Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" Targets AI Regulation, Military AI, and Corporate Accountability

Summary

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," on May 25, framing AI as a new industrial revolution requiring binding ethical guardrails, stricter state and international regulation, and structural limits on private control of the technology. Signed on May 15 (the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum on industrial labor), the document explicitly invokes the comparison to position AI governa