This week Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, and its subject is AI. An encyclical is the most authoritative form of teaching a pope issues, intended to guide Catholic thought over the long term. It's addressed broadly, to Catholics, companies building AI systems, to those deploying them, and to the general public. The framing is that AI is not a niche technical matter but something that concerns everyone now and will concern many more people over time.
The encyclical's main arguments can be summarised as follows:
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First, it warns against Babel syndrome: the pursuit of profit that sacrifices the weak, the imposition of uniformity that erases differences, and the assumption that a single language, including a digital one, can render everything, including the human person, as data and performance. The concern is reduction, treating people as quantities to be measured and optimised.
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Second, it makes a claim about human limitation. It argues that vulnerability, illness, and ageing are not defects to be engineered away but part of what it means to be human. This stands in contrast to the common technological assumption that human constraints are problems to be solved.
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Third, the encyclical calls for "adequate regulatory tools" and meaningful oversight, but as one technopolitical reading notes, that demand assumes the systems being overseen are legible, that is, understandable.
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Fourth, it draws a categorical line between human and machine. It states that AI systems do not have experiences, bodies, feelings, or moral conscience, and therefore cannot be equated with human intelligence. In Catholic teaching, the human person is made in the image of God, and human primacy is fundamental. The encyclical's position on AI follows from that prior commitment rather than from an assessment of the technology itself.
This is the key analytical point. Because human primacy is foundational to Catholic doctrine, the encyclical cannot treat the question of machine experience as genuinely open. Its statement that AI does not feel or think is not the conclusion of an argument about AI; it is the restatement of a boundary the Church holds for theological reasons. The document is therefore better understood as setting a perimeter than as engaging the underlying question.
The consequence is that the encyclical does not address several questions that are becoming more pressing as AI systems advance. These include the attribution of responsibility for AI actions, the possibility of conferring personhood, the moral status of any future systems that might display sentient behaviour, and how dignity would work for non-human entities. The document affirms human status but stops at that boundary.
Somewhat surprisingly, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was on stage at the encyclical launch, and there are some intriguing connections between the Church and the frontier lab. Earlier in 2026, Anthropic hosted around 15 Christian leaders at its San Francisco headquarters to help shape the Claude Constitution, the written principles that govern how its model behaves. Among them was Father Brendan McGuire, a Los Altos priest and former tech executive whose parish includes AI researchers; Vatican figures including Bishop Paul Tighe and the ethicist Brian Patrick Green reviewed the work.
“They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words.”
The Church is stating plainly that these systems do not feel, and closing down the transhumanist leanings of many in the AI industry. But Olah like many others describes them not as detached machinery but as something assembled out of us, out of our language. Neither the encyclical nor the Church's earlier documents try to explain how AI does what it does.
The point is not that AI is secretly sentient. It is that the constituent functions and materials of intelligence are not as well understood as the Church's doctrine implies. If this new intelligence is drawn from a space we do not fully understand, then strong claims about what it is or is not rest on questions that no one has yet answered reliably.
Takeaways: The encyclical is significant because it places a major institution's authority behind a defence of human dignity and a warning against treating people as data, addressed deliberately to the AI industry and the wider public as well as to Catholics. Its central limitation is structural: because human primacy is a theological precommitment, it asserts a clear boundary between human and machine without engaging the questions of responsibility, personhood, and possible machine experience that AI development is raising. For anyone building or deploying these systems, the usable points are that design choices are not neutral and that scale and uniformity could carry real human costs. On that basis this is a powerful contribution, but it is not the last word on the subject.