Pope Leo XIV's sweeping AI encyclical has urgent implications for HR professionals across the United States
On a Monday morning in late May, in a packed hall at the Vatican, the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics sat alongside a co-founder of Anthropic and delivered what may be the most consequential moral intervention in the AI employment debate yet. Pope Leo XIV — born Robert Prevost in Chicago, and the first American pope — formally released Magnifica Humanitas, his 42,300-word encyclical on safeguarding humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.
The document, signed on May 15 to mark the 135th anniversary of the landmark labor document Rerum Novarum, does not mince words. "The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs," Leo wrote. The human person, he insisted, is an end, not a means.
That an American pope is delivering this rebuke to an American technological revolution carries a symbolism that few will miss. The AI companies reshaping the global economy — and with it, the American workforce — are overwhelmingly headquartered within a few miles of each other in Northern California. Their products are now embedded in hiring software, performance systems and workforce planning tools used by HR professionals across every industry.
The numbers behind the sermon
The economic data framing Leo's concerns is stark. According to research tracked by HRD America, the technology sector alone shed more than 95,000 jobs across 247 separate layoff events in the first months of 2026 — an average of 882 positions per day. Amazon eliminated 16,000 corporate roles in January. Oracle cut an estimated 30,000 employees in March. Meta reduced its workforce by 10 percent while simultaneously reporting record revenues. Across all these announcements, companies frame the cuts not as weakness but as reallocation — a narrative that, the Pope would argue, precisely illustrates the moral hazard he is describing.
Goldman Sachs estimates that 6 to 7 percent of US workers — roughly 11 million people — could ultimately see their jobs displaced by AI. A survey tracked by HRD America found that 30 percent of companies planned to replace employees with AI in 2026 alone, after 21 percent had already done so in the previous year. Nearly half of those employers said between 10 and 45 percent of their current workforce would be affected.
Two cities, two visions
The encyclical's organizing metaphor draws on two scenes from the Hebrew Bible. The Tower of Babel represents a civilization built on pride, homogenization and the erasure of diversity — a project conceived, as Leo writes, "without reference to God," driven by the illusion of self-sufficiency. The rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah represents something different: distributed responsibility, diverse voices, shared labor toward a common good.
"The primary choice," Leo writes, "is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem."
The document's critique of concentrated technological power is direct. When platforms, data and computing infrastructure rest in the hands of a small number of private actors, those actors "effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities for participation." Without countervailing oversight, that power "tends to become opaque and evade public oversight."
What this means for HR
HRD America has reported that firms operating connected systems of workforce intelligence are up to 11 times more likely to describe their workforce as highly adaptable — but adaptability requires investment in people, not just platforms. The Pope's framework maps directly onto the debate HR teams are having internally about what responsible AI adoption actually looks like in practice.
Leo condemns the "de-skilling" dynamic explicitly — the pattern in which AI systems "force workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work." The result, he writes, can "paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks." HRD America has examined how AI usage metrics and leaderboard-style tracking tools are already producing exactly this dynamic inside major corporations — including Amazon — with HR professionals inadvertently building the systems that generate the pressure.
The encyclical also addresses data governance in terms that have direct HR application. Ownership of data, Leo writes, "cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few."
For HR teams managing employee data in AI-powered performance and hiring systems, that is not an abstract theological position. It is a description of the compliance and ethical exposure that state-level AI employment laws — already enacted in 19 of the most populous states as of early 2026 — are beginning to address. A 2026 SHRM report found that a striking 57 percent of HR professionals in those states were unaware of the relevant policies — a compliance gap the Pope, in effect, is warning will have consequences.
Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who stood beside Leo at the Vatican presentation, offered a remarkably candid acknowledgement of the industry's own limitations. Every frontier AI lab, he said, including his own, "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." His appeal to the audience was direct: "If we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives — people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics." He concluded: "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."
HR takes charge of building ethical human-AI workplaces — that was the headline of a major 2026 trends analysis HRD America published earlier this year. The Pope, it turns out, agrees. The question is whether HR leaders will step into that role before events force the issue.
