Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Warns AI Is an Invisible Infrastructure Reshaping Human Dignity
An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. In the encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas*, the first signed by Pope Leo XIV and published on May 25, artificial intelligence is not viewed as just another technology; it is part of the invisible infrastructure of our contemporary daily lives. But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes—while updating it—the *Rerum Novarum* of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary.
A New Industrial Revolution in Algorithms
That earlier encyclical addressed the question of labor at the height of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. If the “res novae” of that time were factories, labor, and industrial capitalism, today the new issues revolve around digital platforms, algorithms, data, and automation systems that are reshaping power, the economy, and social relations. For this reason, the encyclical does not present itself as a technical text about innovation, but rather as an attempt to interpret the digital transformation in light of human dignity and the common good. Technology, the Pope writes, is not evil in itself; on the contrary, it belongs to human history and creativity. But the current situation is different in both scale and depth: “Never has humanity had so much power over itself,” the text observes, describing technologies that now shape decisionmaking processes, the collective imagination, and social life in an increasingly pervasive way. It is from this point that Robert Francis Prevost chose to begin: from the growing concentration of power exercised through systems that are increasingly opaque yet increasingly decisive, and from the question that runs throughout the encyclical: What remains of human dignity, the protection of truth, work, social justice, and peace when decisions are transferred into algorithmic logic?
Disarming the Algorithmic Race
In the encyclical there is an expression that becomes the key to interpreting the entire scenario: “disarming technology.” The meaning is far removed from any attempt to slow the development of artificial intelligence or to deny its potentially transformative impact for good. For Robert Francis Prevost, disarming AI means preventing it from becoming a form of power capable of dominating human existence. For Leo XIV, the point is not the technology itself, then, but its organization and application. AI, the pope writes, is part of a global race today to the “highest-performing algorithm” and the “largest data center,” where competitive advantage also becomes geopolitical. In this context, a few players concentrate digital infrastructure, data, and computing capacity, which affects information, economics, and even democracy. Disarming means breaking this equation between technical power and the right to govern. “As happens with every major technological turning point, AI tends above all to increase the power of those who already possess economic resources and access to data,” the pontiff explains. In explicit terms, the encyclical states that it is not enough merely to regulate technology: It must be taken away from monopolies, made transparent and open to challenge—that is, made “habitable” by a plurality of actors. Above all, AI must be prevented from becoming an instrument of economic, political, or military domination by a select few. This is not a moral metaphor: It is a call to prevent the logic of competition from transforming a shared infrastructure into a system of control.
Truth and Disinformation in Algorithmic Reality
If technology concentrates power, one of the first concrete effects concerns the way in which collective truth is formed. The encyclical addresses the issue of disinformation, but in a decidedly deeper way because it examines the structural conditions that produce it. The text argues that when algorithms select and rank information, they do not simply mirror reality—they actively construct what is visible, credible, and widely shared. This mediation, the Pope warns, can distort public discourse and erode the foundations of shared understanding, especially when algorithmic systems are designed primarily for engagement or profit rather than accuracy or the common good. The encyclical does not propose a simplistic return to pre-digital information flows, but calls for a re-examination of the values embedded in the systems that now curate collective knowledge. It asks who decides what is amplified, who profits from the architecture of attention, and what happens to human autonomy when the boundaries of truth are increasingly drawn by code rather than by reasoned debate.
Market Context
Bitcoin is trading at $75,704 as of May 26, 2026, down 2.1 percent in the last 24 hours. Ethereum is at $2,068.86, down 2.0 percent in the same period. The cryptocurrency market continues to reflect the broader digital infrastructure that the encyclical critiques, where a small number of players control vast computing capacity, data flows, and network effects. The document’s call for transparency and distributed governance resonates with debates inside the crypto industry about decentralization, but the current market data shows a landscape still dominated by concentrated mining pools, exchange liquidity, and regulatory arbitrage.