Pope Leo XIV Warns AI Must Be Disarmed, Citing Gandalf From The Lord of the Rings

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, cites a passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in a warning about artificial intelligence, using Gandalf’s line that “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

“The Pope referred to the wizard from The Lord of the Rings, a work that in fact describes the horrors and changes of the 20th century”

El País

In the encyclical, Pope Leo XIV frames the issue as safeguarding “the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” and he stresses that responsibility must be defined “from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions,” according to Tom's Guide’s account of the letter.

El País

Tom's Guide also quotes Pope Leo XIV saying, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” and it adds that the Pope argues for AI to be “carefully controlled” rather than abandoned.

WIRED describes the same encyclical as warning against “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm,” and it says the letter compares AI’s rise to the industrial revolution.

El País adds that the encyclical, published on Monday, warns about “the danger that artificial intelligence can pose to humanity if it grows out of control and remains in the hands of an elite, outside of any democratic scrutiny.”

WIRED says the Tolkien reference is especially salient because of “backward interpretations of Middle-earth mythology by right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk,” and it notes that “Neither Thiel nor Musk immediately returned a request for comment on the encyclical.”

In the same WIRED account, it argues that Pope Leo XIV is concerned about “the motives of tech oligarchs racing to develop artificial general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities,” and it ties the Gandalf passage to a lesson that WIRED says is “miles away from what Musk and Thiel apparently see in Tolkien’s masterpiece.”

Tom's Guide

Where Peter Is frames the Gandalf quote as a “veiled rebuke of Peter Thiel,” and it says Thiel’s company Palantir is assisting the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans through data-mining.

That article also says Thiel has flirted with transhumanism and that the pope is “deeply critical of the concept of transhumanism,” quoting the encyclical’s claim that “the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed.”

El País situates the encyclical’s Tolkien citation within a broader set of cultural references, saying the Pope included Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the story of Oskar Schindler alongside warnings about technology and elite control.

Tom's Guide says Pope Leo XIV’s letter emphasizes “preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence,” and it reports that the Pope argues AI must be “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate.”

WIRED adds that the encyclical warns of “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency,” and it presents the Tolkien citation as part of that critique of technocratic power.

El País connects the encyclical’s warning to earlier papal teaching by citing Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum and quoting: “No system of calculation, however sophisticated, generates a heart that yields, nor a conscience capable of discerning good.”

El País also says the encyclical is concerned with AI if it grows out of control and remains with an elite outside democratic scrutiny, and it describes Tolkien’s own 20th-century experience as shaping the reference.

Where Peter Is closes its account by saying the encyclical uses the Gandalf passage to illustrate “our common responsibility as humans to address the problems of our time,” aiming at “a civilization of love that our children and grandchildren can inherit.”