Pope Leo XIV warns AI needs human oversight in education, work, and data use

Magnifica Humanitas calls for stronger governance of artificial intelligence, including teacher training, student safety, algorithmic accountability, data ownership, and workplace protections.

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas addresses AI governance, education, work, data ownership, and human oversight

Pope Leo XIV has published Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on artificial intelligence that calls for stronger governance, transparent accountability, and human-centered use of digital technologies across education, work, public services, and global infrastructure.

The document focuses on safeguarding the human person during a period of rapid technological change. It places AI alongside robotics, digital platforms, algorithms, data systems, and automated decision-making as technologies already affecting daily life, public institutions, employment, communication, and education.

The encyclical does not reject AI. It describes technology as part of human history, while warning that digital systems can concentrate power, shape access to opportunities, and deepen exclusion when decisions are made without public oversight or accountability.

For schools and universities, Magnifica Humanitas calls for students to be taught when AI should and should not be used. It also says teachers need ongoing professional formation so they can help students use new technologies responsibly, critically, and creatively.

The document also raises concerns about AI’s impact on employment, including de-skilling, automated surveillance, job insecurity, and the transfer of decision-making to systems that workers and citizens may not be able to challenge.

AI power and accountability

Pope Leo XIV says AI should be treated as a tool requiring governance rather than as a neutral force outside human responsibility.

The encyclical states: "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

The document says control over platforms, infrastructure, data, and computing power often sits with major economic and technological actors rather than states. It warns that those actors can set access conditions, visibility rules, and participation pathways across digital environments.

Magnifica Humanitas calls for clearer responsibility across the AI chain, from those who design and train systems to those who use them in decisions affecting people’s lives. It says accountability must include the ability to identify who is responsible for a decision, justify it, monitor outcomes, challenge errors, and remedy harm.

Pope Leo XIV writes: "In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors."

The document also warns against reducing AI ethics to machine alignment alone. It says ethical frameworks themselves must be open to scrutiny, rather than set by a small number of powerful technology owners.

Schools and universities given central role

Magnifica Humanitas places education at the center of AI governance, with schools identified as places where students should learn how to seek truth, build critical thinking, and understand digital systems.

The document says AI and information technologies are making some curricula obsolete, while also requiring changes to school organization, physical spaces, evaluation methods, and the role of teachers.

Pope Leo XIV says: "It is necessary to support the ongoing formation of teachers throughout their professional lives, so that they can engage positively with new technologies, helping students to use them responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence."

The encyclical also warns that fast AI answers and summaries risk weakening the habit of asking questions. It says education should teach students to decide when and why AI should not be used.

The document adds: "Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used."

Magnifica Humanitas also calls for action on children’s online safety, including age limits, service provider accountability, and protection against online sexual exploitation, grooming, blackmail, cyberbullying, and AI-enabled image manipulation.

Work, data, and automated decisions

The encyclical says AI is already embedded in decision-making across communication, management, employment, public services, credit, and reputation. It warns that automated systems can create new forms of exclusion when people cannot understand, challenge, or appeal decisions.

Pope Leo XIV writes: "Current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.”"

The document says AI systems imitate functions of human intelligence but do not have human experience, bodily life, moral conscience, responsibility, or understanding. It warns against confusing speed and computational capacity with human judgment.

The encyclical states: "So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."

On employment, Magnifica Humanitas says automation and AI could relieve people of arduous, repetitive, or dangerous tasks, but warns against using technology mainly to reduce labor costs or increase profit.

The document says: "While AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work."

Pope Leo XIV calls for social criteria for innovation, including protections for employment, retraining, and worker participation when automation and AI are introduced.

The encyclical also addresses digital labor and data extraction. It says AI systems rely on infrastructure, natural resources, energy, and unseen workers involved in data labeling, model training, and content moderation. It also warns that data collected through aid, research, or innovation can become a new form of extraction when individuals and communities lose control over how it is used.

Pope Leo XIV writes: "Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few."

The document extends its AI concerns to warfare, cyberattacks, influence campaigns, and autonomous weapons. It says lethal force must not be delegated to opaque or automated processes, and calls for international rules to curb the technology arms race and protect civilians.

Magnifica Humanitas closes by calling for AI to be guided by truth, education, relationships, justice, and peace. Pope Leo XIV says the digital era should not be left to technological inevitability, adding that researchers, technology companies, schools, media, institutions, and local communities all sit within "the construction sites of history."