Magnifica machinae: Leo XIV asks who owns the machine

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On: Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas. Encyclical letter on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, 15 May 2026. .

In May, the first encyclical on artificial intelligence reached the newspapers under two headlines: the Pope against killer robots, and the Pope against transhumanism. Both are accurate and neither is the point. The reason to read it now, four months later, is a paragraph that went unnoticed in May and that in September reads as if it had been written for this week. In §106, Leo XIV calls for “prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI”. In §107 he says who should set that pace: “a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating”. On 12 September the executives of the frontier labs asked to go slower, and . They decided it themselves, by announcement, over a weekend. The encyclical had already set out the difference between the two pauses, and that difference is the document’s thesis: what matters is not the speed but who holds the brake.¹

An encyclical about property

Rerum Novarum turns one hundred and thirty-five this year, and Leo XIV chose his name with it in mind. The comparison is the one the text itself proposes, and it deserves to be taken seriously. In 1891, Leo XIII did not write a treatise on the steam engine. He wrote about wages, workers’ associations and the social function of property: that is, about whom the factory belonged to and what was owed to those who worked in it. Magnifica humanitas does the same with AI. It explicitly declines to offer “a comprehensive treatment of artificial intelligence” (§97) and devotes its best pages to the question of ownership.

The sentence that organizes everything is in §9: technology “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”. The consequence arrives in §67, and it is the strongest doctrinal move in the document. The universal destination of goods is the principle that subordinates all private property to common use, and among the goods it covers the encyclical now includes “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data”. §108 says it plainly: data “is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few”, and it must be managed “as a common or shared good”. When the magisterium writes that “ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated”, it is not offering an opinion on AI ethics. It is adding a new class of goods to a doctrine of property that has more than a century of case law, trade unions and cooperatives behind it.

The diagnosis of power that underpins all this is equally explicit. In the past, says §5, it was the State that guided innovation; today the main drivers are “private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments”. Technological power takes on “an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good”.

Subsidiarity turned around

The most original paragraph in the document is §71, and it has to be read with the history of the word in mind. Subsidiarity is the principle that what individuals, families and communities can do should not be absorbed by a higher authority. For decades it was used mainly against the State, and much liberal thought adopted it as an argument for shrinking the State. The encyclical turns it around: “in the context of the digital revolution”, it says, “the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life”. The level that “monopolizes expertise, data and decision-making authority” consists of companies and platforms. Subsidiarity therefore demands what it would demand of any absorbing power: “independent checks, transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse”.

§69 also closes the door on the comfortable reading: “subsidiarity does not justify the State’s disengagement, but rather guides its actions”. And §109 adds a point that anyone who has taken part in a public consultation will recognize. Protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections means not “confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere”. That is an exact description of the governance model we discussed last week, the questionnaire that measures whether a country is ready to receive what is decided somewhere else.

The biblical image the encyclical chooses for all this says more than it seems to. Against Babel, with its “single language, a single technology, a single direction” (§7), it sets Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Nehemiah “did not impose solutions from above” and assigned each family “a section of the wall to rebuild” (§8). In another vocabulary, that is a theory of polycentric governance. Many centers of decision, each responsible for what it knows, all coordinated around a common good. It is what Elinor Ostrom found at work in irrigation systems and fisheries, and what §153 turns into policy when it says that “no single model of change or universal solution exists” and calls for “local initiatives, progressive redistribution and new rights of access to essential goods”.

Alignment is also up for a vote

If there is one sentence in the document the industry should read twice, it is this one from §107: “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.” The full paragraph takes on the frontier’s vocabulary directly. It is not enough to call for “the moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values” without “the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice”. Otherwise, “those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems”.

It is worth reading alongside the Humanist AI Code of Conduct that Microsoft published on 14 September, and the constitutions other companies use to describe the values of their models. These are serious documents, and some of them are good. The encyclical does not dispute their content but their provenance: a code of values drafted by the company that trains the model is, however good, a morality determined by a few. Coming from an institution that for centuries presented itself as the guardian of morality, the sentence has something of self-criticism about it, and that makes it weigh more.

§110 carries the argument to the document’s favorite word. “Disarming AI” means taking it out of a race that “today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon”, the race for the most powerful algorithm and the largest dataset. It means “discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern”. It also means “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate”. That is the document’s political program. And the section on autonomous weapons, the one that made the headlines, is its most extreme application: “it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems” (§198).

The view from below

The part we most want to celebrate is in the fourth chapter, and the encyclical opens it with a sentence that deserves to last: “Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical” (§173). Behind every seemingly instant response there is “a long chain of mediation”, and above all there are people. There are millions of workers in data labeling, content moderation and model training, “young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages”. And there are children and adolescents crushing, in dangerous conditions, the materials from which rare earths are extracted: “the bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly”.

§178 goes further and uses the word. Colonialism “no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data”, above all in regions “marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance”. Health data, epidemiological profiles and genetic maps are “often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation”, and they have become “the new ‘rare earths’ of power”. The consequence is stated as a program: “restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.”

Anyone who has read the critical literature of the last decade will recognize the vocabulary: data colonialism, ghost work, the extractive chain that runs from the mine to the data center.² That this agenda enters the language of an encyclical has practical consequences that a paper does not have. It is read in parishes, schools and denominational universities across the continent, and ministers who will never read Couldry and Mejias can quote it. There is also a gesture that should not be passed over: in §176, Leo XIV asks forgiveness on behalf of the Church because the Apostolic See, in the early modern period, legitimized the enslavement of “infidels”. A text that acknowledges having come late to one form of slavery is better placed than almost any other to warn that the next one is being built out of supply chains.

Where the encyclical falls short

The first objection is about framing. In Magnifica humanitas the Global South appears as the place of harm and almost never as the place of alternatives. The phrase occurs only once, in §204, in connection with military spending. The rest is a geography of victims: “places of precarious labor, and hotbeds of instability” (§153), mines, extracted territories. The criticism is fair and the facts are true, but half the picture is missing. The South is not just waiting to get its data back: it is already building its own sections of wall. Masakhane built a research community for African-language processing that the frontier companies had no interest in building. SciELO since 1997, and AmeliCA later, sustain a model of open-access, non-commercial, institution-governed scholarly publishing that the North is only now debating. Latin American public universities are building corpora and models in languages no commercial lab will prioritize. Nehemiah would have gone to see who was already putting up wall before calling the families together.

The second is more technical and more important. The encyclical is clear about the geography of the problem. §109 calls for “questioning the global distribution of power that decides who in fact can train these models and who is merely subjected to them”. But when it turns to solutions, its vocabulary is that of access: “ensuring universal access to both technologies and the education needed to use them” (§109), “investments in skills, infrastructure and essential services” (§164). Having access to a model trained elsewhere, in another language and with other values, is not the same as having the capacity to build, audit or adapt it. The document says nothing about open models, public compute, or licenses that allow people to study and modify what they use. These are precisely the instruments that redistribute the capacity to train that §109 says it wants to redistribute. The door is left open, since “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate” (§110) describes rather well what an open-weights model does, but the document does not walk through it.

The third is environmental. §101 acknowledges that current systems “require enormous amounts of energy and water”. It is a single paragraph, and the remedy it proposes is to “develop more sustainable technological solutions”. An encyclical written against the technocratic paradigm entrusts technology with fixing its own footprint. Laudato si’ had gone much further, and the territories of the South now competing to host data centers by offering cheap water and energy would have needed more than a paragraph.

The fourth is enforcement, and the encyclical is aware of it. §72 charges “States and transnational institutions” with ensuring fair rules and effective safeguards; §201 finds that those same institutions “appear to have been weakened” and that the current order is “a disorderly and conflict-ridden multipolarism”. Someone has to pay for the independent checks of §71, and someone has to be able to sanction those who refuse them. The document asks a great deal of a system that it itself describes as unable to deliver, and it leaves open what the plan is in the meantime.³

The Magnificat as a program

The encyclical ends with Mary’s canticle, and not by chance: the “magnificent humanity” of the title was already pointing there. §244 presents it as an invitation “to look at the world from a lower position: through the eyes of those who suffer rather than the mighty”. The canticle itself, in Luke 1:52-53, is the most redistributive passage in the Gospels: he has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Rerum Novarum did not change the world because of what it said. It changed it because for decades there were trade unions, cooperatives and parties that read it as a program and not as a prayer, and §155 itself acknowledges as much. The question Magnifica humanitas leaves is not whether it is right. On what matters, it is more right than anyone expected. The question is who will read it that way this time: the data labelers §173 describes, who barely have unions; the data cooperatives that are still experiments; the public universities building models on shrinking budgets. If those actors do not exist or do not organize, the document will stand as a good description of what happened. If they do organize, they will find in it something they have not had until now: a moral authority with planetary reach saying, in so many words, that data does not belong to whoever collects it.

Coda: habemus machinam

The image that closes this post proposes a thought experiment the encyclical does not raise, but answers without meaning to. Could a language model be pope? The canonical answer is short and has nothing to do with intelligence. The pope is the bishop of Rome, only a baptized male validly receives sacred ordination (canon 1024), and baptism is administered to a body. The encyclical would say the same at greater length: these systems “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain” (§99). The more interesting question is a different one: could a model write Magnifica humanitas? Probably yes, or something very like it. The magisterium is, in a fairly literal sense, a corpus that is read in the light of itself, and every encyclical quotes the ones before it. A model trained on one hundred and thirty-five years of social teaching would effortlessly produce a plausible text on AI, with the same principles, the same quotations from Paul VI and the same tone.

What that model could not write is §176. A system trained on eighteen centuries of ecclesiastical texts would have faithfully reproduced the toleration of slavery, because that was the pattern in the corpus. The condemnation came when someone broke the continuity. The apology comes now because there is someone who can carry that guilt on behalf of an institution that has a memory and has a body. The encyclical sums it up in a line that may be its best argument against substitution: “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change” (§128). A model can be aligned; it cannot ask for forgiveness. One irony remains, and the image does not hide it. The scene it shows, a college of a little over a hundred electors who decide in secret and announce the result with smoke, looks a good deal like what §107 calls a morality determined by a few. The “examen for the Church” in §86-89 seems prepared to accept it.

Habemus machinam.

Quotations follow the official English translation published by the Holy See, cited by paragraph number. Where it matters, it is worth checking against other language versions: in §178, for instance, the English text speaks of restoring data “to individuals”, while the Spanish and Portuguese versions say “to peoples”, which is a collective and more political reading. ↩︎
The encyclical does not cite any of the authors who developed these categories. Its notes refer almost exclusively to the magisterium, the International Theological Commission and the note Antiqua et nova (2025), on which it relies for the technical material. The few outside voices are classics such as Guardini, Arendt, Frankl and Tolkien. Data colonialism has had a name since Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias’s The Costs of Connection (2019), and Paola Ricaurte developed it from Latin America the same year. The invisible labor of data labeling was documented by Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri in Ghost Work (2019), and the chain that runs from the mine to the model is in Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (2021). It is a striking omission in a document that in §23 calls the contribution of the social sciences “essential”. It also has a consequence: readers who want to go deeper will not find in the notes a way into the literature that has already done the work. ↩︎
An objection every reader will think of, and one the encyclical partly anticipates. The institution preaching subsidiarity, participation and accountability is one of the most centralized in the world. The document knows this and devotes a whole section, “An examen for the Church” (§86-89), to demanding of itself “genuine, rather than merely nominal, participatory bodies”, transparency and the evaluation of those who hold responsibility. In §138 it thanks the journalists who brought abuses to light. That is more than corporate codes of conduct usually do. But where institutional interest appears, it shows: in the section on education, §144 moves from diagnosing unequal access to asking for State support for private institutions as well, and to championing Catholic schools in particular. ↩︎

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