The Vatican’s Encyclical on AI and Technological Power
The Vatican recently released a groundbreaking encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas, which, while framed in the language of artificial intelligence, primarily addresses the deeper political economy surrounding technological dominance. The document highlights how AI tends to concentrate power among those already possessing significant economic resources, technical expertise, and access to data. This consolidation allows a narrow elite to control information flows, influence democratic institutions, and steer economic systems to their advantage. Importantly, the structural issues it outlines are not new; they predate modern AI technologies, Silicon Valley, and even the integrated circuit. Instead, the encyclical points to an enduring pattern of concentrated power.
The document beneath the document
Although Magnifica Humanitas officially centers on safeguarding human dignity in the age of AI, this framing serves more as an entry point than the core thesis. The encyclical recognizes that private technology firms now wield capacities that often surpass those of many governments, an institutional reality rather than a purely theological one. This observation underscores a shift in power dynamics where technological capabilities translate directly into political and economic influence.
The 1891 parallel is deliberate
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, addressing the concentration of industrial power, labor conditions, and the limits of laissez-faire capitalism during the first industrial revolution. Magnifica Humanitas marks the 135th anniversary of that seminal document and explicitly draws a line connecting the two. It describes our current era as a fundamental historical shift requiring the same level of structural discernment first applied to the factory system over a century ago.
The encyclical’s implication is clear and unsentimental: each technological revolution produces a small class of owners who accumulate disproportionate power, enabling them to shape the very rules meant to regulate them. Having observed this cycle through three previous technological epochs, the Vatican now identifies a fourth cycle unfolding in the AI era.
The regulatory capture in plain sight
The timing of the encyclical is telling. It was published just days after former President Donald Trump delayed signing an executive order that would have mandated government oversight of new AI models before their release. This delay came at the urging of venture capitalist David Sacks, among others. Concurrently, hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed from technology executives into super PACs lobbying against AI regulation at both state and federal levels. The encyclical’s argument—that technical prowess should not automatically translate into governing authority—lands at a moment when proposed regulatory mechanisms are being shelved under industry pressure. Notably, the document refrains from naming individuals like Sacks but makes the underlying critique unmistakably clear.
The encyclical’s discussion on ‘disarmament’ challenges dominant industry narratives that frontier AI developers should self-regulate, citing competition with China and rapid technological advances as reasons to exclude external oversight. This argument, prevalent in lobbying efforts in Washington and Brussels, is framed by the Vatican as a fundamental category error—confusing technical capability with legitimate governance.
This pattern extends to institutions ostensibly created for oversight. Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza has pointed out how AI-generated misinformation threatens truth recognition and democratic processes. Yet, this insight is delivered from within the Meta Oversight Board—an entity funded and established by Meta, one of the very companies the encyclical implicitly critiques. This paradox highlights just how deeply industry capture permeates AI governance structures, underscoring the encyclical’s core concern about who ultimately writes the rules.
Why the framing matters
What sets Magnifica Humanitas apart is its refusal to accept the dominant framing promoted by AI companies and their lobbyists. Rather than treating AI as a standalone technology requiring specialized ethical frameworks, the Vatican situates it within a recurring historical pattern: the distribution of benefits—and harms—hinges entirely on who owns the underlying infrastructure and controls regulatory mechanisms.
The encyclical insists that governance questions must come before technical capability questions. This approach is rare in mainstream trade and technology media, which often segregate debates on AI capabilities, regulatory delays, and political finance flows. By placing these issues together, the Vatican offers a holistic critique of the current AI ecosystem, emphasizing that the political economy of power concentration is the central challenge of our time.
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