Pope Leo Xiv’s First Letter Is About AI, And He Puts It In The Same Moral Category As Nuclear Weapons.
Pope Leo XIV issued his first letter today, and its main demand is that artificial intelligence be “disarmed.”‘
The document is called Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity: In Defense of the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”). It runs nearly 42,300 words on 184 pages and was signed on May 15, 2026, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the landmark document on the first Industrial Revolution. Parallels are done on purpose. Leo XIV made AI as the turning point of the century.
Leo XIV, the first pope born in the US (elected in May 2025 as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost), presented the encyclical live at the Vatican. He said their convictions came from months of listening to scientists, engineers, ethologists, families, and what he called “deeply troubling voices” about autonomous weapons and biased algorithms. Then he drew the line directly: “Abolition of nuclear weapons is still a service to the peace and dignity of the human family.” In the same sense, wisdom can now be ‘disarmed,’ freed from rational thought that turns it into an instrument of domination, exclusion or death.
“Abolishing AI,” as the encyclical explains in §110, does not mean stopping development. It means breaking the “armed” mentality of national and political races in ever-expanding models, rejecting the idea that technological power gives anyone the right to dominate others, treating data as normal, and keeping higher decisions under real human control.
As for what AI really is, the document says nothing: “The so-called artificial intelligence is passive, they do not have a body, they do not feel pleasure or pain, they do not mature in relationships and do not know what it means to love, work, friendship or responsibility. And they do not have a moral conscience. They may imitate language, behavior and measure, but they do not understand the skills of empathy, or even understand the skills of analysis.”
Regarding governance, it warns that “AI is not morally neutral; it embodies the principles of its designers,” and that “delegating critical decisions to algorithms risks excluding the vulnerable under neutrality.” It flags concrete domains where this is already playing out: rent, credit, justice, surveillance, and misinformation.
At work, he argues that AI “puts workers at risk by reducing skills, putting them under surveillance, and causing unemployment,” and insists that “technology should free up human time for higher purposes rather than marginalize it.”
In war, it is more straightforward: “The decision to use lethal force must remain under the control of an active, self-aware and responsible person. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”
The encyclical also warns of a “technocratic paradigm” that concentrates power in private hands, perpetuates “data colonialism,” and reduces people to metrics. It calls for international regulation, transparency, digital literacy, and what it calls a “civilization of love” to guide technology.
Leo XIV presented the document alongside AI industry figures, including Anthropic founder Christopher Olah, framing the release as a deliberate opening of dialogue between the Church and the people developing the technology. The full text is published on the Vatican website.
