Pope Leo XIV published his first circular on Monday, it was compiled Magnifica Humanitas, on “protecting the human person in the age of artificial intelligence”. And while artificial intelligence is the hook, the problems Leo focuses on are older and more pervasive: inequality, war, the erosion of democracy, and the concentration of power in the hands of those who don’t necessarily care about whether humanity writes big remains admirable.
Throughout the 200-page document, which Pope presented with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, Leo argues that technology built and controlled by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.
“When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and avoid public scrutiny, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities,” he writes.
“In reality, as with any major technological change, artificial intelligence tends to enhance the power of those who already have financial resources, expertise and access to data,” the circular continued, underscoring concerns that elites can use their power to “shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes, and steer economic dynamics in their favor.”
The circular comes days after President Donald Trump delayed signing his artificial intelligence executive order, which would have given the government oversight of new models before they go on sale. according to information at the urging of VC investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks.
Pope Leo called for artificial intelligence to be guided by “clear criteria and effective supervision” based on the participation of the communities that will be affected by it. More specifically, Leo called for an end to the AI arms race “for increasingly powerful algorithms and larger datasets” that companies and countries believe will “secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”
“Disarmament means abandoning the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to rule,” he wrote.
Again, these dynamics predate artificial intelligence. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum referred to the same concentration of power during the Industrial Revolution, but we need not look back that far. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and development of the platform to help elect Trump. the hundreds of millions pouring from tech elites into super PACs to block AI regulation—the kind of pattern that clearly inspired Leo XIV’s work.
Pope reaches the same conclusion that many have: the surreal power and potential of today’s artificial intelligence raise the stakes enormously.
Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, told TechCrunch that misinformation and profound falsehoods coming from artificial intelligence have “eroded our ability to recognize what is true and what is not true, and this has real consequences for democratic politics.” The tech industry’s practice of “collecting and manipulating” human data, he added, poses “fundamental challenges to cognitive freedom.”
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