Pope Leo's AI encyclical is really about power, not technology

Pope Leo XIV has spent his first weeks in office doing something unusual for a pontiff: he has apologized for slavery and warned, in his first major document, that artificial intelligence could destabilize societies, spread falsehoods, and concentrate power in ways that entrench existing inequalities.

The AI warning, issued as a formal teaching document on 25 May 2026, landed with familiar language about misinformation and conflict. But the document, as one analysis noted, is not really about AI at all — it uses the technology as a lens to diagnose older, deeper problems: the hollowing out of democratic institutions, the erosion of human agency in decisions that matter, and a tech elite that has quietly shaped the world to its own advantage.

A Church that knows its own history

The encyclical arrives against an unusual backdrop. On the same day, Pope Leo apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for its historical role in the transatlantic slave trade — a reckoning that placed the Vatican squarely in the conversation about systemic harm and institutional responsibility. The two acts are not unrelated. A pontificate that begins by owning historical complicity in human exploitation is also one likely to view emerging concentrated power with a critical eye.

The document urges governments to slow and regulate AI development. It stops short of endorsing outright bans or pauses, but its tone is unmistakably cautious. According to Reuters, the encyclical frames AI not as an inevitable technological march but as a governance choice — one with stakes large enough to warrant international coordination.

The power diagnosis, not the silicon one

TechCrunch's reading of the document cuts to the core argument: Pope Leo sees AI as a symptom rather than a cause. The technology amplifies whatever political architecture surrounds it. If that architecture is concentrated, AI concentrates power further. If it is democratic and accountable, the technology can be steered toward different ends. The fear, in this framing, is not the Terminator scenario — it is a world where a small number of firms and states control the infrastructure through which societies make meaning, assign value, and distribute opportunity.

That reading aligns with a broader shift in how serious governance discourse treats technology. The question is no longer whether AI is powerful — it is plainly powerful — but who controls it, on whose behalf, and to what ends. Pope Leo's encyclical places the Vatican in that argument without the technical jargon that usually accompanies it.

What this means for global governance

The timing matters. The document arrives as the European Union's AI Act moves into implementation, as Washington and Beijing contest standards-setting for frontier models, and as smaller states in the Global South watch a technology they did not build reshape their economies. The encyclical adds a voice — one with historical reach and moral authority — to a debate that has been dominated by engineers, investors, and security bureaucrats.

Whether it changes anything is another question. The Vatican has limited hard power over any government or firm. But the document's framing — that AI governance is ultimately about the kind of world people want to live in — is not one that tech companies can easily dismiss without reputational cost. Pope Leo is not a regulator. He is, however, a moral frame-setter. And in a world where the contest over how AI is understood is as contested as the technology itself, that is not nothing.

The sources do not specify whether the encyclical names specific companies, governments, or technical architectures. What is clear is the diagnosis: AI is not neutral. It does not arrive into a political vacuum. And the institutions that govern it — or fail to — will shape the next century as surely as the institutions that governed steel, oil, and nuclear weapons shaped the last one.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• http://reut.rs/4nUu3sI
• http://reut.rs/4nUu3sI