At the University of Arizona’s commencement ceremony last month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the class of 2026 that they would shape AI’s future. The crowd booed him. Other commencements followed with a similar pattern: a hopeful line about AI, then rejection from the crowd.

Their anger is real, and it is justified. Tech executives have told us that AI will remake our jobs, schools, relationships, and wars. But we were also asked to believe we would all benefit from a change unfolding without our consent or participation. For many Americans such as myself, that promise doesn’t fit: we sense that our future is being decided for us, rather than by us.

The past several decades of technology policy have been treated as a narrow technical affair, the domain of scientists, industry CEOs, procurers, and lawyers. This spring, a Pope and a President made it a moral and political question. On May 25, Pope Leo XIV published “Magnifica Humanitas,” his first encyclical on AI and the human person. Then, on June 2, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security.” The two documents could hardly differ more. 

The Pope’s encyclical focuses on humanity and demands that power be constrained by morality. On the other hand, Trump’s order asks how America stays ahead of China. The first is a meditation on dignity, the second a strategy for dominance. Yet neither statement is only about AI. Both turn on a shift: authority passing from citizens to machines, and from public debate to private hands. 

The gap between the two documents is widest on the topic of war and national security. The encyclical’s strongest warning is that lethal and irreversible decisions........

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