remains magnificent.<\/p>\n Throughout the 200-page document, which the pope presented alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, Leo argues that technology built and governed by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d he writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data,\u201d the encyclical continues, highlighting concerns that elites can use their power to \u201cshape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n The encyclical comes a few days after President Donald Trump delayed signing his executive order on AI,<\/a> which would have given the government oversight over new models before they are released, reportedly<\/a> on the urging of VC investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks.<\/p>\n Pope Leo called for AI to be guided by \u201cclear criteria and effective oversight\u201d grounded in participation from communities that will be affected by it. More concretely, Leo called for an end to the AI arms race \u201cfor ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets\u201d that companies and countries believe will \u201csecure geopolitical or commercial dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Again, these dynamics predate AI. Pope Leo XIII\u2019s 1891 Rerum Novarum addressed the same concentration of power during the Industrial Revolution, but we needn\u2019t look back that far. Elon Musk\u2019s acquisition of Twitter and deployment of the platform to help elect Trump; the hundreds of millions flowing<\/a> from tech elites into super PACs to block AI regulation \u2014 the kind of pattern that clearly inspired Leo XIV\u2019s work.<\/p>\n The pope comes to the same conclusion that many have arrived at: the surreal power and capabilities of today\u2019s AI raise the stakes enormously.\u00a0<\/p>\n Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, told TechCrunch that AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have \u201ccorroded our capacity to recognize what\u2019s true and what\u2019s not true, and that really has consequences for democratic politics.\u201d The tech industry\u2019s practice of \u201charvesting and manipulating\u201d human data, he added, poses \u201cfundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n