Pope Leo Just Wrote the Best Document on AI This Year

Magnifica Humanitas is a systems-design manifesto. The coverage missed that.

I’m not Catholic. My kids went to Catholic school, and they’re not Catholic either. But I’ve followed the popes throughout my life the same way I follow other world leaders — with attention, and with a willingness to be persuaded. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is unlike anything I’ve seen from a religious leader in my lifetime.

Almost all of the coverage I’ve read frames it as tech-bros-versus-the-Pope. That is not what I see. What I see is a deeply intelligent, thoughtful person making common-sense recommendations that any systems designer would call correct.

The Pope is calling humanity to recognize the intrinsic risk of consolidating power. He is asking for common-sense policies that anyone who designs resilient systems for a living would recognize as first principles. The clearest example is his invocation of subsidiarity — the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level, by the people closest to the consequences, and never centralized higher than they have to be. In plain terms, this is a core architectural principle for building systems that don’t fail in correlated ways.

What’s at stake in this conversation is a thriving global AI economy. And, perhaps, humanity itself.

Let me explain.

The argument the coverage is missing

The press has fixated on a single phrase from Magnifica Humanitas — that AI risks becoming an “instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.” It’s a striking line, and an easy soundbite. But it is the wrong line to fixate on. The substance of the encyclical is not a moral panic. It is a careful, structural argument about what happens when an entire civilization routes its most consequential decisions through a small number of opaque private systems.

Pope Leo is not anti-technology. He says so directly: “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity.” What he is against is the concentration of power that the current AI trajectory is producing — concentration of data, concentration of capability, concentration of decision-making, all in the hands of a small number of private actors whose power, as he puts it, now “surpasses that of many Governments.”

That is not theology. That is systems engineering.

Consolidation makes humanity less resilient

The most important thing the Pope has done with this encyclical is name what almost no one in our industry will say out loud: we are sleepwalking into a world where one or two labs become the cognitive infrastructure of every industry on earth. That is not a triumph of innovation. It is the opposite. It is the construction of a brittle global system whose failures will correlate across healthcare, finance, logistics, education, and government simultaneously.

We have already seen the small version of this. A single CrowdStrike update grounded airlines and shut down hospitals worldwide. A single AWS misconfiguration has taken down a third of the internet for an afternoon. Now imagine that the surface area is not just login pages and flight schedules — it is the reasoning engine inside every diagnosis, every contract review, every customer interaction, every line of production code. One model regression. One outage. One policy change. One jailbreak. Each of those becomes a society-wide event.

Resilience, in any well-designed system, is built by distribution — of capability, of data, of authority, of decision-making. The Pope’s principle of subsidiarity says exactly the same thing in the language of Catholic social teaching: decisions should be made at the level closest to those affected. An engineer reading the encyclical without the religious vocabulary would recognize it instantly. He is describing the architecture of a healthy system. Some of us are building toward that. The dominant trajectory of our industry is not.

Data sovereignty is the mechanism

If subsidiarity is the principle, data sovereignty is the mechanism. It is the precondition for everything the Pope is describing — and the precondition for the global AI economy not collapsing into the hands of two or three labs.

A more resilient AI economy is one where hospitals, banks, sovereign nations, and small businesses can run AI against their own data, on their own terms, without surrendering control to two companies whose uptime, pricing, and content policies effectively become global law. That is not a slogan. It is the engineering specification for the world the encyclical is describing.

The alternative is the bleak future we are sleepwalking toward — and it is bleaker than most executives I talk to seem to realize. In that future, entire industries are not transformed by AI. They are vaporized and re-aggregated inside the platforms of a few labs that have absorbed all of the world’s most consequential data along the way. Hospitals stop owning what they know about patients. Banks stop owning what they know about customers. Governments stop owning what they know about citizens. The labs do. And the systemic risk of having that much of the global economy depend on the operational decisions, pricing power, and policy whims of three private companies is something nobody — not the market, not regulators, not boards — has yet honestly priced.

Data sovereignty is what prevents that future. It is what allows AI to be deployed everywhere it can lift human flourishing without compressing the global economy into a single point of failure. It is the only architecture under which the Pope’s vision and a thriving competitive AI market are both achievable at the same time.

Market consolidation has been capitalism’s default in industry after industry. The version of it coming for AI would be bleaker than anything we have actually lived through. However, I don’t believe in fate.

Clearly, this is not anti-AI. It is about an architecture under which the next decade of AI is something we choose, not something done to us.

“Anti-innovation” is the oldest lobbyist play in the book

There is a coordinated narrative — amplified by a handful of large US technology companies and echoed by the current US administration — that European AI regulation will smother innovation and weaken Western competitiveness. Magnifica Humanitas is, in effect, a Vatican-issued rebuke of that narrative.

Every incumbent in every regulated industry has run the same play. Railroads said it. Pharma said it. Finance said it. Social media said it. Any rule that constrains us will destroy innovation, hurt consumers, weaken the economy. It has never been true at the level claimed, and it is not true now. The labs and lobbyists arguing loudest that European AI regulation is anti-innovation are, with striking regularity, the same actors whose market position depends on the opacity that regulation would end.

I am a US tech CEO. I have every commercial reason to want a permissive environment. But I also have eyes. The current US posture — treating European regulators as the threat — is not in the long-term interest of American AI leadership. It is in the short-term interest of a handful of companies. Those two things are not the same.

GDPR was supposed to destroy the European economy. It didn’t. It became the global privacy floor that even American companies now build on. The EU AI Act will follow the same arc. The countries and companies that meet the higher standard early will earn the trust to deploy AI where the value actually lives — healthcare, finance, government, defense. The ones that try to lobby their way out of accountability will discover, eventually, that trust deficits become deployment ceilings.

One more detail is worth noticing. Pope Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical confronting the abuses of the industrial age. He chose that date deliberately. He is telling us, in language anyone paying attention can read, that this moment is the platform-capitalism equivalent of the moment Leo XIII addressed in 1891. The defenders of unchecked industrial capital were on the wrong side of history. The defenders of unchecked AI consolidation will be too.

“Trust me” is no longer enough

Pope Leo writes that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” That sentence is the entire argument. For too long, AI accountability has been a trust-me exercise.

Trust-me cannot work, and it is worth being honest about why. Most people want the best for other people. But people also respond to incentives, and the incentives in our industry push relentlessly toward short-term thinking. And the entities deploying AI at scale are not people. They are corporations. Corporations are, by structure, sociopathic. They behave in their own best interest. They lack empathy. Always. That isn’t a moral failing of any one CEO; it is the design of the legal entity. Asking a corporation to self-regulate against its own incentives is asking water to flow uphill.

On top of that, AI agents misbehave. Guaranteed. Anyone who has put one into production knows this. They hallucinate, they leak, they wander, they call the wrong tool with the wrong argument at the wrong moment. The question is not whether — it is how often, and at what cost.

So the Pope is telling the industry — and we should listen — that accountability now has to be a prove-it exercise. The good news is that we already have the tools. Confidential computing, cryptographic attestation, and verifiable AI architectures make it possible for an enterprise, a regulator, or a citizen to mathematically confirm that an AI system is honoring the rules it claims to honor. This is precisely the work we do at Opaque, and it is the direction the entire industry will move over the next decade — whether voluntarily, or under pressure from regulators in Brussels, Washington, and now Rome.

This is what an honest reading of Magnifica Humanitas asks for. Not a slowdown. Not a retreat. Verifiable trust as a precondition for deployment.

Responsible adoption at agent scale

Agents — as currently architected — misbehave. Regularly. Let’s be absurdly conservative and assume a one-percent failure rate per agent. At that rate, a hundred-agent workflow has a 63 percent chance of a privacy or integrity breach. A thousand-agent system is, statistically, a guaranteed exposure event. You cannot meet the encyclical’s standard of human dignity, transparency, and recourse at that scale with policies and pinky-promises. You meet it by encoding those guarantees into the architecture from day one.

Pope Leo is not asking us to slow down. He is asking us to grow up.

The choice in front of us

Read in full, Magnifica Humanitas is not a sermon against Silicon Valley. It is a roadmap. It tells us what a healthy AI economy looks like: distributed rather than consolidated, transparent rather than opaque, verifiable rather than self-reported, oriented to human dignity rather than narrow profit. Every one of those properties is also what makes a system resilient. The Pope and the systems engineer agree.

What the Pope has done, with this single document, is give every executive and every policymaker in this industry the political and moral cover to build AI the right way. The leaders who treat Magnifica Humanitas as a roadmap will define the next decade. The ones who treat it as a press cycle will be the cautionary tale.

I’m not Catholic, and you don’t need to be to understand what Pope Leo named this document. Magnifica Humanitas — the grandeur of humanity. That phrase names something almost all of us want, whatever vocabulary we use for it. We want AI that elevates humanity, not one that diminishes it. The argument inside the encyclical is an honest map of how to get there.

— Aaron Fulkerson