Pope Leo warns of the risks of AI for humanity in his first encyclical

Pope Leo Entitled “Magnifica Humanitas” (Great Humanity), it argues that technology must serve humanity rather than concentrate power or weaken human dignity.

He presented it at the Vatican alongside AI developer Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that companies like his need moral leadership to protect themselves from “incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” the New York Times reported.

“Technology is not just a tool,” says the 42,300-word open letter. “When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what is important and what can be discarded, making creation an object of exploitation and people mere cogs in a system designed for ever greater efficiency.”