The Vatican is about to turn artificial intelligence into a moral battleground. On 25 May, Pope Leo XIV will personally unveil his first encyclical, ”Magnifica Humanitas” (”Great Humanity”), a document focused on human dignity in the age of AI and, according to leaked details, a blunt warning against using algorithms in warfare.
That alone would be unusual. What makes this Vatican AI encyclical sharper is the choice of guest speaker: Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, whose work centers on making neural networks less of a black box. The Church is effectively putting a safety researcher on the same stage as senior Vatican leadership, a signal that AI ethics is no longer just a philosophy seminar with better lighting.
Christopher Olah joins the Vatican stage
Alongside Olah, the presentation will include Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez. Leo XIV will also break with long Vatican habit by presenting the text himself rather than leaving the announcement to cardinals or press officials.
According to Reuters, the encyclical condemns the use of AI in military operations and warns about the impact of automation on workers’ rights. That combination is telling: the Vatican is not just objecting to killer robots in the abstract, but linking battlefield autonomy with a broader fear that machine intelligence could erode human agency across society.
A direct line from Rerum novarum to AI
Leo XIV signed the document on 15 May, a date chosen to mark the 135th anniversary of ”Rerum novarum,” the 1891 encyclical in which Leo XIII defended fair pay and workers’ rights during the industrial revolution. The historical callback is not subtle. The current pope, the first American to lead the Catholic Church, is framing AI as the next industrial shock and insisting the Church has a duty to respond loudly before the technology sets the rules.
That position also tracks with the wider debate outside Rome. Governments, armies, and major tech companies are all racing to define guardrails for generative and autonomous systems, but the uncomfortable part is that the rules are still trailing the deployments. The Vatican’s move is less about technical regulation than moral pressure, and that pressure is likely to land hardest on companies selling AI tools for defense, surveillance, and workplace automation.
Why the Church is treating AI like an industrial upheaval
Leo XIV has made AI safety a central theme of his pontificate since the beginning, repeatedly warning about the risks of uncontrolled digital technologies. The message is consistent: if the industrial revolution reshaped labor, this one can reshape power, and not always in ways that flatter human dignity.
The question now is whether this papal intervention moves beyond symbolism. A Vatican document will not stop military procurement teams or automated hiring systems, but it can sharpen the language everyone else has to use. If the Church is willing to call combat AI part of a ”spiral of destruction,” the next round of AI policy debates may get a lot less polite.