How Pope Leo XIV Is Taking On Big Tech

Something unusual happened at the Vatican on Monday.

Pope Leo XIV walked into the Synod Hall not to address cardinals or lead a prayer as most might assume, but to stand beside a Silicon Valley co-founder and launch the most ambitious papal document in a generation.

Featured image: Matthew Schwartz (UnSplash)

A Pope, a Tech Co-Founder, and a Vatican Auditorium

Pope Leo XIV stepped into the main auditorium of the Synod Hall to launch his first encyclical, a formal papal teaching document, standing beside Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the American AI company behind Claude. The pairing was deliberate, symbolic, and quite extraordinary by Vatican standards.

The encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), runs to 245 paragraphs and centers on what Pope Leo XIV considers the defining moral question of the age: how humanity governs artificial intelligence before it governs us. He signed the document on May 15, 135 years to the day after his 19th-century namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed Rerum Novarum, the landmark text that established the Church’s teachings on workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. That date was chosen deliberately.

One Vatican official privately described the decision to invite Olah as unusual and said it should be read as a signal of Pope Leo’s seriousness. “We haven’t usually invited someone from the outside,” the source told the National Catholic Reporter. Another Vatican statement made the boundaries clear: Anthropic’s inclusion was “not an endorsement, prize, reward or canonization.” It was, rather, an open invitation to dialogue.

Why Anthropic? Why Now?

The choice of Anthropic over OpenAI or Google carried layers of meaning. As CNN reported, it also reflects the ongoing friction between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump administration, which has taken a hands-off approach to AI regulation. Anthropic has been in a legal dispute with Washington over the use of its technology in military and surveillance applications, a tension that sits squarely within the encyclical’s warnings about autonomous weapons.

Anthropic has cultivated ties with the Vatican for some time. The National Catholic Reporter noted that the company listed three Catholic thinkers, among them Bishop Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, among contributors to its Claude Constitution, the internal ethical framework that guides how its flagship AI model behaves.

For his part, Olah used his platform at the Vatican to say something striking for a Silicon Valley figure: that people outside the incentive structures of AI labs are essential. “Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” he told the audience. “That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives.” He described the encyclical as exactly that kind of outside voice.

The Math-Trained Pope Who Saw This Coming

Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, is the first American pope in history, elected on May 8, 2025. Before entering the priesthood and the Augustinian order, he studied mathematics: a background that may explain why his engagement with AI has felt more grounded than that of previous pontiffs.

From his very first formal address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV identified artificial intelligence as one of the defining challenges of his papacy, naming it a threat to “human dignity, justice, and labour.” He even cited AI as one reason for choosing the name Leo, explicitly drawing the parallel between industrialisation in the 1890s and the technological transformation underway today.

At the Second Annual Rome Conference on AI, Ethics, and Corporate Governance in June 2025, he warned that AI “must never forget human dignity” and cautioned about the technology’s effects on children and young people. Days before releasing the encyclical, he established a dedicated Vatican commission on AI.

His predecessor, Pope Francis, laid some of this groundwork. In January 2025, the Vatican released Antiqua et Nova, a lengthy theological note on AI’s promises and risks, signed off on by Francis before his death in April 2025. The Church has, in fact, been monitoring AI’s development for over four decades through the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. But Magnifica Humanitas goes further than anything that came before it.

What the Document Says: The Case For AI

Pope Leo XIV came to this document as an enthusiast as well as a critic, and the encyclical gives real weight to what AI can offer. The document describes genuine enthusiasm for what the technology could do in healthcare, environmental monitoring, scientific research, and development, areas where precision and scale could save lives. It encourages progress and frames AI, when used well, as “part of the collaboration of man and woman with God.”

The encyclical acknowledges the “immense potential” of the technology. AI applications in medicine get particular attention, consistent with Pope Leo’s message to the Pontifical Academy for Life, where he spoke warmly about diagnostic tools that can “alleviate immense suffering.” The encyclical does not condemn AI; it demands that humanity govern it.

What the Document Says: The Case Against

The warnings in Magnifica Humanitas are sharper and more detailed than anything a sitting pope has put in writing on this subject. Several themes dominate.

On war: Pope Leo’s most direct condemnation is reserved for autonomous weapons. Drawing on a line that will likely be quoted for years, he wrote: “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.” AI, he argues, accelerates the horror of conflict and strips it of human accountability. He calls for the technology to be removed entirely from lethal decision-making chains.

On inequality: “AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data,” he wrote. The encyclical warns that a handful of wealthy individuals should not be allowed to determine humanity’s future, and flags the growing gap between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those left entirely behind.

On power concentration: Pope Leo XIV takes direct aim at Big Tech, calling for AI to be freed from “monopolistic control” and demanding stronger state and international regulation. The encyclical calls for government oversight of AI companies, a direct rebuke of the current laissez-faire approach in Washington.

On the environment: The document flags AI’s overwhelming resource demands that compete with human needs. Training large models and running the hardware required to support them consumes vast amounts of energy and water, significantly contributing to CO2 emissions and straining infrastructure, particularly in developing regions.

On human identity: Perhaps most philosophically, Pope Leo XIV pushes back against the very framing of “artificial intelligence” as a term. Quoting Pope Francis, the document argues that the word intelligence as applied to machines “can prove misleading”, and AI is something produced by human intelligence, not a form of it. The soul, conscience, and moral judgement that define the human person cannot be replicated or outsourced.

“Disarm” — The Word at the Heart of It All

The encyclical is built around a single, unusual word: disarm. In paragraph 110, Pope Leo XIV writes that AI is no longer just a tool but “an environment in which we are immersed and a power with which we must contend” . He also emphasized that mere regulation falls short.

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon,” he wrote. The word echoes throughout the document as a kind of refrain: disarming the race for algorithms, disarming economic competition, disarming the logic of domination.

But disarmament, in Pope Leo’s framing, is only the beginning. “Disarming is not enough, we must build,” he adds, calling for broad, inclusive participation in how AI is programmed, governed, and distributed.

A Bigger Stage Than Expected

The presentation itself broke with Vatican tradition. Encyclicals are normally handed off to cardinals to introduce in a press room; Pope Leo XIV oversaw the release himself, addressing the world from the main Vatican auditorium alongside a lineup that included Cardinals Víctor Manuel Fernández and Michael Czerny, theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo, and Olah.

The drafting process, Pope Leo XIV explained, began in July 2025 at Castel Gandolfo. “I have listened to scientists and engineers who work with sincere enthusiasm on technologies capable of alleviating immense suffering, to political leaders and public officials who have perseveringly sought just rules, to parents and teachers who are deeply concerned for the future of younger generations,” he said at the launch.

For those watching from the tech industry, the encyclical lands at a complicated moment. The Trump administration has shelved meaningful federal AI oversight, Anthropic is fighting in court over how its models are used by the military, and AI governance globally remains patchy and contested. In that vacuum, a 245-paragraph document from a pope with a mathematics background, standing next to one of Silicon Valley’s most safety-focused voices so far, is at the very least an unusual intervention.

Whether or not one shares Pope Leo’s faith, the question of who regulates the people building the most powerful technology in human history is one that reaches well beyond the Vatican walls.