Pope's AI encyclical challenges market-driven technology policy

Pope Leo XIV has issued his first encyclical on artificial intelligence, and the document marks a significant intervention in the European policy debate over technology's role in society. According to Project Syndicate, the encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, explicitly rejects the premise that markets and profit incentives should be trusted to guide AI's development and deployment. The Pope invokes the biblical Tower of Babel to frame the risk: that humanity's technological ambition, unchecked by moral reflection, could collapse into fragmentation and harm.

The encyclical's framing carries particular weight in Italy and across Europe, where policymakers have struggled to balance innovation with regulation. Project Syndicate noted that Leo XIV poses a direct challenge to Chicago School economics—the market-fundamentalist framework that has dominated technology policy in the United States and, increasingly, in Europe. By arguing that AI raises questions that prices and profits cannot answer, the Pope is asserting that technological futures must be shaped by deliberation about human dignity and flourishing, not by commercial logic alone.

The timing is significant. As Stellantis and other European manufacturers race to develop affordable electric vehicles to compete with Chinese rivals, and as artificial intelligence begins to reshape manufacturing, supply chains, and labour markets, the encyclical raises fundamental questions about whose interests technology should serve. The Pope's argument—that technology must be directed toward human flourishing rather than profit maximization—stands in tension with the industrial logic that has governed European automotive strategy for decades.