Magnifica Humanitas. The AI Encyclical, which has shaken the tech giants with its urgent and timely message

by Justine Limpitlaw

Photo credit: https://theway.ie/irish-bishops-reflect-on-pope-leo-s-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/

I don’t think I have ever seen so many non-Catholics, indeed so many entirely irreligious lawyers, policy wonks and tech geeks, refer to and be challenged by Church teachings as they have by Magnifica Humanitas. On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence^[1]; the encyclical letter published by Pope Leo XIV on 15 May 2026.

It has sparked an astonishing amount of secular reaction at a time when the entire world, left and right, developed and developing countries, are starting to wake up to the existential challenges posed by AI.

In the past few weeks, the following alarms have been sounded:

• Anthropic, one of the largest US AI developers (including Claude), has said^[2] that its latest, most advanced systems are beginning to show signs they “could escape human control”. It is said its AI models “are dramatically speeding up the rate at which they teach themselves, removing human input from the process”. Anthropic is proposing a slowdown in building such systems and is proposing global rules to contain them. This followed an April announcement by Anthropic that one of its new models was skilled at detecting software vulnerabilities and could be weaponised by people who wanted to carry out cyberattacks^[3].
• Anthropic’s warnings resulted, just last week, in the notoriously anti-regulation US President Trump signing a new executive order, “Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security”^[4], giving the US government access to new AI models for 30 days prior to commercial release to assess any risks they pose.
• Anthropic is not an outlier among AI companies in calling for regulation, as OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) has now also said that “democratic governments, and not AI companies alone, should determine the rules and safeguards” for AI technologies^[5].

While AI is dominated by US and Chinese tech firms, they are not the only countries wrestling with AI regulation. South Africa’s own feeble attempt descended into ridicule and embarrassment for the hapless Department of Communications and Digital Technologies when it turned out that its Draft National AI Policy^[6] was itself an AI-generated product and was immediately withdrawn.

The key challenge is how to harness the societal good that can come from AI, including, for example, using AI to develop a vaccine for whole families of viruses akin to the coronavirus, which has successfully passed its first human trial.^[7] At the same time, avoiding the very real societal harms that can arise from AI use, which has been the subject of a 2025 civil lawsuit against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which allegedly encouraged a teen to successfully commit suicide^[8].

The Magnifica Humanitas is a dense, forty-page read, grounded in the “Social Doctrine of the Church”, which is made up of various Papal Encyclicals since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. One gets the sense of the teachings over the ages culminating in this guiding of the Church, indeed of the whole of humanity, to meet today’s challenge: the pitting of people against technology and the AI-driven worship of efficiency.

The Encyclical sets out the three foundations of the Social Doctrine^[9]:

• the human person made in the image of the Triune God
• the equal dignity of all human persons
• the supreme value of human rights,

and the principles of the Social Doctrine^[10]:

• the common good
• the universal destination of goods
• subsidiarity
• solidarity
• social justice
• integral human development.

In my view, it summarises the task at hand with regard to AI as follows^[11]:

Justice demands that we prevent the emergence of new forms of exclusion and deprivation of freedoms: individuals and peoples hindered or denied access to basic technologies, communities exposed to invasive surveillance and social groups penalised by opaque algorithms that perpetuate prejudice and discrimination. In the digital age, a just social order guarantees everyone equal access to opportunities, protects the youngest and weakest members of society, combats hate and misinformation and subjects the use of data and technology to public oversight, so that the guiding principle is not solely profit but the dignity of every person and the common good of all people.

Pope Leo warns of a modern-day Tower of Babel that will eventuate if AI is allowed to grow as a construction “that is grandiose, yet fundamentally dehumanising”^[12].

The final chapter^[13] of the Encyclical is a template of the key challenges and tasks. Essentially, the need to counter the prevailing culture of power and the normalisation of war which has stemmed from the crisis of multilateralism resulting in a multi-polar world “with a prevailing sense of mistrust”.^[14] And its replacement with what it calls the “civilisation of love” which “will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanisation”^[15]. In particular, Pope Leo calls for dialogue, diplomacy and multilateralism, and for a reinvigoration of international bodies such as the United Nations. He says that “diplomacy must be capable of operating effectively in this new environment, negotiating shared regulations on the use of digital technologies, in order to protect civilisations and the most vulnerable from ‘invisible’ yet real forms of violence”^[16].