By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
I. Prediction Fulfilled
When Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope in spring 2025 and chose the name Leo XIV, I wrote that this choice signaled something consequential for the human rights movement. By invoking the name of Leo XIII—the pope who, in 1891, formulated a Catholic social philosophy adequate to the challenges of industrial capitalism—the new pontiff announced an intention to do the same for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). I noted that "Leo XIV rightly thinks AI poses similar challenges as the industrial revolution to which Pope Leo XIII responded." Magnifica Humanitas, issued on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, confirms that reading in ways that go beyond what I could anticipate in specificity, though not in direction.
What I find genuinely remarkable about this encyclical—and what makes it worth careful engagement from the perspective of someone who works at the intersection of human rights and technology policy—is not that a pope chose to write about AI. That was predictable. What is remarkable is the degree to which the document's most searching insights overlap with concerns that have been independently developed in the human rights and technology governance literature, including concerns I have pressed in my own work (see e.g., here and here). This overlap reflects a convergence of analysis across very different starting points—Catholic social theology on one side, secular philosophical thinking on human rights on the other—and that convergence ought to carry weight.
This commentary explores where these analyses converge most significantly. But a comprehensive approach requires that we also identify where the encyclical might be pushed further, where its principles outrun its institutional analysis, and where human rights advocates would want to press harder than even a committed pope is positioned to press. I will do both.
I also draw on a third point of convergence. Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain, delivered two major addresses on digital governance at Davos in January 2025 and at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February 2026. Sánchez works from the premises of social democracy rather than Catholic social theology or the philosophy of human rights as I understand it—and yet his diagnosis of the digital order, and his vision of what adequate governance would require, converges strikingly with both. I introduce his speeches in Section VIII, where their institutional specificity helps illuminate what the encyclical, for all its analytical power, leaves underdeveloped.
I also draw throughout on Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism, which also illuminates what these three voices share. Together, they do not merely diagnose the same crisis—they are, I will argue, contributing to the same construction project, even if each is working from a different set of tools.
II. The Technocratic Paradigm and Surveillance Capitalism
The most structurally important convergence between the encyclical and my own work concerns what Leo XIV, following Francis, calls the "technocratic paradigm"—the tendency to let "the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions." The pope warns that this paradigm is amplified by AI and threatens to "normalize an anti-human vision" in which "the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control."
The problem is not that particular bad actors are misusing technology, but that a system logic takes hold that progressively subordinates human experience, judgment, and dignity to requirements of data extraction and behavioral optimization.
This is, stated in theological language, precisely what Shoshana Zuboff documented in sociological and political-economic language in her work on surveillance capitalism, which I draw on extensively. The key structural claim in both analyses is the same: the problem is not that particular bad actors are misusing technology, but that a system logic takes hold that progressively subordinates human experience, judgment, and dignity to requirements of data extraction and behavioral optimization. What Zuboff thinks of as commodification of human experience itself, Leo XIV describes as the reduction of persons to "data, a cog in a machine or a commodity." The language differs but the diagnosis is identical.
In my commentary on Trump’s AI Action Plan from August 2025, I argued that the plan's most troubling feature was not this or that deregulatory measure but its wholehearted endorsement of this system logic—its celebration of the "alliance between Government and Big Tech" (and what Zuboff has called the “fusion scenario”) and its complete absence of any role for human rights or safety as genuine constraints. The encyclical's insistence that "we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral" and that "ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes" but must examine "what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it" is a philosophical rebuttal of the premise underlying that Action Plan. That rebuttal comes from a very different institutional vantage point than mine, which only strengthens it.
What is particularly useful is the encyclical's direct link between the technocratic paradigm and concrete power concentration. Leo XIV observes that "control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors" who "effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities for participation." This mirrors what I identified in my trilemma analysis as "technological power without governance" — one of three fundamental failures in current AI regulation. The pope frames this through subsidiarity, condemning processes imposed "in an opaque and unilateral manner"; I frame it through accountability and rights-compatible governance. But we diagnose the same institutional failure.
III. Data as Common Good: Extending the Universal Destination of Goods
One of the most intellectually striking moves in Magnifica Humanitas is the extension of the Catholic principle of the universal destination of goods to cover digital and informational resources. Leo XIV writes: "Among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data." He continues: "Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good."
In my 2023 book Political Theory of the Digital Age, I treat data in the same spirit, as “social facts” in Durkheim’s sense that are subject to a social-justice analysis (see chapter 9). In my trilemma piece, I contended that the U.S. regulatory failure is not simply a matter of missing specific rules but of a fundamental misframing: American law treats data as a private commodity, subject to market exchange, rather than as a resource whose production involves collective contribution and whose uses have public consequences. The encyclical reaches the same practical conclusion from a different starting point, the centuries-old Catholic teaching that the right to private property is "always subordinate to the universal destination of goods."
The political importance of this move should not be underestimated. One of the persistent difficulties in making the case for AI governance that genuinely serves human rights is that the prevailing framework in the U.S.—and to a considerable extent in international trade law—treats data concentration as a natural outcome of legitimate market activity. The Catholic Social Doctrine tradition offers a principled counter-framework with enormous institutional reach: roughly 1.4 billion Catholics, a global diplomatic network, and a centuries-long tradition of engaging political and economic structures at the level of first principles. When that tradition declares that concentrated control over data and algorithms violates the universal destination of goods, it is not a boutique academic position—it is a claim that carries weight in political and institutional spaces that academic human rights scholarship does not easily reach.
IV. The Trilemma Partially Acknowledged
In my trilemma analysis, I argued that genuinely rights-compatible AI governance requires three conditions simultaneously: governance reach, technological power, and rights commitment. I argued that no major regulatory jurisdiction currently combines all three, and that this structural deficit is the central challenge for global AI governance. It would be too much to say that the encyclical engages this trilemma—it does not. But it does come close to acknowledging its logic.
Leo XIV is clear that regulation alone is insufficient: "It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required." He is equally clear that corporate self-governance is inadequate: "More power does not necessarily imply something better." And he is explicit that the technological infrastructure itself must be subject to genuine public oversight: "Ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated."
What all this amounts to is an implicit argument that rights commitment (the encyclical's core concern), governance reach (which Leo XIV clearly wants strengthened), and some relationship to technological power (which he addresses through the lens of subsidiarity and common goods) must all be present. The encyclical does not offer an institutional design for how to achieve this combination—and I return to that limitation—but it accurately identifies the problem space. Identifying what needs to be built, however, is not the same as building it—and it is here that the encyclical's limitations begin to show.
More specifically, the encyclical's critique of what it calls the "alignment" problem in AI ethics resonates with a concern I have pressed in my own work. Leo XIV writes that "we cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines—'alignment’ of AI with human values—without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice." The point—that "a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few"—is precisely the critique I leveled at the Trump administration's Executive Order on "woke AI," which I described as using the language of neutrality and objectivity to enshrine a particular ideological vision. The pope and I agree: who controls the values embedded in AI systems is itself a political question of the first order.
V. Universalism, Equal Dignity, and the Hierarchy of Grief
One central preoccupation of another recent commentary has been what I described as the "hierarchy of grief"—the systematic differential in how different human lives are counted, mourned, and protected depending on who those lives belong to and whose interests are served by attending to them. I argued that the Gaza conflict, the neglected wars of Tigray, Sudan, and Yemen, and the ongoing persecution of the Uyghurs collectively demonstrate not merely selective application of universal norms but the erosion of any shared belief that such norms genuinely exist.
The encyclical engages this concern, in terms that closely parallel my own framing. Leo XIV writes: "The value of persons does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human." He explicitly connects the failure of universalism to the technocratic paradigm: when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, some lives are implicitly assessed as less worthy of concern.
This is one of the areas where my secular philosophy and the Catholic Social Doctrine converge most distinctly. The commitment to universalism in human rights—the insistence that every human life has equal moral worth, that the deliberate killing of a child in Gaza is no more and no less a moral disaster than the deliberate killing of a child in Ukraine or a child in Tigray—is not a Catholic position specifically, but it is a position that Catholic Social Doctrine robustly supports, and that support matters when the position is under profound political pressure. Again, the encyclical insists that "there are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human." This very much echoes the central commitment of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights—that human rights are for everyone—and does so with a moral authority and global reach that our center can only aspire to.
The chapter on war and the civilization of love extends this analysis in ways I find particularly important. Leo XIV's willingness to declare the "just war" theory "outdated" is remarkable—and something I am not altogether happy with. Leo is worried about abuse of appeals to just war theory to justify violence. But currently the bigger danger is that just war theory is dismissed as somehow tedious and replaced with retribution, as so openly done by America’s self-declared “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth. (See here, and also here.)
Still, Leo’s analysis of how AI accelerates and depersonalizes warfare, lowering "the threshold for resorting to violence" and "transforming victims to data," parallels arguments I made about autonomous weapons and AI-enabled warfare. The call for "personal responsibility" in the chain from design to deployment, for "effective human control" over lethal decisions, and for "a shared framework at the international level to curb the technological arms race" are exactly the kinds of institutional commitments I argued for in my trilemma analysis. That these demands now come from a papal encyclical rather than only from academic and civil society voices is significant for the prospects of achieving them.
VI. New Forms of Slavery and Colonial Extraction
Perhaps the most arresting passages in Magnifica Humanitas concern what Leo XIV calls "new forms of slavery" in the digital economy. The encyclical is unsparing: it describes the labor of data labelers, content moderators, and rare-earth miners as "hidden" and "exploited" work that sustains the digital economy while remaining invisible in its official self-presentation. It connects the extraction of health data and epidemiological profiles from structurally vulnerable populations to historical forms of colonialism: "New forms of colonialism (…) no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information." And it—remarkably—asks pardon for the Church's own historical complicity in slavery, as a gesture of moral accountability intended to sharpen present vigilance.
I have not written about data colonialism in these terms, but the analysis is consistent with the concerns I raised about "imperial condescension" in the context of Trump's trade arrangements with the EU and about the Maduro abduction as an expression of a world "increasingly resembling what Schmitt described in terms of Great Spaces." Leo XIV's frame is theological and historical; mine is political-philosophical. But we are both pointing to the same structural reality: the world's most powerful actors are organizing relationships of extraction and subordination that are colonial in their logic, even if they do not carry that name. AI infrastructure is increasingly the mechanism through which this extraction is accomplished.
The encyclical's demand for transparency in supply chains, for "due diligence" from companies and investors, and for platforms to "cooperate responsibly with authorities and civil society to prevent communication, payment and profiling tools from becoming channels for the recruitment and control of victims" translates the abstract principle of human dignity into concrete institutional demands. This is where I would want Catholic Social Doctrine to go—and this encyclical goes there.
VII. Where I Would Press Further
There are several places where the encyclical falls short, or where a human rights scholar would want to press harder. The most significant is also the most structural: Magnifica Humanitas provides the architectural vision but not the scaffolding—rich in principle and diagnosis but thinner on the specific institutional architecture needed to translate principles into governance.
The encyclical calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." It calls for forms of cooperation capable of governing AI across borders. It calls for subsidiarity, transparency, and accountability at every level of the AI ecosystem. All of this is sensible. But the trilemma I identified—that no major regulatory jurisdiction currently combines governance reach, technological power, and rights commitment—is not a problem principled exhortation can resolve. What is needed is institutional design, which requires engaging more directly with the question of which bodies, with what powers, subject to what accountability, could achieve the goals the encyclical sets out.
This is not a demand that a papal encyclical become a regulatory white paper. But there is a version of engagement with institutional questions—something like what Leo XIII did when he endorsed unions as a concrete institutional response to industrial capital—that this encyclical does not achieve. The analogous move today might be a more specific endorsement of something like the EU AI Act's rights-tiered framework, or a specific call for international AI governance institutions with genuine authority, or engagement with the question of what a "common good" governance model for data would look like. The encyclical circles these questions without landing on any of them.
Second, the encyclical is notably silent on China by name—a striking omission given that China's AI surveillance model, and its export of that model to dozens of governments, is among the most significant contemporary threats to human rights-compatible visions of AI development. I argued in my trilemma analysis that China's regulatory sophistication in the absence of rights commitment represents the clearest example of "governance reach without rights commitment" producing "a force multiplier for repression." The encyclical's universalism requires naming this, as it requires naming the failures of any major actor. The Church's historic relationship with China and ongoing negotiations over the presence of Catholicism there may explain this reticence—but it is a reticence that costs the document some of its moral clarity.
Third, while the encyclical's treatment of truth, misinformation, and democracy is strong in principle, it does not engage the political dynamics through which the language of "neutrality" and "objectivity" is being weaponized to entrench particular ideological frameworks in AI systems. My commentary on Trump's AI Action Plan and the Executive Order on "woke AI" argued that the real political danger is not that some AI systems are biased but that the accusation of bias is being deployed strategically to prevent any recognition of structural discrimination, historical injustice, or ecological reality. The encyclical's call for "ideological neutrality" in AI—though not in those exact words—would be strengthened by more direct engagement with how that concept is currently manipulated.
VIII. A Third Convergence: Political Leadership and the Demand for Governance
The encyclical's most significant limitation—its richness in principle and sparseness in institutional architecture—is thrown into relief by comparison with two major speeches delivered by Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain, at Davos in January 2025 and at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February 2026. Those speeches represent a third point of convergence: a political leader, working from the premises of social democracy rather than Catholic social theology or secular human rights philosophy, arriving at a strikingly similar diagnosis—and supplying the institutional specificity the encyclical does not supply.
The structural convergence is immediate. Sánchez's Davos address frames the problem in terms that parallel both Leo XIV and my own work (and that of Shoshana Zuboff): social media began with a promise to unite people, extend accountability, and strengthen democracy, and instead produced "a concentration of power and wealth in the hands of just a few" at the cost of "our social cohesion, our mental health, and our democracies." The encyclical's "technocratic paradigm" finds its political equivalent in Sánchez's description of platforms whose algorithms are "engineered to hide certain political views and foster others" and whose owners are "no longer satisfied with holding nearly total economic power" but "also want political power in a way that is undermining our democratic institutions." What Leo XIV describes through subsidiarity and the universal destination of goods, Sánchez describes through democratic governance and popular sovereignty—but the structural diagnosis is the same.
Sánchez also reinforces the specific concern I pressed about the encyclical's treatment of alignment and ideological neutrality. The encyclical is circumspect; Sánchez is direct. He quotes Peter Thiel's admission that tech-billionaires want to overthrow democracy because "they have stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible." This is the explicit statement of what I argued in my commentary on Trump's AI Action Plan: that neutrality language is being weaponized to advance a particular ideological vision. The encyclical's universalism requires naming this; Sánchez names it, echoing Zuboff’s clarity in this domain.
His framing of social media as "a common resource for humanity, like the oceans" is particularly notable. This is the same move the encyclical makes with the universal destination of goods, and the move I make in treating data as a social fact subject to social-justice analysis. That a sitting prime minister reaches for this frame—in a Davos address—suggests the idea has political traction beyond academic and theological circles.
But the most important contribution of the Sánchez speeches is what the encyclical lacks: institutional specificity. Where Leo XIV calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility"—sensible but abstract—Sánchez offers concrete proposals.
At Davos: end anonymity through digital identity wallets linked to every user account; mandate algorithmic transparency and fully enforce the Digital Services Act; hold platform CEOs personally liable for harms, as restaurant owners are liable for food poisoning.
At Dubai: criminalize algorithmic amplification of illegal content; create a "Hate and Polarization Footprint" to track and penalize division-amplification; ban social media for under-16s; pursue criminal investigations of specific platforms.
Whether each proposal is optimal is a separate question. What matters analytically is that they represent the kind of institutional translation of principle into governance Leo XIV calls for but does not supply—the move that Leo XIII made for industrial capitalism when he endorsed unions, and that Magnifica Humanitas, for all its analytical power, largely stops short of making.
The Dubai speech goes further still, announcing a "Coalition of the Digital Willing"—several European countries committing to stricter, faster, coordinated social media regulation. This is a nascent example of what my trilemma analysis requires: governance reach (multiple states acting together), leverage over technological power (through regulatory pressure), and rights commitment (the democratic values Sánchez invokes throughout). It does not solve the trilemma—no actor yet combines all three conditions fully—but it is movement in the right direction, organized around exactly the principles Leo XIV articulates.
This raises a question neither the encyclical nor my own work has engaged: whether global AI governance will advance through universal institutions or through expanding coalitions of aligned states. Sánchez's model is implicitly a theory of change—one worth taking seriously as a complement to, rather than substitute for, broader multilateral ambitions.
Where the Sánchez speeches fall short—and where the encyclical is similarly silent—is on China. Sánchez is focused on Western platforms and the political dynamics of European democracy; his proposals address X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, but not the export of China's AI surveillance model to dozens of governments worldwide. The encyclical's silence on China by name, which I noted, costs it moral clarity.
So my trilemma analysis remains: China represents the clearest case of governance reach without rights commitment producing a force multiplier for repression, and any serious global governance framework must engage this directly.
Taken together, the Sánchez speeches and the encyclical form a remarkable convergence: a political leader, a pope, and a human rights scholar, arriving from very different starting points at a common diagnosis of what is wrong with the current digital order and a broadly common vision of what adequate governance would require. The speeches supply what the encyclical lacks in institutional specificity; the encyclical supplies what the speeches lack in philosophical depth and global reach. Neither alone is sufficient. Together, they suggest that the conditions for a serious political response are more present than they appear.
IX. The Building That Is Ours to Complete
Leo XIV's central biblical metaphor—the contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah—gains new resonance when set alongside the Sánchez speeches. The Babel image captures not only the trajectory of AI development under deregulation, but specifically the dystopia Sánchez described at Davos: a digital infrastructure built on a promise of connection and freedom, "conceived without reference to God"—or, in secular terms, without reference to any value beyond efficiency and self-assertion—that has become, in his words, "the tool of our own oppression." The encyclical and the speeches diagnose the same failed structure.
But the Nehemiah image is where the convergence becomes most productive. Nehemiah's project—active, shared, locally grounded reconstruction, in which "each is assigned a section of the wall," listening precedes building, and the goal is a city fit for human habitation—is the model Sánchez advances in institutional terms. The Coalition of the Digital Willing is, in this sense, a Nehemiah structure: states taking up their sections of the wall, not waiting for a universal solution that may never arrive. The encyclical blesses the vision; the speeches begin to supply the scaffolding.
That three distinct institutional voices—a papal encyclical addressing 1.4 billion Catholics, a prime minister addressing the world's governments, and human rights thinking—converge on this diagnosis at this historical moment is no coincidence. It reflects the depth and visibility of the problem. The technocratic paradigm, the concentration of power, the erosion of democratic self-governance, the hierarchy of grief that devalues some lives while protecting others—these are not academic constructs. They are the lived political reality of the mid-2020s.
The wall is not finished. But sections are being assigned, and some of us have picked up our tools.
None of these analyses alone is sufficient. Magnifica Humanitas has notable silences on China, institutional thinness, and insufficient engagement with how neutrality language is being weaponized. The Sánchez speeches focus on Western platforms and European political dynamics, silent on the global South and China's surveillance exports. My own trilemma analysis identifies the structural challenge without resolving it. But together they point toward something: the moral case has been made, with global reach, by an institution addressing a billion and a half people; the political demand has been articulated, with institutional specificity, by a democratic leader willing to name the threat and propose concrete responses; the analytical framework is available.
For a human rights scholar who began the year asking "could this truly be the end of universalism?"—it is, at minimum, clarifying to know that the most globally present moral institution on earth has answered "not yet, and not if we build well," and that democratic leaders are beginning to build. The wall is not finished. But sections are being assigned, and some of us have picked up our tools.
Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, generated with AI
