Over the past year, Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump have clashed several times in the press, including on the Iran War, nuclear weapons, and immigration. On Monday, Leo potentially opened a new front: AI. 

Leo’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas—a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics about preserving dignity in a tech age—never mentions Trump at all. But across many sections, Leo offers pointed recommendations for reining in AI that directly contrast with theTrump’s administration embrace of the tech industry in his second term. 

While the pope has no direct political power, his essay could nevertheless have political impact. “I think that what the pope is trying to tell us is that the spiritual has political dimensions,” says Michael Toscano, a Catholic and the director of the Family First Technology Initiative. “I believe the pope is not interested in just issuing an encyclical, but leading the Church into a time of what he called ‘digital sobriety.’” 

Disarming the arms race

The main lens through which the Trump administration has approached AI is the so-called “arms race” with China. Last week, Trump delayed signing an executive order which called for pre-deployment testing of AI, explaining that he didn’t “want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of” the U.S. maintaining its technological lead over China in the race to build powerful AI systems. This viewpoint has been driven hard by top technologists; Politico reported that Trump pulled the EO after hearing concerns directly from the industry. 

In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo criticizes this worldview, which he argues is part of a larger “remote clash between opposing imperialisms, between powers that wish to preserve their supremacy.” He laments that “there seems to be no limit to the race—driven by a dehumanizing ambition—to develop ever more powerful technologies or to secure control over them.” 

Instead of propagating a race, Leo argues for “disarming” AI. This does not mean that he wants a technological pause—as some have called for in the past—but rather a slowing of adoption to allow ethics, governance, and public oversight to keep pace with the technology. 

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate.” 

Lack of government oversight

Because Trump believes the U.S. needs to build powerful AI before China does, he has mostly advocated for a hands-off approach when it comes to regulation. In January 2025, he repealed Biden’s more cautious executive order on AI, later characterizing it as an “attempt to paralyze this industry.” His administration, in contrast, would work to “remove barriers to United States AI leadership.” 

Leo, on the other hand, stresses the need for a “political system that does not abdicate its responsibility” around tech regulation. He then calls on governments to impose specific guardrails: to oversee algorithms and data management; to protect AI from taking jobs from humans; to tax those who have accrued inordinate wealth and power; and to protect minors from digital harm. 

To Michael Baggot, a professor at the Regina Apostolorum and the Angelicum in Rome, the specificity of Leo’s policy language is striking. “The document does not remain at the level of moral exhortation,” he says. “It gives these criteria of the tradition of Catholic social teaching and then begins to apply them to very specific aspects—in our relationships, in the economy, work, and to promote peace rather than…means of dominance and destruction.” 

While Trump has encouraged and befriended executives at the top AI companies, Leo condemns the consolidated corporate power of the industry. “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,” he writes. “What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating.” 

David Sacks—the co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—pushed back on Leo’s call for regulation on X. “If we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell foretold in 1984?” he wrote. 

Autonomous weapons

Another major AI flash point that Leo differs with the Trump administration on is the use of AI in war. In February, Trump’s Pentagon clashed with Anthropic over the company’s attempt to prevent its technology from being used by the government for piloting autonomous weapons or carrying out mass surveillance. 

Leo writes that "it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems." He contends that AI could contribute to an increasing “normalization of war,” in part because its ability to allow armies to attack others without seeing their victims’ faces “lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”

In April, when J.D. Vance was asked about the pope’s critiques of the Iran War, Vance invoked the “just war” theory—a Catholic framework long used to determine when armed conflict is morally permissible. In the encyclical, Leo offers a direct rebuttal to the “just war” theory by calling it “outdated.” The rise of AI weapons, he argues, has contributed to making the traditional ethical criteria for restraint in war impossible to uphold. 

When Leo released Magnifica Humanitas, he was joined onstage by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the company that sued the Trump administration after the Pentagon blacklisted it for refusing to let its AI be used in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. That Leo chose to platform a representative of the AI company most directly at odds with the Trump administration is notable in itself. 

“There was no illusion of Anthropic being a perfectly Catholic company, but it's key that the Church is able to dialogue and contribute her wisdom tradition to orienting these key conversations,” says Baggot. 

Potential impact

Whether Pope Leo’s encyclical actually has an impact on the direction of AI is very much to be determined. Many Catholics hold powerful positions in America, including Vice President J.D. Vance, who told NBC News on Tuesday that the parts of the essay he read were “very profound.” 

AI “raises such profound questions for how we interact with one another, what kind of skills we need in the workforce, the kind of wars that we’ll fight, and how we’ll fight our wars,” Vance said. “I think we really need moral leadership to think through those questions, and that’s exactly what the Church is the best leader to do.”

Over time, Leo’s essay could influence an increasing number of Catholics in America, about half of whom are conservative, according to a 2020 Pew poll. Toscano expects the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to eventually implement the text across their dioceses and parishes, and for pastors to start teaching based on its tenets. He believes that some Catholic orders may go even further and advise digital fasting. 

“It would be a gargantuan spiritual effort,” Toscano says. “But if the Church can institutionalize practices which limit the presence of screens—which is currently the primary mode by which people engage in artificial intelligence—I think that would put a check on the reach of AI.”