Magnifica Humanitas

Pope Leo XIV released the Catholic Church’s first encyclical dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence on May 25, 2026. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), the 83-page document is the most significant formal teaching on AI from any major religious institution to date.

A Tradition of Responding to Technological Change

The Catholic Church has a long history of issuing major social teachings in response to technological and economic transformations. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), addressing the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, workers’ rights, and the rise of capitalism and socialism. The current pope’s decision to take the name Leo XIV appears deliberate — a signal that he sees AI as the defining civilizational shift of our time, comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution.

Encyclicals are formal letters from the Pope addressed to bishops and, by extension, the global Catholic community. They carry significant moral and intellectual weight even outside the Church. Magnifica Humanitas is the first to treat artificial intelligence as its central subject.

The Core Argument

The encyclical does not focus primarily on technical details. Instead, it frames AI as a question of power. Pope Leo XIV argues that frontier AI labs now control more data and computational resources than many nation-states. This concentration, he writes, risks creating new forms of dependency and eroding human agency.

The document explicitly calls for external regulation rather than leaving governance to the companies building the technology. It warns against the development of autonomous weapons systems that could operate “beyond any human reach to govern them effectively” and urges that AI be developed in service of the common good rather than commercial or geopolitical dominance.

One of the sharper lines states that “the promise of automatic general prosperity often proves illusory” — a direct challenge to the idea that advanced AI will simply lift all boats without deliberate design.

Engagement with Builders

Significantly, Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, participated in the Vatican events surrounding the encyclical’s release. Olah has previously discussed internal research at frontier labs that has uncovered phenomena inside models resembling human-like states such as joy, fear, and unease. His presence underscored the document’s attempt to engage directly with those building the technology, rather than speaking only from outside it.