In the same week that Pope Leo XIV released a 40,000-word encyclical demanding AI be “disarmed,” governments across the Western world were quietly dismantling the encryption that protects your private messages. Different actors, different targets, same impulse: centralised control over technology that makes individuals harder to manage.
Welcome to 2026, where the Vatican and the surveillance state have found unlikely common ground — both convinced that powerful technology in the hands of ordinary people is simply too dangerous to be left alone.
The Pope, Gandalf, and the Anthropic Co-Founder Walk Into a Room
Let’s start with the sheer theatre of it. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, released his debut encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on May 25th — timed deliberately to the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 workers’ rights document. The message: AI is the new industrial revolution, and without intervention, it will crush the workers just like the last one did.
Sitting in the front row for the presentation was Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic — one of the most powerful AI labs on the planet. The Vatican, naturally, is already using AI to translate papal masses into 60 languages. This is peak 2026: the institution asking you to distrust technology is simultaneously deploying it at industrial scale.
The encyclical is worth reading, or at least skimming — if you have a week spare and enjoy 40,000 words of careful prose. The core argument: AI must be freed from “logics of domination, exclusion, and death.” Tech elites are compared to colonial conquerors. Data is described as “the new rare earths.” And in a line that will live forever in tech journalism, Leo cited Gandalf — specifically the idea that some powers should not be wielded, even by the wise.
It’s a coherent argument. It’s also an argument being made by an institution that accumulated extraordinary wealth, political influence, and control over information for roughly fifteen centuries before anyone thought to question it.
Meanwhile, Your Messages Are Being Opened
While the Pope was warning about AI concentration, a quieter battle was playing out across the democratic world — governments methodically dismantling the encryption that keeps private communication private.
Meta quietly removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs on May 8th, citing “low adoption.” The Global Encryption Coalition called it exactly what it was: “Encryption is not just a feature. It is fundamental to safety and human rights.” But Meta buckled — the pressure from governments to make messages readable is immense, and Instagram was the easiest front to fold on.
Canada’s Bill C-22 wants backdoors baked into encrypted communication. The EU’s Chat Control regulation (CSAR) — still grinding through Brussels — would require client-side scanning of messages before they’re encrypted. Critics have called it what it is: warrantless mass surveillance. It would also require ID and face scans to open messaging accounts, effectively banning anonymous communication in Europe.
The UK’s Online Safety Act contains technical capability notices that pressure companies to weaken encryption on demand. Apple’s iCloud dispute with UK authorities is ongoing — and getting uglier. Privacy advocates are blunt: 2026 is shaping up to be the worst year for digital privacy in a generation.
The Language of Protection
Here is where the Pope and the surveillance state converge. Both frame their arguments in the language of protection. The encyclical worries about AI harming the vulnerable, the poor, the worker. The governments want backdoors to protect children from predators, to stop terrorism, to prevent financial crime.
These are not dishonest concerns. They are real problems. But “protection” has historically been the most reliable justification for concentrating power, and the pattern here is identical: technology is dangerous, so authority must control it.
The question nobody in power seems willing to ask is: dangerous to whom, and controlled by whom? AI in the hands of an open-source community is a very different threat profile to AI controlled by three labs and a Vatican working group. Encrypted messaging that governments can’t read is dangerous to governments. It is extraordinarily useful to dissidents, journalists, abuse survivors, and anyone living under an authoritarian regime — including quite a few people who currently live in countries that think of themselves as democracies.
Phil Zimmermann Did This Already
In 1991, Phil Zimmermann released PGP — Pretty Good Privacy — and was promptly investigated by the US government for “munitions export without a licence.” Cryptography was classified as a weapon. The idea that civilians could communicate without government access was, in the official view, a national security threat.
The crypto wars of the 1990s produced the Clipper Chip — the NSA’s proposal for an encryption standard with a built-in government backdoor. It failed, eventually, under sustained technical and civil liberties pressure. The internet that emerged was, for a decade or so, genuinely decentralised and hard to surveil at scale.
That window is closing. Chat Control, the Online Safety Act, Bill C-22 — these are the Clipper Chip with better PR. The arguments are identical. The risks are identical. And this time the governments have more leverage, because the platforms are larger, more centralised, and more susceptible to regulatory pressure.
The one bright spot: Apple and Google — pushed by the EFF and others — rolled out E2EE for cross-platform RCS messaging. It’s a genuine win. It also illustrates the dynamic perfectly: the good outcomes come from technical standards and civil society pressure, not from government benevolence.
The Libertarian Counter
Here is the case that neither the Pope nor Brussels will make: technology doesn’t need to be disarmed. It needs to be distributed.
The danger in AI is not that it exists. It’s that it’s concentrated in the hands of a small number of labs, with enormous government influence over those labs. The answer to that isn’t a Vatican working group with a kill switch. The answer is open-source models, local inference, individual sovereignty over compute. The danger of powerful AI is the same as the danger of powerful anything: monopoly. You solve monopoly with distribution, not with centralised disarmament.
The same logic applies to encryption. If your concern is that encryption enables crime, consider that the absence of encryption enables crime on an industrial scale — identity theft, financial fraud, state surveillance of minorities, stalking. The math is not complicated. Backdoors don’t stay exclusive to the good guys. They never have.
Zimmermann was right in 1991. The technology he fought for has saved lives — literally, for journalists and activists working under authoritarian governments. The people trying to “disarm” encryption now are making the same mistake his prosecutors made: confusing “we can’t read it” with “it is dangerous.”
The Irony Worth Savouring
The Vatican is an institution that, for most of its history, controlled who could read the Bible, in what language, and with what commentary. It imprisoned people for translating scripture. It ran the Inquisition. It accumulated land, political influence, and informational control on a scale that would make any tech billionaire envious.
The Pope citing Gandalf to warn about unchecked power is genuinely funny. It’s also worth taking seriously — not because the Vatican has earned the moral authority, but because the underlying point about concentrated technological power is correct. The problem is the proposed solution: more governance, more oversight, more international bodies with “soft power” over AI development. That’s not disarmament. That’s a different set of hands on the same controls.
The answer to powerful AI in the hands of a few is powerful AI in the hands of many. The answer to surveillance infrastructure is encryption infrastructure. The answer to centralised control is radical decentralisation.
Gandalf, for what it’s worth, didn’t hand the One Ring to Gondor for safekeeping. He insisted it had to be destroyed.
The Pope might want to re-read his own citation.
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