The Vatican's Indictment of AI
Magnifica Humanitas is more technically literate than any law Congress has passed. Whether it becomes the moral foundation of an AI New Deal depends entirely on who picks it up.
Pope Leo’s moral pronouncement on AI is an intense read, and it’s clearly been informed by some of the great investigative scoops in tech journalism. I’ve included a speculative bibliography at the end of this piece — the kind of work I’m imagining may have helped form Leo’s structurally and technically sophisticated analysis.
At 11:30am today in Rome, the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas, its official moral teaching about protecting the value of human beings in the age of AI. For the Vatican, it’s part of a long tradition of pushing back against the efforts of the market to evaluate humans on nothing more than what we can produce. For critics, activists, and policymakers, it creates language for resisting the market of human output that AI is enshrining. For Anthropic, which had a representative present at the unveiling in Rome, it’s a tremendous marketing opportunity.
I woke up at 5am PT to get as much of it into my head as I could. Here’s what I’ve pulled from it so far.
The document’s official title translates roughly as “The Grandeur of Humanity.” It’s Leo XIV’s first encyclical, published on the 135th anniversary of the encyclical that first pulled the church into “social doctrine,” Rerum Novarum. In 1891, that encyclical’s author, Leo XIII, looked at the industrial revolution’s wreckage and declared that workers had dignity far beyond their economic utility. The Catholic labor organizations that followed, particularly in Belgium, Germany, and the United States, took that declaration as a warrant. It took another forty years, a depression, and a president willing to act — but the New Deal’s intellectual scaffolding included Catholic social teaching that began with what Leo XIII put on paper.
Leo XIV is trying to do the same thing. He has clearly thought about this deeply, and the Magnifica Humanitas is technically literate and structurally aware — I was genuinely impressed by the sophistication of his analysis of the problem of AI. The question is whether there’s a labor movement, a litigation strategy, a legislative coalition in what he’s published today. Let’s look through it together.
