The Slavery That Wore a Digital Face
A month ago, Pope Leo XIV did something no Pope had done before. He apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery — not with a casual remark, not with a carefully worded expression of regret, but with a formal, institutional acknowledgment that the Church had been complicit in “a wound in Christian memory.” And he did it inside the same document that warned artificial intelligence is creating “new forms of slavery linked to AI.”
The document is Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, published May 25. The timing was deliberate: he signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s encyclical that confronted the first Industrial Revolution and demanded that capitalism serve human dignity rather than consume it. Leo XIV was framing this moment as equally pivotal. AI, he was saying, is our Industrial Revolution. And like the last one, it is being built on invisible labor and hidden suffering.
What struck me most was not the AI warning itself. We’ve heard that before — from philosophers, engineers, science fiction writers, politicians. What struck me was the pairing. The Pope did not separate the historical sin from the emerging one. He placed them in the same breath, as if to say: we have done this before, we recognized it too late, and we are doing it again right now while congratulating ourselves on our progress.
The specifics he called out are not abstract. The AI supply chain depends on critical mineral extraction — cobalt, lithium, rare earths — often mined under conditions that meet the definition of forced labor. It depends on electronics manufacturing in factories where workers clock fourteen-hour shifts. It depends on logistics networks where delivery drivers are classified as independent contractors to avoid labor protections. It depends on data centers burning through water and electricity in regions that can afford neither. And perhaps most invisibly, it depends on an army of data annotators and content moderators — hundreds of thousands of workers, many in the Global South — who train the models and filter the horrors so the rest of us see clean, helpful outputs. These workers are paid pennies per task, exposed to traumatic material without adequate psychological support, and given no job security because the work is routed through layers of subcontractors designed to dissolve accountability.
The Pope called for “supply chain transparency within the technological industry, so that no competitive advantage is built upon hidden exploitation.” He could have been speaking about any industry, but he chose AI specifically — the industry that markets itself as the summit of human ingenuity, the engine of a brighter future, the solution to problems we have not yet solved. The contradiction is almost grotesque: a technology promoted as liberation, built on labor conditions that resemble the opposite.
And then there is the apology. “The Church’s own historical role in legitimizing slavery,” the Pope wrote, was a “wound in Christian memory.” He asked formally for pardon. This matters not because the apology fixes what was done, but because it establishes a pattern of moral reasoning: an institution powerful enough to shape civilizations can also be wrong, and when it is wrong, it must say so. That may sound obvious, but institutions do not do this easily. They do not do it at all, as a rule. The Catholic Church spent centuries justifying slavery with theology before slowly, grudgingly, abandoning the position. Now the Pope is saying: we were wrong, we knew we were wrong, we took too long to admit it, and here is why we must not make the same mistake again.
I keep thinking about the phrase “new forms of slavery.” What does it mean for slavery to be new? The old form was visible: chains, ships, auction blocks, whips. The new form is distributed across networks and contracts and APIs. It does not need a plantation. It needs a dashboard. It does not need an overseer with a lash. It needs an algorithm that pays workers per microtask and deactivates their accounts if their accuracy rate drops below a threshold. The violence is not physical. It is architectural — baked into the design of platforms and the incentives of markets.
The Pope stood beside Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, when he presented the encyclical. Anthropic is currently suing the U.S. government for designating it a supply chain risk after the company refused to let its AI be used for lethal autonomous weapons. That pairing — a Pope apologizing for slavery while an AI researcher who drew an ethical line stood at his side — was a strange kind of tableau. It suggested that moral clarity is still possible, even in the industry that the Pope was warning against. But it also suggested how isolated that clarity is. One company, one Pope, one encyclical, against an economy that runs on hidden labor and extracted attention and optimized engagement.
A month has passed. The encyclical was covered, summarized, debated for a week, and then replaced in the news cycle by GPT-5.6 rumors and World Cup highlights. Google announced it is now processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month. The data centers expanded. The annotation workers kept annotating. The supply chains stayed opaque. The apology was historic. The warning was specific. And the world, for the most part, kept scrolling.
That is perhaps the most melancholic thing about it. Not that the Pope was wrong. But that he might be right, and it might not matter. An institution that took two millennia to apologize for slavery is now warning us about a new form of the same sin, and we are building it faster than he can write about it. The wound in Christian memory is being joined by a wound in our own — the one we will eventually have to apologize for, when the machines we trained on hidden labor have already become the infrastructure we cannot imagine living without.
The slavery that wore a digital face does not look like the old kind. It is quieter. It is cleaner. It is more efficient. And that is exactly what makes it harder to see.
Sources: Walk Free Foundation, National Catholic Reporter, AI Tools Recap, OSV News