Pope Leo XIV Frames AI as Babel, Rabbis Sharpen the Warning

Every few years a religious leader tries to give the AI debate a moral vocabulary the industry does not have on its own, and this week the Vatican did it through a Genesis story. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, casts artificial intelligence as a choice between "building another Tower of Babel, or rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem alongside Nehemiah." The new Pope reportedly chose his name to echo the church's response to the last great technological rupture, the industrial age under Pope Leo XIII, so the framing is deliberate.

Writing in Tech Policy Press, Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene push the reading further by pulling in the rabbinic tradition, and three warnings stand out. One from the midrash: "When the brick matters more than the man, you are building Babel," which they line up against AI systems optimized for throughput at the expense of the people doing the work. One from Nachmanides and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in The Dignity of Difference, that Babel is a critique of empire and enforced uniformity rather than a story about linguistic diversity as punishment. And one from a rabbinic image of a builder who asks his partner for an axe and gets handed a shovel instead: the risk of building systems no one can talk about clearly enough to govern.

The concrete claim underneath the theology is a market one. The authors argue that "two governments, a half-dozen companies and a handful of individuals now hold most of the compute, capital and talent that will shape the technology," and point to the recent friction between Anthropic and the Pentagon over military uses as a preview of a permanent negotiation between AI labs and states. That is the sentence in the piece a policy or strategy reader should sit with.

The honest caveat is that this is a commentary, not a reporting scoop. The essay does not tell you what the Vatican plans to do beyond the encyclical, how Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon actually resolves, or which regulatory mechanism would break the concentration it names. What it does give you is a warning that arrives with unusual authority, closing on the line that "we are about to learn whether we can build something nearer the heavens than anything before it without repeating their mistake."