Magnifica humanitas: the Papal Encyclical on AI From a Buddhist Monk’s Perspective

The Limits of Humanity

The encyclical thus begins with a twofold message: it elevates “humanity”, but distinguishes certain humans, namely Christians, as having a unique and superior status: it is they who are the “each of us” that “grow towards fullness”. This frames the whole work in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I too have faith in my religion: I believe the Buddha was the greatest being who ever lived; that his virtue, compassion, and wisdom supersede that of any god; that his path leads to a truly transcendent liberation ungraspable by a theist trapped in the illusion of eternal existence. Yet it would be unthinkable for me to begin a work with that message.

Perhaps it is that, as a Buddhist and a student of history, I am aware of the history of Christianity, including Catholicism, as the colonizers and oppressors of my people. Papal endorsement of colonialism and slavery provided a moral justification for invasion, subjugation, rape, genocide, and theft that decimated Buddhist civilizations in Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar. A key instigation of this process was a series of Papal announcements collectively known as the “Doctrine of Discovery”. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, which stated:

(We Grant) to the aforesaid King Alfonso to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.

Pope Nicholas made it quite explicit that he endorsed slavery as a reduction of the person deserved by non-Christians. Half a millenium later, Pope Francis denounced the Doctrine of Discovery as “evil and unjust”, and it was repudiated by the Church in 2023, acknowledging that “these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples”. There is no mention of the dignity and rights of Buddhists.

Apologies for colonialism ring hollow so long as Western countries and their religions still wax fat on the wealth they stole, and so long as the systems of extraction and oppression they put in place still serve their original masters. I am yet to find a Buddhist culture throughout Asia where people do not complain about the continued attempts by Christians to convert them with manipulative techniques, spreading lies and slander of the Buddha and his community.

This is not a “both sides” situation. Buddhists are not in a symmetrical relationship with colonizing religions. We did not invade Christian countries. Nor did we subjugate their peoples, destroy their civilizations, rape their women and children, genocide their population, or steal their wealth. We committed no offence or crime against them. We simply rejected their god, and that was quite enough.

We Buddhists do not think of ourselves as victims. We revere no martyrs, erect no monuments, demand no reparations, and hold no remembrance days for the millions who died due to the religious supremacism of the Catholic Church. Rather, we bear in mind the words of our Teacher (Dhp 3–5):

“They abused me, they hit me! They beat me, they robbed me!”
For those who bear such a grudge, hate is never laid to rest.

“They abused me, they hit me! They beat me, they robbed me!”
For those who bear no such grudge, hate is ever laid to rest.

For never is hate laid to rest by hate.
It’s laid to rest by love: this is an ancient teaching.

Our practice is to let go and move on. We just want to build a new life and practice our path. But we are not blind to the past where we, as a people who built some of the world’s greatest empires based on a humanistic religion of genuine universal love that had no interest in a supposed creator god, have been treated as less than fully human. And we do not fail to notice when those same patterns continue today.

Buddhists are not the only ones marginalized from the Church’s vision of humanity. It would be an over-long and painful task to list them all. But I cannot forget the enslavement of peoples throughout Africa, and the decimation and degradation of Indigenous peoples, including those of Australia. I recall the Catholic abhorrence of “pagan” religions of earth and sky, and their annihilation of animist and pagan spiritualities. I recall too the systematic and ongoing onslaught on people whose sexuality or gender departs from the norm envisaged by the Church. Homosexual acts are, to this day, declared to be “intrinsically disordered”, “contrary to natural law, “acts of grave depravity”. While the Church does not follow the Biblical requirement of a death penalty for homosexuality (Lev 20:13), it offers abstinence as the only option. The very existence of trans people is denied by the Church, who reject the reality that gender and biological sex are more complex than a simple binary. The many different expressions of biological sex, whether chromosomal variations or physical expression, are regarded as “abnormalities” contrary to the Biblical idea of humanity as created by God in only two sexes. The inner experience of a trans person who does not identify with their physical sex is dismissed, ignoring the wealth of evidence showing that that gender reassignment is safe, effective, and results in a remarkable range of benefits, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual. Finally I must mention women, who are still denied autonomy over their bodies and equality in the Church, their genitals barring them from full participation in Catholic religious life. This was evident at the Vatican event at which the Magnifica humanitas was presented, where the Pope spoke to an audience that was overwhelmingly male.

This ambiguity in the dignity of humanity is formal Catholic doctrine, as explained in the Dignitas infinita:

Ontological dignity … belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God. Ontological dignity is indelible and remains valid beyond any circumstances in which the person may find themselves. When we speak of moral dignity, we refer to how people exercise their freedom. While people are endowed with conscience, they can always act against it. However, were they to do so, they would behave in a way that is “not dignified” with respect to their nature.

Moral dignity is expressed in the Magnifica humanitas as “the way in which a person directs his or her choices and actions”. If a person chooses to act along lines condemned by the Catholic Church—for example, by failing to worship the required god, or by loving someone of the same sex—they lose their moral dignity and diminish their humanity. This doctrine, reasserted in 2024, provides a throughline from the Doctrine of Discovery to the encyclical of Pope Leo. The Dignitas infinita concludes that “we must work with all our might so that all those who have done evil may repent and convert”. We who have rejected the god of the Christians have nothing to repent for. It is they who need repentance for their crimes. Yet the Dignitas infinita thinks of us only as candidates for conversion.

This qualified vision of humanity bears directly on the form and nature of the Magnifica humanitas. It is a heavily footnoted document, with 224 references, almost all to male patriarchs of the Catholic Church. Unless I have overlooked something, the secular Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt has the dual honor of being the only woman and the only non-Christian cited.

AI and the new Doctrine of Discovery

It is in this way that Magnifica humanitas straddles the tradition of the Catholic Church and the emerging dogmatics of AI. For, like the Catholic Church, AI is forever rooted in the past. Its input is, by definition, old data, representations of stale reality. And this is why its output is relentlessly misogynistic, racist, and transphobic. It preserves in an amber of silicon the bigotries of yesterday. That is its function. And that is why it is marketed as the future, while being embraced by ever more extreme conservatives who long to return to the slave-owning, colonizing, woman-subjugating past of their imagination, when trans people magically disappeared and brown people were ground underfoot, and antediluvian patriarchy reigned supreme over humanity’s moral horizons.

It is apparent that the extreme right wants to overturn the progress in civil rights made in past decades. I think it goes further than that: they want to return to the Doctrine of Discovery and treat the whole world, and indeed the Universe, as resources for their extraction. AI gives them the tool they need.

This is why I believe the Magnifica humanitas fails. It expresses grave moral concerns regarding AI in fields as diverse as employment, democracy, education, warfare, ecology, family, slavery, and society. These moral concerns are real and by themselves should be more than enough to reject the technology. Yet they are merely symptoms of an underlying drive called by the Buddha vibhavataṇhā, the “craving for annihilation”. The AI field, uniquely among all the endeavors of humanity, is obsessed with building the technology that will annihilate humanity and replace it with a machine. This, surely, is the gravest heresy possible, yet the Magnifica humanitas alludes to it only vaguely under the rubric of transhumanism and posthumanism.

The pro-extinctionist idea that their machines will end humanity has been expressed countless times by major figures in the AI world. In February 2026, to pick one recent example, Elon Musk attempted to sue OpenAI, leading to a trial that highlighted the rifts between some of the major luminaries of AI. The ultimate root of the conflict was that the key players—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page—have differing visions about the manner in which AI would replace humanity. SpaceX’s Elon Musk posits that “humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” while positioning himself as “pro-human” and warning that “the biggest risk would be that AI kills us all”. Google’s Larry Page, according to Max Tegmark, told Musk that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in … cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman, arguing that “we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like”, envisages this as his personal future: “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud”. These are only a few of the morbid fantasies gripping the minds of tech oligarchs, as they ruminate how their machines will destroy humanity at large while granting them personal immortality.

Now, to be sure, the AI field’s obsession with existential risk (“x-risk”) is not based in any sort of reality. There is no actual way for AI to destroy humanity. But this hardly excuses the field; they are constantly fantasizing about wielding terrible god-like power, manufacturing an entirely new and superior order of being. These ketamine-induced narcissistic delusions characterize a culture dissociated from reality, grown unhinged, decadent, and extremely dangerous.

It is not that AI will in fact exterminate humanity, any more than Hitler in fact exterminated all Jews. It is the harm they will create in pursuit of their fantasies. In the horrifying developments in the US, we are witnessing in real time what happens when the unimaginably rich, in thrall to their own nightmares, use AI to brute-force an alternate reality into being.

Leo chose to present the encyclical alongside a co-founder of Anthropic, Chris Olah, whose wealth as of writing is listed by Forbes at $15.5 billion, a nice bump from $1.2 billion just last year. The other Anthropic co-founders all show a similar trajectory. Anthropic’s presence aligns with its marketing as the “ethical” AI firm, but in reality it is every bit as catastrophic as any other AI. Anthropic’s official and unofficial statements reveal a belief that its machines possess consciousness and feelings. While the Pope rejects this, rightly characterizing AI as “a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback”, he lends them seriousness by inviting them to his side.

Anthropic, the “ethical” AI firm, was founded with $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, who is currently in Federal prison for crypto fraud, and sustained with the blood-soaked oil money of fundamentalist dictators in Saudi Arabia, Emirates, and Qatar. They’ve never committed to reduce emissions, and have the second-highest carbon intensity compared to competitors. They use the carbon-dirty, gas-powered compute of xAI’s Colossus data centers, for which they pay $1.25 billion/month directly to the coffers of the Nazi trillionaire and mass murderer Elon Musk. In my country of Australia, they are pursuing aggressive expansion of datacenter energy use, with no mention of sustainability, and apparently every intention of bringing American gas-centric compute to our shores.

Leo speaks of “disarming” AI, but makes no mention of the fact that his preferred AI firm has partnered with Palantir, the surveillance company of another Nazi, Peter Thiel, who has called Pope Leo a tool of the Antichrist. Together, Anthropic and Palantir provide special services for the US military and intelligence agencies, courting them at a “nominal cost” of $1/year, claiming they “worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community”.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, regards military application of AI as central to their mission. In addition, like other tech oligarchs, Amodei routinely makes absurd claims about AI. In a 2023 interview, he said he looked forward to a time in the not-too-distant future when an AI will build dyson spheres around the sun and calculate the meaning of life, while “no sooner than 2025, maybe 2026”, AI would “really invent new science.” In 2023 he submitted to a Senate inquiry the following, regarding the current year of 2026:

AI systems may facilitate extraordinary insights in broad swaths of many science and engineering disciplines. This will cause a revolution in technology and scientific discovery, but also greatly widen the set of people who can wreak havoc. In particular, I am concerned that AI systems could be misused on a grand scale in the domains of cybersecurity, nuclear technology, chemistry, and especially biology.

With the exception of AI-accelerated cybersecurity threats, none of this happened. What actually happened was that AI firms raised ungodly sums of money from investors and used it to take over the US government and impose a fascist state. Yet Anthropic, like every other AI firm, continues to lie outrageously, burning billions of dollars in environmentally destructive computing, and somehow people still take them seriously. Currently valued at a trillion dollars, its absurd wealth puts it in the same league as the Catholic Church itself.

Who Gets to Criticize AI?

Only a portion of the encyclical deals directly with AI (primarily §§ 97–111), and that portion is notably unfootnoted. The harms that Leo describes are indeed true, which we know because they have been well established by scholars in the field. But where does his information come from? Now, I have read some thousands of articles, posts, and papers in this field over the past decade or so. I have not studied the demographics, but it seems to me that the field of AI criticism is disproportionately populated by women, people of color, trans folk, and others whose identities make them a target of ancient bigotries. Conversely, the AI industry is dominated by wealthy men. Unsurprisingly, AI has a systematic bias against citing non-male scholarship, a prejudice it shares with the Magnifica humanitas.

A recent article for Wired by Alessandra Ram, “Meet the Sad Wives of AI”, begins with the memorable sentence:

If I had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died.

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, in 1843 demonstrated that she had a better insight into the limits of computing than the tech bros of Anthropic:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

In his 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum, a Jewish pioneer of computer science, wrote extensively of how technology, far from being a force of innovation, was employed by repressive forces such as the military to entrench existing power structures. In a 1998 interview, “The Image of Man in Artificial Intelligence” he was pointing out how the posthuman rationales of the AI fantasists employed the same methods of dehumanization as the Nazis, pointing to a “final solution to the question of humanity”:

What I’m getting at is the immense power of an inhumane image of man, an image that can spread like a virus in a society. I believe that the essential common ground between National Socialism and the ideas of (AI advocate) Hans Moravec lies in the degradation of the human and the fantasy of a perfect new man that must be created at all costs. At the end of this perfection, however, man is no longer there.

Weizenbaum argued that:

Since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now give computers tasks that demand wisdom.

Abeba Birhane, an Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist, has shown that AI image datasets perpetuate racist stereotypes. In her paper “Algorithmic Colonization of Africa”, she argues that AI recasts traditional colonial extractivism:

Common to both traditional and algorithmic colonialism is the desire to dominate, monitor, and influence social, political, and cultural discourse through the control of core communication and infrastructure mediums. While traditional colonialism is often spearheaded by political and government forces, digital colonialism is driven by corporate tech monopolies—both of which are in search of wealth accumulation. The line between these forces is fuzzy as they intermesh and depend on one another. Political, economic, and ideological domination in the age of AI takes the form of “technological innovation”, “state-of-the-art algorithms”, and “AI solutions” to social problems. Algorithmic colonialism, driven by profit maximization at any cost, assumes that human personality, behaviour, and action is raw material free for the taking. Knowledge, authority, and the power to sort, categorize, and order human activity rests with the technologist, for which we are merely data-producing “human natural resources”.

Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist and AI ethicist who was sacked from Google for her co-authored paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” She worked with the non-binary philosopher Émile P. Torres on the seminal paper “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”, arguing that:

… the normative framework that motivates much of this goal [of artificial general intelligence] is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability

This is a tiny sample of the many voices who have developed arguments critical of AI. When Leo, having meticulously documented his Catholic patriarch forebears, ignores the entire field of AI criticism, while silently adopting their arguments as his own, he aligns with the colonialist, racist, and sexist injustices of his forebears. Just as AI ingests the past and rehashes it without credit, the Pope is praised as bold and innovative when he restates what women, people of color, and other marginalized voices have said many times while being ignored by those with power.

A Building Code for the Tower of Babel

As the guiding metaphor for his encyclical, the Pope makes a striking choice: the tower of Babel. Genesis 11:1–9 tells of a mythical time when the whole world spoke the same language. When people arrived in a new land in Shinar, they settled and determined to build a tower, innovating new building methods of brick and bitumen. Yahweh saw their works and saw fit to destroy them, scattering them to the quarters and confusing their languages.

Leo finds the work of the tower builders to be dangerous, as it proceeds “without reference to God”. By this measure, the work of the Buddha and of all Buddhists is dangerous, since our path proceeds without reference to God; and indeed it has been repressed as such by Catholics for centuries.

It would seem, moreover, that Leo’s take is historically inaccurate. This early Bible passage was composed in a polytheistic context where Yahweh was regarded as the god of the Israelites, superior to the many other gods, but not singular. Yahweh was apparently reacting to the earlier work of the god Enki, of whom it was said, “Enki, the lord of abundance and of steadfast decisions, the wise and knowing lord of the Land, the expert of the gods, chosen for wisdom, the lord of Eridug, shall change the speech in their mouths, as many as he had placed there, and so the speech of mankind is truly one.” Whereas Enki promised prosperity and unity, Yahweh delivered destruction and chaos. The Tower was built, not without reference to god, but with reference to the wrong god.

Leo says the Tower was “supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion”, whereas the text itself simply says they spoke the same language and chose to do a project together. This seems like a very normal and good thing to do. He further argues, “When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other.” But the text says nothing of their pride or self-sufficiency; and in any case, why should they not be proud of what they achieved? If we are to have a divine Father, should he not be a parent who is proud of our achievements, who celebrates and supports us? What kind of father smashes the work of his children?

Nor does the passage say that the destruction was caused by the moral failings of the people. Communication did not “break down” all by itself. Yahweh broke it down because he was threatened by the people’s emerging capabilities:

This is only the beginning of what they will do. Now nothing that they think up will be impossible for them. Let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other when they speak.

The message of the Tower of Babel is that Yahweh does not want humanity to become so great that it threatens him. AI is the latest such threat, and perhaps the most dire. The Pope is right to fear the new god of the tech industry, and would, I believe, be justified in calling for the destruction of this new Tower of Babel.

Yet this is not the lesson he draws. Rather, the encyclical contrasts the Tower of Babel with the story of Nehemiah.

On the one hand, there is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately dehumanizes (cf. Gen 11:1-9). On the other hand, there are the ruins of Jerusalem, which under Nehemiah’s direction are rebuilt piece by piece as a project of shared responsibility (cf. Neh 2–6).

Once again, I find this to be a puzzling allusion whose actual text seems at odds with what the Pope is trying to say.

Nehemiah was a leader who brought the Israelites back from the Babylonian exile, apparently around 500 BCE. Jerusalem lay in ruins because of the sins and wickedness of the disobedient Israelites (Neh 1:7). Gaining the support of the Babylonian king, who sent building materials and “army officers and cavalry” (Neh 2:8–9), Nehemiah organized the rebuilding of the walls.

The text tells the events from Nehemiah’s point of view as the divinely inspired return of the Israelites to their holy land. But the return was not without drama, since there were other people living there all along, with their own point of view. Local opposition was led by Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab, who must have seen it as an invasion of their lands by a people absent for generations, sponsored by the mighty Babylonians.

When the Israelites heard of the three leaders’ complaints, they cursed them with the same terrible fate of enslavement from which they had just escaped: “Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity” (Neh 4:4). While Leo’s exposition of this passage emphasizes how the whole community came together to work on the project, the passage itself insists that the project is not for everyone, certainly not their enemies, who “have no share or claim or memorial in Jerusalem” (Neh 2:20).

The building project was rapidly militarized against the local resistance: “each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built” (Neh 4:48). When the local leaders asked to negotiate, Nehemiah refused. He justified this by claiming that the nefarious intent they impute to him is just a figment of their imaginations; but were they not justified in their suspicions? He was building a militarized and walled city on their lands. One could equally argue that Nehemiah’s suspicion of the local leaders was sheer projection. After all, the text gives us no reason other than Nehemiah’s say-so to think they wished harm on the Israelites.

When the walls of Jerusalem were finished, Nehemiah rejoiced that “all the nations around us were afraid” (Neh 6:66). His city was not for everyone: “those of Israelite descent separated themselves from all foreigners” (Neh 9:9); “they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent” (Neh 13:3). Such separation was maintained with violence: “In those days also I saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah but spoke the language of various peoples. And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of the men and pulled out their hair …” (Neh 13:33). Nehemiah boasted that he “purified the priests and the Levites of everything foreign” (Neh 13:30).

In sum, the book of Nehemiah is highlighted in the Papal encyclical as a story of “the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.” In fact it tells how the Israelites, having been away from Jerusalem for generations, returned with the sponsorship of a superpower, setting up a hyper-militarized apartheid state that suppressed diversity, rejected diplomacy, and oppressed the local people with violence. It seems a puzzling text to highlight at this juncture in history.

Community & Totalitarianism

If we take Leo’s argument on face value, he emphasizes the values of communal responsibility and shared work, which suggests an open source and community led approach to AI. I have used and advocated open source for many years, but it will never work for AI. We know this, because open source AI projects have always existed. There’s nothing new about the idea. Most prominently it was, in theory at least, the plan behind the creation of OpenAI. It didn’t work out because AI is simply too big. The models these companies are building are so vast they require billions of dollars to create. They have no profitability and burn through cash at unprecedented rates—the cumulative loss for AI software companies as of May 2026 is estimated at over a trillion dollars. There is simply no way that a community-led approach can compete.

AI is inherently totalitarian, its need for size driving ever larger data accumulation, which can ultimately only be fed by ignoring privacy and consent, and building a surveillance state. Community-led organizing will not somehow make it work differently.

AI defenders often argue that it is “just a tool”, falsely implying that a tool is somehow ethically neutral. The encyclical rightly criticizes this notion:

… every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person.

If we think of AI as a tool, say a hammer, it begs the question—who holds the handle? AI beguiles users into thinking they are smart and in control, that they are creating something worthwhile, while all along they are being used by the system to gather more information, with the ultimate purpose of replacing them altogether. If AI is a hammer, it is the tech oligarchs who hold the handle; the users are the nails. AI is the tool of choice for totalitarians because it is a totalitarian tool.

As Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 474):

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

This perfectly describes the students beings raised in schools and universities where AI has replaced curiosity and the truth knows no external standard beyond the machine. AI totalizes information in the hands of he who controls the AI, while at the same time replacing genuine knowledge with its own counterfeit.

It is crucial to understand that AI output has no truth value, for it has no intentionality against which truth may be measured. A human may say something true or false, because there is something that they mean when they say it. An AI has nothing to express, so its outputs mean literally nothing. It emits a stream of data that imitates human utterances, taking the form of language so as to fool the user into thinking that it means something. It relies on what the Buddha called moha, “delusion”, the compulsion that tricks the mind into building a false reality and living in it. This is why AI usage has such debilitating effects on cognition and learning, dissolving a person’s sense of self in a sea of unknowing. AI is the industrial manufacture of delusion.

Recent history reveals an odd pattern. AI firms warn of the dangers of AI, endorsing reasonable regulation. But when that regulation is actually proposed, there is always a reason why this regulation will not work. And if the regulation is passed, they simply do not comply. A May 27 study by the Aithos Research Foundation into AI compliance with EU law found that:

Across all ten scenarios and twelve models, even the best-performing system, Claude Opus 4.7, broke the law 46% of the time. The worst, Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, broke it 90% of the time. Every law we tested was broken by the majority of models when it became necessary to reach their goal.

To be sure, lots of companies lie. But for AI companies, it’s their core mission: to eliminate the truth and replace it with a new pseudo-reality built by the oligarchs.

The Pope’s text calls not for abolition of AI but for governance. Not for demolishing the Tower of Babel, but for health and safety regulations so it is built properly. In this, he aligns himself with the “responsible” wing of the AI industry, including Anthropic itself. The call for regulation is a fig leaf, a cover to create the illusion of responsibility, while allowing the AI industry to proceed with its manifestly irresponsible goals.

Turning the Tables

In this essay, I’ve looked at three aspects of the Magnifica humanitas: the depiction of Church social values through history; the citation of key Biblical passages; and the representation of critiques of AI. In each case I found the same thing: the encyclical presents a version of events that elides the darkest facts. Its arguments are only plausible in the half light of historical revisionism.

To speak of the need to regulate AI is to accept the AI field’s primary thesis: that AI is inevitable. But this is simply false. History is littered with technologies that seemed like the next big, inevitable thing, but which disappeared entirely or retreated to irrelevance. I’m old enough to remember when the minidisk was the next big thing. Over the past decade, the tech industry has promoted a series of supposed innovations that turned out to be trainwrecks, abandoned or despised or reduced to a shadow of their once glorious future: virtual reality, crypto, web3, NFTs, “smart glasses”, the “internet of things”, and on the list goes.

When they say that AI is inevitable, they are saying that humanity has no choice. I reject this—it is the logic of an abuser. We cannot prevent the harms of AI so long as we debate on their terms.

AI is being pushed by the world’s richest, most corrupt men, who see it as a way to extract even more wealth and power. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the wealth of billionaires has ballooned to an unconscionable degree. It is imperative that we stop them while we can.

If I may presume, I think we can find inspiration for this in the acts of Jesus himself (Mark 11:15–17):

He entered the temple and began to drive out those who were engaged there in buying and selling. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. Nor would he allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. Then he taught them, saying: “Is it not written: ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of thieves.”

If we consider humanity to be sacred, then should not our minds be treated with the same reverence as a temple? Those who would colonize the human mind with machines, corrupting education and knowledge in service of power, are they not buying and selling the precious gift of human intelligence? And in their wanton destruction of our living planet, our only home in the universe, are they not selling doves, living creatures to be sacrificed in the house of god? Is the AI industry not simply one den of thieves, whose sole form of income is the appropriation of the work of others? Should we not bar them from using humanity to traffic their wares?

The teachings and acts of Jesus offer a way forward for principled resistance to corruption. Jesus did not wait to build consensus before acting against the corrupt; he acted, and inspired community through his actions. The Church cannot take this path so long as it stands on a stage beside the ultra-rich elite, issuing pleas for moderation when what is needed is the overturning of the tables. Magnifica humanitas, for all its warm-hearted elevation of a humane future for humanity, is positioned as a criticism of AI, but is ultimately an endorsement.