This blog post was originally published on Medium on May 27th, 2026 and reposted on the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech website. Please find the original blog post here.
The release of Pope Leo XIV’s new Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas — On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence marks an important intervention in one of the defining debates of our time: how humanity should govern and direct technological power of artificial intelligence in service of the human person. While much of the global press coverage has understandably focused on the document’s warnings regarding autonomous weapons systems and the urgent call to “disarm AI,” the encyclical is ultimately much broader and more ambitious. At its core, it is not simply a warning against dangerous technologies; it is a reflection aboutsafeguarding the human person, the meaning of peace, human dignity, and the moral responsibilities that accompany technological development. As such, it contributes to a broader moral and normative understanding of why PeaceTech matters.
Rooted in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, the encyclical contributes to a broader moral and ethical foundation on the societal implications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Its central concerns — human dignity, justice, peace, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, responsibility, charity, and the ethical stewardship of technological power — reflect some of the defining moral questions of the AI age. It also complements similar calls by other spiritual and ethical leaders, including the Dalai Lama who has repeatedly emphasized that artificial intelligence must be guided by compassion, responsibility, critical thinking, and the welfare of humanity.
Throughout Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV repeatedly argues that the central challenge of our era is not whether technology advances, but whether it advances in service of humanity or in opposition to it. The document warns against what it calls the “Babel syndrome” — the temptation to use technological power for domination, uniformity, and control rather than communion and coexistence. In one of the encyclical’s most important passages, he writes: “In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.” This distinction is essential for understanding PeaceTech.
PeaceTech is not simply the opposite of WarTech or DefenseTech. Nor is it a naïve belief that technology alone can solve conflict. Rather, PeaceTech represents the intentional design, development, governance, and deployment of technologies that save human lives, strengthen the conditions for peace, dignity, justice, resilience, dialogue, and human flourishing. We define PeaceTech as the intentional use of technologies and data to save lives, safeguard human dignity, prevent, mitigate, or recover from conflict, enable accountability, and strengthen the social, civic, informational, and institutional conditions that allow people to live with dignity, agency, and security. As Pope Leo XIV writes in Magnifica Humanitas:
“peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war; instead, it is always possible as the fruit of justice and charity”
Importantly, the encyclical itself adopts a similarly expansive understanding of peace. Peace is not merely the absence of war. Magnifica Humanitas emphasizes that peace must be built through justice, solidarity, human dignity, dialogue, and the common good. The document explicitly calls for “building peace through justice” and “adopting the perspective of victims” as essential responsibilities in the age of artificial intelligence and technological power.
This broader conception of peace aligns closely with what peace scholars have long described as “positive peace”: the long-term societal conditions that allow individuals and communities to live meaningful, dignified, and participatory lives. PeaceTech, therefore, is not confined to ceasefires, mediation, or post-war reconstruction alone. It also includes technologies that strengthen social trust, improve access to information, counter disinformation, support humanitarian coordination, foster civic participation, protect human rights, and help communities become more resilient before violence emerges.
Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the encyclical is its insistence that technological governance must be rooted in a vision of the human person. The Pope repeatedly warns against reducing human beings to “data and performance.” He cautions that technologies are never neutral because they inevitably reflect the values, incentives, and power structures of those who design and deploy them.
This insight is especially relevant today as AI systems increasingly shape public discourse, security systems, economic opportunities, political decision-making, and even warfare itself. The rapid militarization of AI — from autonomous drones to algorithmic targeting systems and predictive surveillance — risks normalizing a world in which efficiency replaces ethics and technological superiority substitutes for diplomacy.
The encyclical directly challenges this trajectory. It calls on humanity to reject “force without limits” and warns against the “normalization of war.” Yet the document does more than critique. It invites the global community to actively imagine and build alternatives.
That is precisely where PeaceTech enters the conversation.
Around the world, there are tech founders, entrepreneurs, engineers, venture capitalists, researchers, innovators and civil society organizations, are seeking to develop technologies explicitly oriented toward peacebuilding and human dignity. Early warning systems powered by machine learning are being used to identify signals of escalating violence before conflicts erupt. Satellite imagery and open-source intelligence tools help document war crimes and environmental destruction.
One notable example is Common Space, which is developing the first independent, community-tasked satellite mission focused on peacebuilding and humanitarian action, providing open-access imagery to support verification, response efforts, and peacebuilding activities. Another example is Aerobotics7 — an AI-driven drone technology designed to detect and neutralize landmines in conflict zones, including in Ukraine, supporting post-conflict recovery and civilian safety.
As Pope Leo XIV writes in Magnifica Humanitas, “Those who make history are the peacemakers, not those who sow seeds of suffering.”
Importantly, many of these efforts reflect the encyclical’s repeated emphasis on participation, subsidiarity, and shared responsibility. Pope Leo XIV argues that no single actor can solve the challenges of our time alone. Instead, he calls for cooperation between “scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities.”
This is deeply consistent with the ethos of PeaceTech. Peace cannot be engineered solely through centralized systems of control, nor sustained through technological power detached from moral responsibility and the dignity of the human person. Sustainable peace requires legitimacy, trust, pluralism of thought, representation, and participation rooted in human relationships. Technologies designed without communities often reinforce existing inequalities, deepen exclusion, or create new forms of surveillance and coercion. By contrast, PeaceTech at its best recognizes that peacebuilding is relational, contextual, and fundamentally human-centered.
The encyclical also offers a powerful critique of technological determinism: the assumption that innovation itself automatically leads to progress. This critique mirrors a growing recognition within the PeaceTech field that technologies can simultaneously support peace and fuel conflict depending on governance, incentives, and context. The same AI systems used to coordinate humanitarian relief can also power autonomous weapons. Social media platforms can foster dialogue or amplify polarization and hate. Data systems can increase accountability or enable authoritarian control.
As the PeaceTech framework itself cautions, technologies are “support tools” rather than replacements for human judgment, diplomacy, and peacebuilding. This is precisely why the encyclical insists that humanity must remain morally and spiritually grounded amidst rapid technological transformation. In one of its most moving passages, the document states: “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”
That sentence may ultimately become one of the defining moral imperatives for the age of AI.
At a time when billions are being invested into military AI, autonomous systems, surveillance infrastructures, and geopolitical technological competition, PeaceTech offers an alternative innovation agenda, beyond dual use: one centered not on domination, but on dignity; not on extraction, but on solidarity; not on fear, but on coexistence.
The challenge ahead is therefore not simply to regulate harmful technologies, though that remains essential. The greater challenge may be whether humanity is willing, intellectually, politically, morally, and financially, to invest in technologies explicitly designed to advance peace itself.
Ultimately, PeaceTech is not merely about building safer technologies, but about cultivating a civilization capable of directing technological power toward the common good. Technology is never morally neutral; it reflects the character, priorities, and moral imagination of those who design, finance, and govern it.
Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that peace is not passive. It must be built intentionally. And increasingly, in a digital and AI-mediated world, part of that construction will involve building technologies worthy of humanity.
Stefaan Verhulst is co-founder of The GovLab and The DataTank, and Research Professor at the Tandon School of Engineering.
Artur Kluz is the founder and CEO of Kluz Ventures and the founder of the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech.