Pope Leo XIV is set to release a landmark encyclical Monday focused on preserving human dignity in the face of AI.<\/p>\n
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The pope, who has been outspoken about AI\u2019s potential to encroach on human values, will be joined in Vatican City by leading Catholic figures and Chris Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic.<\/p>\n
The document will be Leo\u2019s first encyclical, a special papal letter<\/a> that is sent to all bishops in the Roman Catholic Church. The encyclical, titled \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d comes amid growing backlash to AI\u2019s environmental, social and educational impacts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,\u201d Leo said Friday at a Vatican conference on AI, highlighting \u201cthe unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity and the damage caused when chatbots and other technologies exploit our need for human relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n Leo has made AI a focus of his young tenure. Just days after his election in May 2025, the pope told the College of Cardinals that the church could offer unique advice on how to approach \u201cdevelopments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, the pope said he chose his name partially in homage to Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical \u201cRerum Novarum\u201d shared teachings on how to navigate another transformative period, the industrial revolution.<\/p>\n Last week, Leo XIV also approved the creation<\/a> of a new interdepartmental Vatican commission to discuss and exchange information about AI\u2019s \u201cpotential effects on human beings and on humanity as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n Leo signed the new encyclical on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the signing of \u201cRerum Novarum,\u201d and will release it Monday. In an unusual move, the pope will deliver an address to accompany the encyclical.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we should expect something that is of two minds,\u201d said Charles Camosy, a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America. On one hand, Camosy said the encyclical will continue centuries\u2019 old Catholic teaching and \u201capply the gospel and the church\u2019s tradition to the signs of the times.\u201d<\/p>\n But the encyclical will likely also reference \u201cnew strategies and calls to action based specifically on artificial intelligence,\u201d Camosy wrote in a note to NBC News. \u201cIndeed, the very concept of the human seems up for grabs, and I strongly suspect the encyclical will push back firmly against that.\u201d<\/p>\n Popes often release encyclicals to share the Vatican\u2019s perspective on pressing social issues. Pope Francis, Leo\u2019s predecessor, released four encyclicals during his 12 years at the head of the church, including one on the importance of caring for the environment<\/a>.<\/p>\n Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who will join the pope at Monday\u2019s unveiling, wrote in an X post last Monday<\/a> that \u201cthe questions posed by AI are bigger than the AI community. We urgently need the world \u2014 religions, civil society, academics, governments \u2014 to participate in creating a positive outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic has held a series of events targeting religious leaders across faiths in the past year. In two gatherings during March and April, Anthropic invited Christian leaders to its headquarters to discuss the spiritual development of its AI systems.<\/p>\n Anthropic has said that it trains its AI system, Claude, to conform to a constitution \u2014 what became known as Claude\u2019s \u201csoul\u201d document internally<\/a>, according to Anthropic\u2019s resident philosopher.<\/p>\n This constitution \u201cexpresses and shapes who Claude is,\u201d Anthropic said in a January blog post<\/a> laying out the constitution\u2019s contents, adding that it explains \u201cthe kind of entity we would like Claude to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet some religious experts are skeptical about AI companies\u2019 fierce drive<\/a> to build intelligent systems, the companies\u2019 eager engagement with religious leaders<\/a>, and the optics of hosting a leading AI co-founder at the announcement.<\/p>\n \u201cI think most religious people, and certainly people from most Abrahamic faiths, would object to the idea that a system like Anthropic\u2019s Claude could ever have personhood,\u201d said Will Jones, who leads faith outreach efforts at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to avoiding extreme risks from transformative technologies.<\/p>\n Regarding AI\u2019s potential impact on society, Jones told NBC News that \u201chuman dignity can\u2019t so much be lost, but it can be desecrated and undermined and exploited and abused. Instead, it should be affirmed and celebrated and protected.\u201d Jones said he expects this focus on human virtue and identity to appear throughout the upcoming encyclical.<\/p>\n Many theologians within the Vatican are strongly opposed to granting AI any notion of personhood or allowing that AI systems could have anything like a soul.<\/p>\n Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan friar and one of the pope\u2019s key AI advisers<\/a>, argued in December<\/a> that human intelligence and dignity are unlike any sort of intelligence that could arise from digital minds.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the Christian believer, human intelligence is distinct and sacred, characterized by a capacity for wisdom, moral reasoning, and an orientation toward truth and beauty,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThese are qualities of the soul \u2014 the \u2018divine spark\u2019 \u2014 not the output of probabilistic computation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pope Leo XIV is set to release a landmark encyclical Monday focused on preserving human dignity in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-457667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}