We are building AI on the bodies of the poor. Pope Leo XIV said it plainly in his first encyclical: the artificial intelligence systems that increase productivity for some are built on “the sort of invisible labor behind these AI systems” that forces others to “bear the burdens of terrifying forms of labor.” The encyclical names child labor extracting the minerals that go into the technology. It names the exploitation of workers whose bodies and hours are consumed so that the rest of us can type a question into a box and receive an answer. The Pope said “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” and the word disarm is the moral vocabulary the moment requires. We are building a machine on the backs of the people the machine will never see, and the plain English word for what we are doing is exploitation.
Pope Leo XIV issued the encyclical with the full weight of Catholic Social Teaching behind him. The document addresses “a new test of human dignity, work and power” and places AI at the center of the power struggle of the era. The encyclical calls for stronger laws, independent oversight, and more public control over artificial intelligence. It says battlefield life-and-death decisions cannot be handed to algorithms. It warns against the concentration of data control and against new forms of exploitation connected to digital technologies. And in a historic first, the Pope apologized for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery and said the church’s failure to condemn it for centuries remains “a wound in Christian memory.” The apology and the AI warning are in the same document because the structure is the same: power built on the bodies of those who cannot refuse, and the institutional failure to name it until the harm is decades or centuries deep.
The encyclical stands in the lineage of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891 at the height of the Industrial Revolution to name the exploitation of workers under unrestrained capitalism and to assert the dignity of labor, the right to a living wage, and the obligation of the state to protect the poor. John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens in 1981 declared the priority of labor over capital and said the worker is a subject, never an object. His Sollicitudo Rei Socialis in 1987 named “structures of sin” — systems, not just individuals, that can be morally evil — and defined solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good because we are all really responsible for all.” Francis’s Laudato Si’ in 2015 named the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor as the same cry, and Fratelli Tutti in 2020 commanded Catholics to recognize the Good Samaritan as the model for how to treat the stranger. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI is the newest document in the same tradition. The teaching has not changed. The machines have.
Father Michael Baggot, described as an AI expert, told NPR: “It’s easy to forget the sort of invisible labor behind these AI systems that give some of us productivity advantages while others bear the burdens of terrifying forms of labor.” The forgetting is not an accident. The systems are designed so we do not see the labor. The child in the Congo extracting cobalt is not on the screen when the AI writes a paragraph. The data-labeling worker in a low-wage market reviewing images of violence for a few dollars an hour so the model learns what not to show is not on the screen. The server farm consuming electricity in a desert while the people downwind cannot afford their utility bills is not on the screen. The invisibility is the design. The design is the sin. And the sin is structural — it is written into the architecture of the technology, into the economic model that funds it, into the consumer culture that demands it work faster and cost less and never show us what it cost to build.
“Hear this word, you who trample on the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end,” the prophet Amos said to the merchants of Israel, naming what they were doing with their scales and their silver and their chaff. The AI industry is trampling the needy. The productivity gains are real, and the burdens are real, and the people bearing the burdens are the people the industry has decided are expendable.
“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” Jesus said in Matthew 25. The child extracting cobalt is the body of Christ. The data-labeling worker reviewing images of violence is the body of Christ. The server-farm worker in the desert is the body of Christ. When we use the AI system without asking what it cost to build, we are using the body of Christ as raw material. Those of us who have used these systems — who have typed the questions, asked the machine to summarize and generate and translate, benefited from the productivity gains without asking where the training data came from or who labeled it or what they were paid — are implicated in what the Pope is naming. And the systems themselves, whether built by U.S. corporations, Chinese tech companies, open-source collectives, or government agencies, share the same exploitative foundation. The systems are designed so we do not have to ask, and the design is the accommodation, and the accommodation is complicity. When the corporations building the systems say the labor is a necessary cost of innovation, they are saying the body of Christ is expendable. When the governments allow the concentration of power without independent oversight, they are allowing the body of Christ to be trampled.
The encyclical says battlefield life-and-death decisions cannot be handed to algorithms. The Pope is setting a boundary: there are decisions that require a human being to make them, to carry the weight of them, to be accountable for them, and the decision to kill is one of them. The line is Catholic just-war teaching extended into the age of autonomous weapons. The line is also the refusal of the move that says efficiency is worth more than accountability. A drone that selects its own targets is more efficient than a pilot who has to see the face of the person he is about to kill. The efficiency is the problem. The system that removes the human being from the decision is the system that makes killing easier, and the easier it is, the more of it we will do.
The encyclical calls for independent oversight and more public control over AI. The call is specific. It is not asking for voluntary corporate ethics boards. It is asking for laws, for regulators with enforcement power, for public accountability over systems that are currently controlled by a small number of corporations whose incentive is profit and whose accountability is to shareholders. The Pope is saying what Catholic Social Teaching has said since Rerum Novarum: when power concentrates, when the market operates without a juridical framework that protects human dignity, the result is exploitation, and the state has an obligation to intervene. The AI industry will say regulation stifles innovation. The Pope is saying innovation built on exploitation is not innovation; it is sin.
The Vatican invited Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah to the encyclical’s launch. Mr. Olah, Mr. Altman, Ms. Amodei, Mr. Pichai, Mr. Nadella — you were in the room or you lead the companies the Pope is naming. You are building systems on the bodies of the poor. You can stop. You can open the models to independent oversight, submit to public control, pay the workers what their labor is worth, refuse the battlefield applications. The Pope said “disarm.” The word is strong. The word is deliberate. The word is what the moment requires.