VATICAN CITY – Pope Leo XIV is using his first social encyclical to warn that artificial intelligence could become a tool for surveillance, social control and automated warfare if left unchecked by ethical and political limits — and the document’s moral framework lands with particular force on models of AI governance built around state control, behavioral management and the concentration of technological power.
In Magnifica Humanitas, the pope argues that AI is never neutral because it reflects the values and interests of those who design, finance and control it. The debate over AI ethics in Western democracies — already well-documented, legally contested and politically visible — is in many ways the easier part of this story. The more underexplored question the encyclical raises is what it means for authoritarian AI models, and above all for China’s.
Why it matters: Leo XIV frames AI not just as a tech issue, but as a political and moral struggle over freedom, human dignity and the concentration of power — one that cuts across both private and state actors, but whose implications are sharpest where accountability is structurally absent.
- The encyclical implicitly challenges AI systems built around surveillance, profiling and behavioral management — a description that fits China’s model more precisely than it fits the fragmented, legally contested landscape of Western Big Tech.
- It also warns against autonomous military robotics and AI-assisted targeting systems, as the global race toward battlefield automation accelerates.
The big picture: Leo XIV describes AI as the defining res novae of the digital era, comparable to the industrial transformations that shaped modern Catholic social doctrine. But the encyclical is notably clear-eyed about where power actually sits.
- The pope warns explicitly that today’s most consequential AI systems are increasingly controlled by powerful states and transnational private actors — both are named as risks.
- His critique of Western Big Tech is sharp: the encyclical argues that the concentration of data, infrastructure and computational capacity in the hands of a few private corporations is itself a threat to the common good, democratic accountability and individual freedom.
- But the encyclical’s framework — built around transparency, independent oversight, accountability and the inviolable dignity of the individual — is structurally harder to apply where those mechanisms do not exist by design.
Zoom in: China as the elephant in the room. Without directly naming China, Magnifica Humanitas lays out a moral framework that is difficult to reconcile with state-led AI ecosystems built around surveillance, predictive profiling and centralized political control.
- Leo XIV warns repeatedly against systems that use mass data extraction and algorithmic decision-making to classify, manage and control human beings — and against the use of AI to suppress dissent, enforce conformity and entrench existing power structures.
- He also develops the concept of “digital colonialism”: the use of data infrastructures, algorithmic platforms and AI-powered systems to extract strategic leverage over populations and territories — what he calls the new “rare earths” of geopolitical power.
- That framing maps directly onto documented practices — from China’s Social Credit System to the export of Chinese surveillance infrastructure across the Global South, where governments have acquired AI-powered tools for population monitoring with few strings attached.
- The timing matters. The encyclical arrives as Washington and Beijing increasingly frame AI as a strategic competition tied to economic dominance, military power and political influence — and as the governance gap between the two models widens rather than narrows.
War and robots. The military dimension runs throughout the encyclical and acquires particular urgency in the current strategic landscape.
- Leo XIV argues that no algorithm can make war morally acceptable — and that lethal or irreversible decisions cannot be delegated to automated systems, however sophisticated.
- The warning comes as China has recently showcased increasingly advanced autonomous military capabilities, and as multiple actors accelerate investment in AI-assisted targeting, drone warfare and battlefield automation.
- The Vatican’s core concern is the erosion of human moral responsibility in warfare: when decisions are made by systems rather than people, accountability dissolves — and with it, the ethical limits that constrain the use of force.
Between the lines: The encyclical’s sharpest analytical move is to reframe the AI debate away from technology policy and toward political anthropology.
- Leo XIV argues that the legitimacy of any AI system cannot be measured by efficiency or capability alone — the central question is whether it expands or diminishes authentic human freedom.
- That principle underpins his call to “disarm” AI: stripping the technology of its role as a tool for domination, coercion and social engineering — whether wielded by corporations or by states.
- Where Western democracies offer at least the institutional possibility of contestation, legal challenge and political correction, China’s AI governance model is structured around the opposite premise: that technological systems serve state priorities, and that individual freedom is a variable to be managed, not a value to be protected.
The bottom line: Magnifica Humanitas is not a simple brief against China — and it would be a misreading to treat it as one. The encyclical is equally critical of Western tech monopolies and the concentration of private power. But its moral framework, built around accountability, transparency, human dignity and the right to contest automated decisions, describes a standard that democratic systems at least aspire to meet. For China’s model of AI governance, it describes something closer to a structural incompatibility.
