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Pope Leo XIV has barely released his first major encyclical, and the internet is already asking an awkwardly modern question: did artificial intelligence help write the Vatican’s warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence? The lengthy document, titled Magnifica Humanitas, focuses on the social, ethical and political risks posed by rapidly advancing AI systems.
In it, Pope Leo urges governments and technology companies to slow down the race towards increasingly powerful AI tools, warning that unchecked development could fuel misinformation, deepen conflict and threaten workers’ rights.
But while the document’s message was about caution, online discussion quickly shifted towards the possibility that the encyclical itself may have been drafted with AI assistance.
Did Pope use AI to write dangers of AI? The debate began after researcher Linch Zhang posted an analysis on the online forum LessWrong, claiming parts of the encyclical showed signs commonly associated with AI-generated writing.
In my new post, I argue that the first papal encyclical *on* AI is also the first papal encyclical substantially *by* AI.
(1/x) pic.twitter.com/XrFMTcst5r — Linch (@LinchZhang) May 26, 2026 Using the AI detection tool Pangram, Zhang found that certain passages of the document were estimated to be anywhere between 40 per cent and fully AI-generated.
Another user reportedly analysed the text chapter by chapter and found that nearly two-thirds of the first chapter was flagged as AI-written.
Even independent tests produced mixed results.
When portions of the document were run through Pangram, some sections appeared strongly human-written, while others showed noticeable AI markers.
This is unlikely to be a false positive: a) 0% of paragraphs in past encyclicals....
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