The Vatican Just Outmaneuvered Washington on AI

It takes a profound failure of political imagination for the United States government to be outflanked on the most pressing technological issue of the twenty-first century by a two-millennia-old religious institution. Yet, with the release of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the Catholic Church has accomplished exactly what U.S. politicians have failed to do: ground the national dialogue on artificial intelligence in broader questions about what it means to be human.

In fact, along with the Catholic Church, U.S. politicians need to cultivate a new dialogue with civil society about how AI will transform not only the individual lives of Americans, but also larger questions about strategy and statecraft. That dialogue is currently fragmented and requires deeper investments in AI benchmarking, tracing the supply chains that power the AI economy, and rebuilding the institutions that combat mis-, dis-, and mal-information.

The New Tower of Babel

Washington’s current debate on AI is structurally broken. It is a disjointed, top-down echo chamber dominated by defense strategists, tech CEOs, and highly funded foundations obsessed with theoretical “existential risk.” Billions of dollars and countless congressional hearings are dedicated to preventing a hypothetical doomsday where artificial general intelligence (AGI) goes rogue. By obsessing over science fiction, policymakers are willfully ignoring the slow, accumulative risks happening right now. They are also failing to frame a broader debate that will connect dialogue about the moral challenge of AI with larger questions of economic and military strategy.

Over the last decade, billions of dollars from organizations aligned with the “effective altruism” movement have been channeled into preventing a hypothetical rogue superintelligence, an ideological framework largely anchored by Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. Critics of this worldview, including prominent AI researcher Timnit Gebru and scholar Émile P. Torres, argue that this hyper-fixation on theoretical extinction events creates a catastrophic vacuum in practical policy. By capturing the political imagination of Washington, evidenced by the outsized focus on AGI alignment in congressional hearings, the foundation ecosystem distracts lawmakers from building the resilience infrastructure needed to address the accumulative, ground-level crises of algorithmic bias, intellectual property theft, and workforce disruption that are actively destabilizing the middle class today.

Pope Leo sees what earlier thinkers such as Reinhold Neibhur also embraced: the need for dialogue about moral man and immoral society. The individual experience of AI is defined not by apocalyptic threats, but by a steady erosion of human agency and dignity, a phenomenon scholars including Shoshana Zuboff have framed as the expansion of algorithmic paternalism and surveillance capitalism. Everyday life is increasingly intermediated by invisible systems that dictate creditworthiness, hiring, and medical care, often leaving the individual with zero recourse or ability to cross-examine the algorithm, as detailed in Joy Buolamwini's Unmasking AI. Furthermore, as labor economists including Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Daron Acemoglu have consistently documented, the economic dialogue remains dangerously fixated on aggregate job displacement while ignoring the psychological toll of “cognitive outsourcing” and the devaluation of human mastery in the knowledge sector. This shift has triggered a profound crisis of societal trust. Data from the Pew Research Center confirms that a growing majority of Americans feel a total loss of control over their data and express deep anxiety over navigating a digital ecosystem newly saturated with synthetic media and deepfakes.

The Pope’s encyclical cuts through this macro-bias. It correctly identifies that the immediate threat is not a sentient supercomputer, but a “culture of power” that degrades human dignity, outsources cognitive agency, and leaves individuals powerless against algorithmic paternalism. The Pope points out that the concentration of the few has created monopolistic powers in AI that further erode human prosperity, presence, and morality in designing technological innovations. Furthermore, it captures new forms of tyranny already in the making including the assault on truth by AI-empowered propaganda and the ways in which unregulated supply chains create repression and exploitation.

From the Tower of Babel to the Pope’s New Jerusalem

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas exposes a vacuum in U.S. leadership. While Silicon Valley and Washington pour capital into preparing for the end of the world, they are neglecting to build the bridge humanity needs to survive the next decade. To be fair, the Trump administration has moved fast to harmonize regulation to sustain U.S. leadership on AI, but it is time for U.S. policymakers to shift their gaze from the theoretical horizon and start addressing the people standing right in front of them. U.S. political leaders in both parties should embrace key aspect of the Pope’s call to debate key philosophical and ideological ideas underlying the relationship between humanity and technology at stake in the accelerating adoption of AI. As the Pope notes in the treatise

It is essential that the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight, grounded in participation and subsidiarity. Communities and intermediary organizations must not be reduced to passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere; they must be able to contribute to discernment and oversight.

First, the government needs to promote broader work on benchmarking and developing a better understanding of how AI models work in the real world. While there has been progress in adolescent mental health after growing concerns about teenagers turning to chatbots for advice, key areas such as national security remain under studied. This is an area where the federal government can offer grants to nonprofits and civil society actors to build benchmarks for high-stakes areas most likely to affect people using AI.

Second, combating what Pope Leo XIV calls “new forms of slavery,” including dangerous and illegal labor for mineral extraction, is a bipartisan issue the next Congress can rally behind. It will require fast-tracking the implementation of new provisions on critical mineral traceability. The Chinese Communist Party has created a system that allows it take advantage of exploitive labor practices and convert commodities into the inputs that run the twenty-first century digital economy. It also requires additional investments to support tracking supply chains consistent with new federal acquisition guidelines and National Defense Authorization Act Fiscal Year 2026 Section 833 on illuminating supply chains. These efforts could be expanded in the next Congress to explore Foreign Entity of Concern screening.

Last, to address the Pope’s concerns about the assault on the truth, democracy, and devaluing of humanity, requires reinvesting in institutions used to fight misinformation at home and abroad. The United States has dismantled or reduced funding to many of these entities, yet they are exactly what is needed to help communities face rapid economic irrelevance or navigate a world flooded with deepfakes. This effort must be seen as a public good, if not moral imperative, and disentangled from the polarization of modern American politics. Yes, free speech matters and groups should be allowed to promote their worldviews, but there should be mechanisms that call out when statements are actually false. For example, the United States has a Motion Picture Association to assign film ratings but no nongovernmental, independent mechanism to at least alert people when films spread proven mis-, dis-, or mal-information and that absence is mind boggling.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.