Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical calls to 'disarm AI' from Big Tech control

Pope Leo XIV used his inaugural encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas,’ to frame artificial intelligence as a fourth industrial revolution that risks concentrating power among a handful of wealthy actors, weakening democracy, and eroding human dignity. He called to ‘disarm AI’ — stripping it of military, economic, and cognitive ‘armed competition’ logic — and argued that regulation alone is insufficient without stricter state and international oversight plus broad public participation in how the technology is designed and governed.

The document directly criticizes Big Tech, warning that AI amplifies the advantages of those who already hold data, expertise, and capital, letting small groups steer information flows, elections, and markets. Leo pushed back on transhumanist and posthumanist ideologies popular in Silicon Valley, defended a slower and more deliberate pace of deployment, and said ethical frameworks baked into models by individual companies — a nod to Anthropic’s constitutional approach — aren’t legitimate if their morality is set by a few. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah appeared alongside the pope at the Vatican presentation.

Leo also flagged labor displacement, AI-driven loneliness and atrophied human judgment, training on copyrighted material, rare-mineral extraction, and the harvesting of health, genetic, and demographic data as a ‘new face’ of colonialism. He called for progressive tax systems to redistribute AI’s gains and for responsibility to be assigned at every stage of the development pipeline.