Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Sunday — titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” — issuing a sweeping moral and regulatory critique of artificial intelligence that drew explicitly on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, the foundational Catholic social teaching document on labour and capital. NPR reported that the document calls for AI to be “disarmed” — freed from military and economic competitive interests — and subjected to rigorous international regulation and broad public participation in its governance. The encyclical warned that AI “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data,” and that small but highly influential groups could “shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage.” Al Jazeera noted that the Pope described concentrated AI power as “a new form of colonial dominion.” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the document’s Vatican presentation, acknowledging that AI development “operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
The received wisdom
The liberal reading of the Pope’s encyclical embraces it enthusiastically as a long-overdue institutional counterweight to Silicon Valley’s autonomy. In this framing, Magnifica Humanitas validates the progressive critique of Big Tech: that the concentration of AI development in a handful of American companies poses systemic risks to labour, democracy, and human dignity; that voluntary ethical commitments from those same companies are self-serving; and that international regulation is the appropriate response. The document’s call for progressive taxation of AI’s economic beneficiaries and its insistence that “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few” fit neatly into the regulatory agenda that has gained traction in the EU and among a segment of American Democrats. For this audience, the Pope has provided moral authority to a set of policy positions they already hold.
The right, meanwhile, has tended to either dismiss the encyclical as ecclesiastical overreach into economics, or to greet it with the polite inattention reserved for things that are inconvenient but hard to argue against directly. Both responses are mistakes.
A different read
The instinct to dismiss Papal social teaching on economic grounds is understandable — the Church has a long history of backing centrally planned solutions that have not worked as advertised, and there is a fair criticism of any document that calls for “progressive tax systems” and “international regulation” without specifying what those mechanisms would look like in practice. The right has learned, through hard experience, that technocratic governance bodies tend to reflect the preferences of whoever controls them, and that “international regulation of AI” will likely mean different things in Brussels, Washington, Beijing, and Geneva.
But the core diagnosis in Magnifica Humanitas is harder to dismiss, and conservatives who care about distributed power, national sovereignty, family stability, and the dignity of labour have more reason than they might expect to take it seriously. The encyclical’s argument is not primarily that AI is bad but that its current trajectory concentrates power in ways that are historically recognisable and historically dangerous. “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight,” Leo writes. That is not a progressive critique. That is a Burkean one. Edmund Burke did not worry about technology, but he worried a great deal about unaccountable elites whose power had outpaced any institution capable of checking it.
The Leo XIII parallel is worth dwelling on. Rerum Novarum was published in 1891, at a moment when industrial capitalism had generated enormous wealth and equally enormous immiseration for the working class, and when the Church’s options were to endorse laissez-faire, endorse socialism, or articulate a third position grounded in human dignity and the principle of subsidiarity — that decisions should be made at the lowest level of society capable of making them effectively. The Church chose the third path, and its influence on European Christian Democracy, on labour law, and on the welfare state compromise of the twentieth century was substantial.
The question Leo XIV is implicitly asking is: are we at a comparable inflection point with AI? The evidence is not conclusive, but the circumstantial case is serious. Generative AI systems are being deployed at speed into labour markets without adequate study of their distributional effects. The training data for these systems has been extracted — in many cases without consent or compensation — from creative and intellectual workers. The companies building them have, as Olah admitted at the Vatican presentation, structural incentives that “can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” And the geopolitical competition between the US and China is producing pressure to deploy faster rather than more carefully, because slowing down means falling behind.
The encyclical’s warning against transhumanism is the passage the right should most readily engage with. Leo explicitly rejects the Silicon Valley philosophy that treats human limitation — illness, disability, ageing — as a design flaw to be engineered away. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes. This is a formulation that any conservative thinker from Chesterton to Roger Scruton would recognise. The meaning-making structures that give human life coherence — family, vocation, craft, religious practice — are grounded in the experience of bounded, mortal, embodied persons. A technology philosophy that aims to transcend those limits is not neutral; it carries a specific anthropology, and it is not one that conservatives should accept by default simply because it arrives packaged as progress.
The right’s best contribution to the AI debate is not to cheerlead for deregulation while Silicon Valley becomes the most powerful unaccountable oligopoly in history. It is to insist that accountability must be real, that it should be exercised as close to the human scale as possible, and that the subsidiarity principle the Church has advocated for 135 years is a better framework for AI governance than either state capture or market anarchy.
What to watch
- How the EU AI Act’s implementation timeline interacts with the encyclical’s framing — several European Christian Democratic parties will now have political incentive to cite Magnifica Humanitas in regulatory debates.
- Whether the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issues a formal response, and whether Republican politicians with Catholic constituencies engage with the encyclical’s substance or simply ignore it.
- Whether Anthropic’s participation in the Vatican presentation translates into any concrete changes to its governance model, or whether Chris Olah’s appearance functions primarily as a reputational exercise.
- The Chinese government’s response — Beijing has its own reasons to welcome international frameworks that restrain American AI companies, while simultaneously developing its own without equivalent scrutiny.
— J