Pope Issues Encyclical on AI Ethics, Criticizes Musk and Thiel

ME AI message, according to monitoring by Beating, in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum in response to the Industrial Revolution. Exactly 135 years later, Pope Leo XIV officially released his first encyclical during his papacy, Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical aims to construct a new moral and social framework for the age of artificial intelligence. The Pope warned that the AI revolution, driven by "the idolatry of profit," is threatening human dignity, and declared a ban on delegating lethal military decisions to automated algorithmic systems. The central focus of the encyclical targets Silicon Valley monopolies and new forms of digital servitude. The Pope sharply criticized the transhumanist visions promoted by Silicon Valley leaders such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, condemning the elitist tendency in AI development to label certain groups as "inefficient, useless, and redundant." The Pope noted that digital giants are building "architectures of visibility" through mass data collection to manipulate the public, reducing individuals to exploitable digital profiles, and even fostering "new forms of slavery and digital colonization" in sectors such as rare earth mining at the bottom of supply chains. The Pope not only called for advancing "AI demilitarization" to end harmful competition, but also unusually issued a public apology for the Catholic Church’s long-standing failure to condemn the罪行 of slavery. At the encyclical’s unveiling ceremony, the Vatican broke with tradition by inviting Christopher Olah, co-founder of the AI unicorn Anthropic, to stand alongside the Pope, aiming to directly impose moral constraints on Silicon Valley’s model builders. The Pope emphasized that algorithms cannot confer moral legitimacy to war, and that transparency and public recourse must be guaranteed in critical decision-making areas such as military operations, credit scoring, and public assistance. He also reaffirmed that the Catholic Church’s traditional "just war" theory is obsolete in modern conflicts. In response to politicians like U.S. Vice President Vance who invoked the just war theory to justify U.S. military strikes in Iran, the Vatican explicitly rejected such arguments. The Pope further demanded deep internal purification within the Catholic Church to dismantle structures that have enabled abuse and opacity in matters of power, sexuality, and conscience. (Source: BlockBeats)