Two Visions of AI: The Pope and the President

Two of the most consequential statements on artificial intelligence issued in the past year came from leaders who could not be more different in temperament, constituency or institutional authority. One governs the most powerful nation on earth. The other leads the world’s oldest continuously operating institution. Together, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and President Trump’s Executive Order 14365 define the poles of the AI governance debate as it stands today. Understanding both documents, and what they share as well as where they diverge, is essential for any lawyer, entrepreneur or business leader trying to navigate the landscape ahead.

The Common Ground: AI Is a Civilizational Moment

Start with what they agree on, because the agreement is real and important.

Both Leo and Trump treat AI not as a product category or a regulatory nuisance but as a civilizational inflection point. Trump’s July 2025 AI Action Plan opens with a declaration that AI and other transformative technologies have “the potential to reshape the global balance of power, spark entirely new industries, and revolutionize the way we live and work.” Leo’s encyclical frames AI as a second Industrial Revolution demanding a moral response as comprehensive as Rerum Novarum offered to the first. The scale of the moment is not in dispute.

Both also agree that the United States and the world are not moving fast enough to grapple with AI’s implications, though they draw opposite conclusions from that premise. Trump concludes that the urgency demands acceleration and deregulation. Leo concludes that it demands a pause, deliberation and binding legal constraints. But the shared premise, that AI cannot be treated as business as usual, is worth noting. Neither document is complacent.

And both, perhaps surprisingly, express concern about the concentration of AI power in too few hands. Trump’s executive order frames the threat as foreign, primarily Chinese, dominance of AI infrastructure. Leo frames it as the danger of private sector oligopoly, a handful of corporations controlling technologies with civilizational stakes. The object of concern differs, but the underlying anxiety about power concentration runs through both documents.

The Divide: Innovation vs. Accountability

Beyond those points of convergence, the two visions diverge sharply, and the fault line runs through a single question: who should govern AI, and how?

Trump’s answer is clear and consistent across every executive action his administration has taken since January 2025. The federal government should govern AI minimally, the private sector should lead and state governments should get out of the way. His December 2025 executive order explicitly frames state AI regulations as threats to innovation, targeting laws like Colorado’s algorithmic discrimination statute as potentially compelling AI systems to “produce false results.” The order created an AI Litigation Task Force in the Department of Justice tasked with challenging state AI laws inconsistent with the administration’s deregulatory agenda. The July 2025 AI Action Plan reduced the framework to three pillars: accelerating AI innovation, building AI infrastructure and achieving global dominance.

Leo’s answer is equally clear and runs in the opposite direction. He calls for “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility.” That phrase, “does not abdicate its responsibility,” reads as a direct rebuke of the approach embodied in Trump’s executive orders. The Pope is not calling for innovation to stop. He is insisting that innovation without external legal accountability is not a policy, it is a gamble with consequences that fall disproportionately on the vulnerable.

Regulation: Enemy of Innovation or Guarantor of Trust?

The deepest philosophical disagreement between the two documents concerns the relationship between regulation and innovation, and it is not a new debate.

Trump’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025 under the banner Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, frames regulation as an obstacle to be cleared. The administration revoked Biden’s 2023 executive order on safe and trustworthy AI on its first day in office, eliminated mandatory reporting requirements for large AI models and moved aggressively to preempt state laws that impose transparency, bias auditing or consumer protection obligations. The premise is that regulation slows development, and that slowing development cedes ground to China.

Leo rejects that framing entirely. His encyclical argues that voluntary ethics commitments and market self-discipline have already proven inadequate. The concentration of AI data and infrastructure in private hands, he writes, is “especially” dangerous to children and vulnerable populations. Ethical AI development is not a constraint on competitive advantage; it is a condition of the technology’s legitimacy. The absence of external accountability does not produce better AI. It produces AI optimized for the interests of those who control it.

This is not merely a theological argument. It echoes the position of the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the thirty-six state attorneys general who wrote to the Trump administration opposing a moratorium on state AI laws, warning that federal preemption would freeze states’ ability to respond nimbly to emerging risks.

Power, Competition and Who Bears the Costs

On geopolitics, the two documents speak entirely different languages, though both are shaped by a recognition that AI is reordering the global balance of power.

Trump’s framework is explicitly competitive. The AI Action Plan describes achieving “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” as a national security imperative. AI is the primary theater of a new technological cold war with China, and winning that war requires removing any friction that might slow the American private sector’s ability to develop and deploy AI at scale. Environmental regulations, state consumer protection laws, mandatory safety audits and bias disclosures are all cast as friction.

Leo’s framework is explicitly relational. He argues that the “race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets,” driven by geopolitical and commercial competition, is itself a source of danger. The race dynamic, he writes, produces technology optimized for dominance rather than for human flourishing. His call to “disarm” AI is a call to step back from the competitive logic that both Washington and Beijing are currently accelerating.

On labor and economic distribution, Leo is direct in a way the Trump framework is not. The encyclical warns against AI driving widespread unemployment without adequate social support, and demands that productivity gains not be captured exclusively by capital while workers bear the losses. Trump’s AI Action Plan is largely silent on distributional consequences, focusing instead on aggregate growth and national competitive position.

Children, Vulnerable Populations and Where Both Documents Converge Again

One area of genuine and perhaps unexpected overlap: both documents express concern about AI’s effects on children and vulnerable populations.

Trump’s executive order includes explicit carve-outs, declining to preempt state AI laws relating to child safety. Leo devotes substantial attention to the danger AI poses to children, calling the concentration of AI data in private hands “especially” dangerous to the young and vulnerable. The Trump administration’s stated concern may be narrower and more politically motivated than Leo’s, but the convergence is real. Any AI governance framework, regardless of its broader regulatory philosophy, will need to grapple seriously with how AI affects those least able to protect themselves.

What This Means for Lawyers and Their Clients

The gap between these two visions creates genuine legal uncertainty for businesses operating in the AI space, and that uncertainty is not going away.

Trump’s framework is dominant at the federal level but contested at the state level and internationally. Thirty-six state attorneys general oppose federal preemption. California, New York and Colorado have enacted or are implementing AI transparency and accountability laws. The EU AI Act imposes binding requirements on any company doing business in Europe. A business that structures its AI compliance program around the Trump administration’s minimally burdensome federal standard may find itself exposed in state courts, before European regulators and in litigation from consumers and employees.

Leo’s framework carries no legal authority, but it does carry moral authority at a scale that eventually moves legislatures and courts. Rerum Novarum did not create labor law. But it created the moral vocabulary that made labor law politically possible and culturally sustainable. Lawyers advising clients on AI governance would be wise to track the encyclical’s influence on international regulatory trends, particularly in Europe, Latin America and among multilateral institutions.

The NJSBA Task Force Report on AI and ABA Formal Opinion 512 make clear that for New Jersey attorneys, the professional responsibility obligations around AI use are already live and are not waiting for either the Pope or the President to resolve their differences. Competence, supervision, candor and confidentiality impose real obligations now.

The Bottom Line

Pope Leo XIV and President Trump have both produced serious, sweeping statements on AI in the past year. They agree that the moment is extraordinary, that power concentration is a danger and that children require protection. On nearly everything else, including regulation, labor, geopolitics, the role of the private sector and the very meaning of governance, they are operating from incompatible premises.

The tension between those premises is not merely philosophical. It is the terrain on which AI law, AI policy and AI litigation will be contested for the next decade. Lawyers, entrepreneurs and technology leaders who understand both visions, and the gap between them, will be better equipped to build governance frameworks that survive whichever direction the political winds ultimately blow.

The Pope has spoken. The President has acted. The rest of us are left to navigate the distance between them.