Overview
- The Vatican publicly released the more-than-100-page encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on Monday, May 25, 2026, and Pope Leo XIV personally presented the document at the Vatican with Anthropic co‑founder Chris Olah in attendance.
- The text demands algorithmic transparency, rules on data ownership, broader public participation in rule‑making, and age limits for platform use to shift responsibility to service providers and protect minors.
- Leo XIV categorically rejects delegating lethal or irreversible decisions to artificial systems and calls for limits on autonomous weapons because such machines cannot bear moral responsibility for life-and-death choices.
- The encyclical highlights social harms tied to AI, including exploitative supply chains, poorly paid data work and what it calls ‘new forms of slavery,’ arguing that data-driven systems can degrade people into ‘data’ or ‘packages.’
- By dating the letter May 15 to echo Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum and positioning the church in direct dialogue with industry, the pope aims to shape global debates on tech regulation, arms control and democratic oversight of a concentrated tech sector.