Vatican Encyclical Declares War on Skynet, Prescribes Expanded State Control as Remedy

The encyclical warns that artificial intelligence is not neutral.

It is shaped by the people who build it, own it, train it, sell it and weaponise it.

It condemns digital colonialism, algorithmic dehumanisation, and the transformation of the human person into a sad little data packet waiting to be monetised by someone named Brad from Product Strategy.

The Pope even calls for AI to be “disarmed,” especially where lethal autonomous weapons are concerned. This is the kind of radical moral insight previously available to anyone who watched Terminator and thought, “Maybe the murder robots were the bad part.”

So far, excellent. Rome has correctly identified the glowing red eye in the server room.

But then the encyclical reaches its proposed solution, and the soundtrack changes from ominous to full horror.

The Pope’s remedy is to place it under state control, international supervision, regulatory frameworks, ethics boards, public oversight bodies, and other sacred institutions of modern civilisation that can take a bad idea and turn it into a twelve-year procurement process.

This is not defeating Skynet.

This is giving Skynet a ministry.

The issue is not whether AI should be owned by Google, the Pentagon, Brussels, or some smiling international council. The issue is whether AI is going to serve actual human beings or whether it will become another instrument by which powerful institutions manage, classify, predict, correct, and discipline the rest of us.

Magnifica Humanitas begins as a warning against the machine.

It ends by asking the machine to report to committee.

The full English text is available here:

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

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