The Pope just declared war on Silicon Valley
Key Points
- Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on 25 May 2026, focused entirely on artificial intelligence and Big Tech power.
- The document demands age limits on social media, accountability for service providers and protections for children online, shifting the burden away from parents.
- Leo XIV condemns the hidden labour behind AI, including data labellers, content moderators and rare earth miners, and links it to the Church's historical failure on slavery.
- The encyclical bans the delegation of lethal decisions to autonomous weapons and calls for an international framework to curb the AI arms race.
- Leo XIV presented the document alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, signalling direct engagement with Silicon Valley.
Pope Leo XIV has used his first encyclical to demand binding limits on the world’s biggest tech companies.
The Vatican published the 50,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday (25 May), with Leo XIV presenting it personally in the Synod Hall alongside Christopher Olah, co-founder of AI firm Anthropic.
Leo XIV signed the text on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on labour and capital written at the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution.
The American-born pope is a former mathematics major, and Time magazine named him in its 2025 list of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence, describing him as a spiritual counterweight to Silicon Valley.
“The main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments,” Leo XIV wrote.
He argues that concentration of control over platforms, data and computing power in a few hands tends to become opaque, evade public oversight and create new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.
The document refers to “the new monopolies of AI” and describes the situation as a new form of epistemic, economic, and political asymmetry that contradicts the universal destination of goods.
Among the concrete demands are age limits on personal devices and social media.
“Interventions by legislators are appropriate for setting age limits, holding service providers accountable rather than shifting the whole burden of control onto families, and for providing specific protections against all forms of online sexual exploitation and violence,” Leo XIV wrote.
He links early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices to damage to sleep, attention, emotional regulation, and relationships in children, and singles out grooming, sexual exploitation, and AI-generated image manipulation as escalating threats.
The encyclical also turns to the hidden workforce behind the AI boom, describing data labellers, content moderators and rare earth miners as the silent labour underpinning the industry.
Young people, predominantly women, perform much of this work under demanding conditions for minimal wages, while children and adolescents work in dangerous mines extracting materials for AI hardware.
Leo XIV draws a line from this to historical slavery, arguing that the Church spent eighteen centuries failing to condemn slavery fully and now risks repeating the pattern.
“In the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” he wrote of past complicity, before warning that today’s so-called advanced societies are building digital systems on similar foundations.
On autonomous weapons, the encyclical is unequivocal. “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable,” Leo XIV wrote.
The document states that lethal decisions cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, that the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable, and that an international framework is required to curb the technological arms race and protect civilians.
The economic chapters take aim at the broader market model. Leo XIV calls for taxation that lightens the burden on the weakest and asks for more from those with greater resources, challenges the use of GDP as the dominant measure of progress and warns that finance has detached from the real economy.
He singles out cryptocurrencies as part of a financial sector with a proven capacity to generate systemic and global economic crisis.
The release date of US Memorial Day, with an Anthropic co-founder onstage at the Vatican, places the document in front of the industry it targets.
Anthropic is a US AI company best known for its Claude large language model and was recently in a public dispute with the Trump administration over the use of its models in military and surveillance contexts.
The pairing makes the message difficult to read as anything other than a direct address from Rome to San Francisco.
Ryan Brothwell is an Editor for HotMinute. This is an opinion piece and not the views of HotMinute.
