WORLD VIEW
12 June 2026
The papal letter goes beyond a religious document and diagnoses a failure in AI governance that the scientific community should heed.
By
Paolo Benanti
Paolo Benanti is a professor of ethics of technology and moral philosophy at LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy.
Theologian Paolo Benanti sees papal encyclicals as a signal for society as a whole. Credit: Massimo Di Vita/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty
On 15 May, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical letter, titled Magnifica humanitas (‘magnificent humanity’ in Latin). In it, he chose to warn society about artificial intelligence.
The encyclical — an official format once used to address Roman Catholic bishops but now intended as a moral statement for all — is a diagnosis of who governs AI and on whose behalf (see go.nature.com/3qxctvc ). Leo XIV maps the unprecedented ways in which AI is concentrating power. He raises concerns that a handful of private actors are making crucial decisions about the values encoded in systems used by billions of people without democratic mandate and beyond national regulatory frameworks.
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The document discusses autonomous weapons, the destabilization of democratic discourse and the displacement of professions through AI use. It highlights the risk of ‘algocracy’ — a system of governance in which algorithms make decisions that were previously made by humans. For example, predictive algorithms are used in some jurisdictions to inform policing strategies and sentencing decisions.
Magnifica humanitas deserves serious attention from the scientific community. This is not because the Pope has legal or regulatory authority over AI development — he doesn’t — but because the document flags a structural problem that continues to be understated. The capacity to shape how AI systems reason, what they optimize for and whose values they embed is a political issue. Deferring to self-regulation of AI — the prevailing approach in the United States, for example, which relies mainly on voluntary ethics commitments rather than on enforceable regulations — is more an abdication of responsibility than governance. Some scientists, by maintaining their studied neutrality, are complicit in this.
Why should scientists pay attention to a religious text when academic and policy reports have already flagged such concerns? When the Catholic Church invests the full apparatus of its teaching authority in a social question, it is often because secular institutions — universities, parliaments, scientific academies — have been unable or unwilling to address a crack in the foundations of human coexistence. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII warned in 1891 of the impact of automation, which he felt could reduce workers to interchangeable commodities. Encyclicals of the 1930s responded to the rise of totalitarianism, including fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. Magnifica humanitas is ringing the same civilizational alarm bell.
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Nature 654 , 573 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01876-z
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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