AI safety advocates are increasingly looking to the Vatican for moral leadership as Pope Leo XIV prepares to release a landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence. Reported by Transformer, the upcoming document is expected to challenge the “deregulatory paradigm” of the current US administration and Silicon Valley accelerationists by framing AI safety not just as a technical issue, but as a moral imperative rooted in human dignity.
The potential intervention comes after a high-profile summit in November where tech executives from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI met with the Pope and safety activists at the Vatican. Sources indicate the forthcoming encyclical will be modeled after Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, addressing the “cognitive industrial revolution” with a call for ethical guardrails and labor protections. This spiritual pivot has created a complex dynamic in Washington, where Vice President JD Vance—a prominent Catholic—finds himself bridging the divide between the administration’s libertarian tech policy and the Church’s call for oversight.
