The Pope Used AI?

The Pope recently put out his first big letter on artificial intelligence (Magnifica Humanitas, 25 May 2026). It is a document that runs over 42,000 words and is not a casual papal letter, by any means, and it represents one of the most significant forms of teaching a Pope issues.

Within a few days of its release, somebody ran the whole document through an AI-detector tool and the tool decided that a machine had probably written portions of it. It turns out an AI-company cofounder (Chris Olah of Anthropic) even helped present it at the Vatican, and the internet did what the internet always does. It screamed “Gotcha!” to the Pope and called out the hypocrisy of the papal letter writer(s) using AI to write about the dangers of AI.

I've been sitting with both the release of the letter and that particular reaction for a couple of weeks, and I think we've got it almost exactly backwards. I don't think that's the embarrassing part of this story; I think it might be the most honest part of it.

If you've been feeling a little seasick lately, a little unsure about what's real and who actually made the thing in front of you (no matter what the thing is), I don't think that's you being dramatic, I think it’s you trying to keep up in a world that is making it harder for any of us to determine what’s real and what’s not.

Given that, I want to make the case for why the “Gotcha!” is the wrong read on all of this. To do that, we need to talk for a minute about what the Pope actually said, because it's better than the headlines made it sound.

For the uninitiated, the current Pope is named Leo XIV, and this is his first encyclical, which is the heaviest, most deliberate kind of teaching a Pope does. This encyclical is called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) and he did something clever with the timing: Pope Leo dated this current encyclical to line up with a famous letter from 1891, written by the last Pope named Leo (Pope Leo XIII), about the Industrial Revolution, titled Rerum Novarum (Of New Things). At that time, the dominant question was, “What happens to workers when the machine shows up in the factory?” Today, the question is, “What happens to people when the machine shows up in the mind?”

What is crazy is that the first lines of Rerum Novarum ("Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine," roughly "Once the desire for new things had been aroused") read practically the same today as they did back then. The encyclicals are a hundred and thirty-five years apart, but each echoes similar themes.

What I appreciate most about the encyclical released last week is that Pope Leo refused to answer the obvious (and I think wrong) question. Everyone wanted to know if he was for AI or against it, but that wasn’t the point at all. The question he asked instead was sharper: Do we stay in charge of these tools, or do they quietly start running us?

For me and my work? That is THE question because I strongly believe humans need to stay in charge of these tools, leverage them for the greater good, and draw sharp lines so they don’t quietly start running us (any more than they already do!).

Pope Leo returns to one image in his letter and the more I sit with it, the more I think it's the whole argument in miniature. He says we're standing between two options, and he reaches back to the Bible to draw them.

The first is the story of Babel. You might remember that’s the story of the people who decided to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens as a monument to how impressive they are, a single language and a single project all pointed at making a name for themselves. It ends in collapse and confusion with everyone suddenly talking past one another.

The second story Pope Leo draws on comes from the book of Nehemiah, and it's the opposite kind of story. The city of Jerusalem is in ruins, the walls knocked down, and instead of one great leader swooping in with a plan, the people rebuild it together. Each family takes a section of the wall. They listen, they argue, they coordinate, and the city comes back not because someone was impressive but because everyone did their part.

One of those is a showpiece and the other one is a home, and I don't think it's hard to tell which is which. In the Pope’s telling there's God at the center of that city (which, to be fair, is how it should read since he’s the Pope), but I'm reading it a little more broadly as a statement about society, but the bones hold either way.

All of this feels less like a technology question and more like a who-are-we question.

Pope Leo goes on to say something I have been saying in this newsletter, and in just about all forms my work takes, which is that the technology is never neutral. As so many have pointed out over the centuries, technology is never just a tool. Every system somebody builds has a theory of you baked into it. A quiet guess about what you are, what you're for, and what you can be nudged into doing. The phone in your pocket has an opinion about you. The feed has an opinion about you. Every notification you ever receive has an opinion about you. Most of us have just never stopped to ask what that opinion is.

The line from Magnifica Humanitas that the press ran with was "disarm AI," and people heard it as "smash the machines." That's not it. Pope Leo’s language specifically calls for AI needing to be “disarmed” from systems of domination, exclusion, warfare, and concentrated power. He is saying don't hand life-and-death calls to systems nobody can hold responsible. Don't let a handful of companies own all the computing power and all the data and call that progress. It's not. It's monopoly and it’s not serving the collective good.

Pope Leo goes further than that, actually. He says the old idea of a "just war," the one we've used for centuries to make killing sound defensible, falls apart once the killing is automated and nobody's hand is on the trigger. And the concentration he's worried about isn't really about market share. When a few companies control the tools, the data, and the decisions, what they're really concentrating is the power to shape what the rest of us get to see, say, and do. That's the part that I find most chilling. It’s not the machines themselves, but the very small number of people pointing them, controlling them, and ultimately, controlling us.

But the line that actually got me was quieter. Pope Leo said the things we treat as human weakness (being limited, getting sick, growing old, suffering, being vulnerable) are not defects to be engineered away or bugs in the design. In a culture that sells optimization as a personality, that's a genuinely radical sentence. The cracks, the weakness, the fragility, those aren’t the problem. They’re where we actually live.

So let's go back to that gotcha earlier. A machine (AI) may have helped make a letter warning us about machines, and a lot of people decided that was the punchline of the whole thing. The more I sit with it, the less it looks like hypocrisy and the more it looks like the truest thing in the whole story. The reality is that none of us are actually opting out of this, because to function in modern society, there is no exit.

If you wanted to be really declarative about it, if you wanted to stand up and say, “AI has no place in my life!” you'd have to put down the phone in your hand. You'd have to walk away from the internet. You'd have to leave your bank and your maps and your email and your doctor's office behind, because so much of ordinary modern life already has all of this baked into it, quietly, invisibly, whether any of us ever said yes.

So I've stopped thinking the interesting question is whether we use it. That ship sailed a while ago, and nobody asked us before it left the harbor. The question I actually care about is how we live with this thing as it grows into every corner of our days, and how we use it without quietly letting it start using us back.

And honestly, the encyclical answers its own question just by existing. Even if a tool helped, a person kept his own judgment in charge of the whole thing and put his name on the result. That's not the technology running the human. That's a human running the technology, which is the entire point he spends 42,000+ words making.

Using AI to think harder about AI was never the contradiction. It might be the only honest way to do it.

Which is why you don't have to be Catholic for any of this to land, and I'm not here to preach anybody's religion. Strip the theology off and what's underneath isn't really about the machine at all. It's about us. What we hand over. What we forget how to do. What we stop noticing because it crept in slowly enough that no alarm ever went off. The machines were never the story. We are. And that’s been my point whenever I talk about technology to anyone who will listen.

Technology is about humans more than it is about the machines themselves.

If everything's felt a little off, you're not behind and you're not crazy. You're paying attention to this crazy part of the history we’re living in and collectively trying to survive. We don't have to resist all of it. I've never been the burn-it-down person at all. But we do get to decide how much of ourselves we hand over to the ghost in the machine and how fast we let in. Nobody is going to ask our permission, so we have to ask it of ourselves.

That's the work. And I propose we keep doing it together.

Keep evolving and stay human.

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