Pope Leo XIV Takes on the Silicon Valley Oligarchy

His new encyclical pulls no punches in attacking tech billionaires—and the politicians who enable them.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday. The 42,000-word statement is being described by major media outlets as centering on the rise of artificial intelligence and the moral, spiritual, and social challenges that it poses to modern society. Even the encyclical itself says that its topic is “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

While AI is indeed the central focus of Leo’s writing, it is also a reckoning with the unchecked power of Silicon Valley and the American tech industry, as well as with the Trump administration’s cruel and un-Christian foreign policy. Read deeply, it is a direct challenge to the political and economic might wielded by American tech oligarchs.

Encyclicals are commonly referred to by their first few words in Latin; this one translates to “the magnificence of humanity.” That name draws a vivid contrast to what Leo describes as the “new Tower of Babel,” which he juxtaposes with the Augustinian city of God. The other emphasis is on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, which outlined the church’s teachings on social justice amid the Second Industrial Revolution, or what Americans would understand as the Gilded Age.

Leo XIII focused on the plight of workers in a rapidly modernizing world. He rejected both socialism and communism as well as unconstrained capitalism, calling upon countries and governments to ensure fair wages, the right to unionize, and to preserve the dignity of work and labor. The current pope signaled his affinity for Leo XIII from the outset. At his first post-conclave meeting with cardinals last year, Leo XIV explained that he had adopted his name as a tribute of sorts to the earlier pontiff’s work. To that end, he told the cardinals, “offers everyone its heritage of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and work.”

“While many of the historical conditions described by Leo XIII have changed,” Leo XIV explained in Magnifica Humanitas, “at least two insights remain highly relevant today: the primacy of human labor over any mindset focused solely on finance or productivity—with the consequent attention to the people and families most susceptible to exploitation—and the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order.”

On AI itself, Leo correctly noted that there is a common “misconception” about the technology and that it can only “imitate certain functions of human intelligence,” lacking actual sentience. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” he explained. “Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

Leo called for AI to be “disarmed,” not in the military sense—though he did address that elsewhere in the encyclical—but rather to be “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.” The logical implication is that AI currently serves those ends. Leo also rejected ideologies like transhumanism and posthumanism that “seek an enhanced and almost disembodied humanity” in the name of technological “progress.”

Though the pope did not identify or quote these ideologies’ adherents directly, it is........

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