Pope Leo XIV Makes His First Encyclical About AI

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, released on May 25, is about artificial intelligence. That alone is worth pausing on. An encyclical is the highest-ranking teaching document a pope issues, addressed to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, and Leo chose to make his inaugural one about AI before touching poverty, climate or any of the long-running themes the modern papacy returns to. The document, titled Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), runs to roughly 42,300 words and carries the subtitle On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

Leo presented the encyclical alongside an unexpected co-presenter: Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. The National Catholic Reporter notes the choice was deliberate. The Vatican has been quietly building relationships with AI labs since at least 2020, and Olah's interpretability research, which tries to look inside neural networks rather than treat them as black boxes, fits the document's themes more naturally than a generic CEO photo-op would.

What the document actually says

The text reads less like a condemnation and more like a long, careful argument about responsibility. As TIME reports, Leo's underlying premise is that technology is not "a force antagonistic to humanity," nor is it "inherently evil." But, in his own words, technology "is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it."

From there, the encyclical covers transparency obligations for developers, the dignity of work in an age of automation, protection of families and young people from manipulative algorithmic systems, and a sharp section on the use of AI in warfare. There is also a quietly direct passage on data: scraping the writings of millions of people without their consent, the document argues, treats human creative work as raw material rather than as the product of a person.

Why this carries weight

Encyclicals do not have the force of law, but they shape Catholic education, hospital policy, charity work and the positions of bishops' conferences in national debates. A doctor running a Catholic hospital in São Paulo, a school principal in Manila, a regulator in Italy whose Catholic faith is part of their public identity: these are not abstract audiences. Pope Francis's Laudato si' in 2015 reshaped how Catholic institutions invested and divested over climate issues. Magnifica Humanitas appears designed to do something similar for AI procurement, employment policy and lobbying.

It is also a signal to other religious institutions, which tend to follow rather than lead on technology. Simon Willison's annotated read of the text picks out a striking line: AI systems should be evaluated not by what they can do, but by what they do to the people who use them. That framing, which mirrors a lot of the recent harm-evaluation work coming out of academia, may end up being the document's most quoted sentence.