Pope Leo XIV’s AI beacon in the machine age

The encyclical "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence" serves as the Catholic Church's moral framework for the digital age.

It asserts that humans can never be replaced by machines or reduced to algorithms. The effort is lofty but likely to be futile. The Pope probably knows it too, having seen American corporate culture up close growing up in Chicago.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Holy See and Washington are not on the best of terms and the Pope’s stance would likely set off twisters in the American socio-political landscape, the companies and individuals at the frontier of AI technology are unlikely to be deterred by moral guardrails.

Scout was unveiled in early June at Build 2026, Microsoft's flagship annual developer conference. It also showed off a new Surface laptop that runs on Nvidia processors, and office equipment, including a badge, powered by Qualcomm and Mediatek silicon. The desktop device and badge are part of Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform which runs AI agents instead of apps. The system does not run on its iconic Windows but on competitor Google’s Android operating system. That’s a collaboration of five companies which are also rivals.

Google’s parent Alphabet owns DeepMind and AlphaFold, among the most successful AI companies founded by Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis. It is also a major investor in Anthropic, which built the highly popular AI assistant, Claude.

At Build 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, appeared to take a dig at OpenAI’s Sam Altman when he said the company did not believe in “metered AI”. Microsoft is also a major investor in OpenAI and until recently had exclusive access to its models.

Meanwhile, Apple and Meta are developing their own wearables as well as other hardware that would integrate AI. Apple has spliced Google’s Gemini to its devices. All in all, it may not be unfair to say that the Big Tech AI ecosystem is collectively targeting every human on earth. The ambition is to reside in as many devices we use as possible.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and the second richest man on earth, believes that AI models have consumed every bit of data that is publicly available.

Ellison thinks the next big business opportunity lies in private data— companies' internal financial records, customer data, and proprietary systems. Extend Ellison's argument to consumers. A large number of people already spend significant time on their devices.

This data can be harvested with edge computing, where processing happens at the device level itself. That serves two purposes—the energy cost gets distributed and users will pay for data storage and processing because they will own the devices. The data, however, will be available on tap to whichever company owns the model.

Assuming these robots would be taking over everyday chores and errands from humans, it is safe to say that they would need to be trained on personal data of humans.

Sitting next to Pope Leo XIV while he released the encyclical, Chris Olah, the billionaire cofounder of Anthropic, said researchers "keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling" in AI models. They seem to be reflecting on their own thoughts and display an inner world that "functionally mirrors joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease". Olah said, “They are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words”.

Yet, the Pope was categorical that while AI can imitate behaviour and simulate empathy, it does not possess a body, undergo experiences, feel joy or pain, or understand the true meaning of love, friendship, or responsibility. AI sentience is still debatable, but the possibility is not ruled out.

Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things in Latin)—subtitled “On Capital and Labour"—was aimed at truly a capital vs labour moment. The Pope argued that industrial workers were not mere commodities for profit and the working class should be protected. He supported unionising and government intervention to alleviate worker distress. The diminished gravitas of that encyclical is quite evident as globally, the suppliers of capital call the shots. The current one literally is the moment when AI is likely to hijack not only jobs but the soul of humanity itself.

Which is why the Pope is concerned and is batting for putting human dignity ahead of productivity and efficiency.

It is not a battle for the Church to fight but a war for visionary politicians to wage. To be sure, India was among the first countries to pitch for global regulation of artificial intelligence. It speaks to the feebleness of India’s voice that the call went unheeded. The Pope has now called on the collective global political will to act, create international guardrails and binding safeguards to protect humanity from the technology of the future.

He said AI must be disarmed, meaning “discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern…To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity”.

PS: Javier Milei, President of Argentina, which is predominantly Roman Catholic, has proposed legislation to create non-human corporations that can legally own assets, enter contracts, and manage daily operations via AI algorithms without requiring human shareholders or traditional board members. Incidentally, Peter Thiel, cofounder of Paypal and Palantir, who controversially suggested that Pope Leo XIV could be the anti-Christ, has recently relocated to Argentina.

Dinesh Narayanan is a New Delhi-based journalist, columnist, and author of ‘The RSS and the Making of the Deep Nation'.