Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical Demands AI Oversight, Classifies Data as Shared Resource

Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday, a 245-paragraph document dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence that demands tighter oversight of Big Tech, classifies data as a shared human resource, and argues that "technology is never neutral" because it absorbs the values, blind spots, and economic incentives of whoever builds it.

The document, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), was released at the Vatican's Synod Hall on May 25. Pope Leo signed it 10 days earlier, on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum—the 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII on labor rights that became the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching.

Pope Leo has consistently framed AI as the defining moral challenge of his papacy, and compared the coming social upheaval to that of the Industrial Revolution.

The encyclical covers a lot of ground: AI in warfare, dehumanization, technocracy, data colonialism, child safety online, mass unemployment, disinformation, autonomous weapons, and even transhumanism. But the argument tying it together is simple. Every algorithm reflects the priorities of the people who designed, funded, and deployed it. Building systems that pretend otherwise doesn't eliminate that bias—it just hides it.

Data belongs to everyone. Including yours.

Catholic social teaching has long held that the earth's natural resources are intended for all of humanity, not private owners. Leo extends that principle directly to the digital economy. Algorithms, platforms, and data, the encyclical argues, must be governed as common goods, not locked behind commercial walls by a few companies.

"Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few," the pope writes.

The text also applies subsidiarity—the principle that decisions should be made at the most local level possible—to tech platforms specifically. The encyclical doesn't just call for top-down regulation; advocating instead for transparent algorithms, independent community audits, and real legal power for people to challenge automated systems that affect their credit scores, job applications, or criminal risk assessments. Without that distributed oversight, Leo argues, governance of AI becomes a form of digital authoritarianism that silences the populations it claims to serve.

The encyclical also takes aim at transhumanism—the idea that human limitation and vulnerability are flaws to be engineered away. Leo's counter is that finitude is not a bug. It's what makes empathy, moral judgment, and genuine care for other people possible. Systems built to optimize it out don't produce a better human. They produce something that evaluates and excludes the vulnerable more efficiently.

The pope is careful not to anthropomorphize the technology. AI systems, the encyclical states, "do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," he writes. The encyclical notes that AI systems lack the lived experience that produces real understanding. They can simulate empathy and produce convincing language, but they don't comprehend what they output.

That distinction matters practically. When an algorithm makes hiring decisions, sets credit terms, or assigns a risk score in a courtroom, its apparent objectivity obscures the choices baked in by its designers. The encyclical warns specifically against delegating sensitive decisions to automated systems that "do not know compassion, mercy, forgiveness" and against treating the result as neutral just because a machine produced it.

Anthropic was there

The person sharing the stage with Leo on Monday drew as much attention as the document itself. Christopher Olah—co-founder of Anthropic and head of its interpretability research team—spoke at the Synod Hall presentation alongside two Vatican cardinals and a pair of theologians.

As Decrypt reported when Leo was elected, the pope framed AI as the central moral question of his papacy from his very first address to the cardinals. Monday's encyclical is the formal doctrinal version of that commitment.

Olah used the occasion to say openly what most AI executives avoid: that every major lab "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," and that outside scrutiny—from governments, religious institutions, and civil society—isn't optional. He also flagged AI-driven labor displacement as a near-term risk that, if it materializes at scale, would create "a moral imperative of historic proportions."