Hugging Face Ethics Team Annotates Pope Leo XIV's AI Encyclical

Pope Leo XIV signed his first major encyclical, 'Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,' on May 15, 2026. The ethics and society team at Hugging Face read it and did something unusual: they annotated it.

Starting with 105 scholarly citations, the society-ethics group including chief ethics scientist Margaret Mitchell and colleagues Avijit Ghosh and Verena Rieser built an interactive space where readers can work through the papal text alongside highlighted connections to decades of responsible AI research. The team noted they were amazed to see how much the encyclical echoed scholarship in AI ethics, societal impact, and rights-focused policy, and that the document shared solutions alongside the problems it identified.

The encyclical itself is direct. 'Technology is never neutral,' it states, 'because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.' It warns that 'never has humanity had such power over itself,' and that emerging technologies are 'interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes.'

What the project does not yet give you is clarity on how community-contributed annotations are reviewed. The team describes it as a work in progress and invites submissions of relevant academic research, which leaves the question of editorial oversight genuinely open. Annotations added without strong review could project positions onto the text that the encyclical itself does not hold.

The more interesting possibility is what happens if this resource reaches Catholic institutions beyond the tech world. Catholic universities, hospitals, and NGOs span much of the globe, and a readable package connecting papal social teaching to peer-reviewed AI ethics literature could carry responsible-AI norms into conversations that technical workshops rarely reach.