Jun 8, 2026
by Purpose Foundation
Data: the new currency of the digital age, the fuel of AI. Artificial intelligence feeds on all of our data. The data of humanity, the knowledge of humanity, the knowledge that individuals and groups have developed together, as well as on cultural achievements and forms of expression. AI absorbs that vast inheritance and scales it to levels never seen before, multiplying human capability through technology – at work, in culture, in private life, for civilian ends and military ones alike. That last part, especially, is alarming enough to invite comparison not only with the Industrial Revolution, but with threats as singular as nuclear weapons.
And it has also alarmed the Pope. With his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV doesn't just strike a chord. He strikes the chord, by laying a finger on the most conspicuous wound of our time. And his long reflection on AI lands on a single, deliberately jarring verb: “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” he plainly summed up his conclusion when presenting the encyclical at the Vatican on May 25.
While he generally acknowledges the potential of new technology (it “has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home”), the pope observes severe challenges coming with the rapid development of AI: growing inequality, potentially new forms of slavery, and even acts of war spiraling out of human control. And his call for disarmament of AI ultimately brings the topic of ownership on the table – without openly saying it. But “disarming” AI – freeing it from domination and, in Leo's own words, from “monopolistic control” – is, we believe, finally a question about ownership.
Because with the topic of data and AI, old questions come in new clothes – questions that maybe matter more than ever before: How is – and how should – ownership behind these technologies (be) structured? What is AI used for? What’s its purpose? Who should be in control? And who or what benefits from the profits it generates? At whose costs?
In their technical, legal and economic detail, those questions stay open in the encyclical. But that a Pope steps into them is nothing new. It is no accident that Leo compares the AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution, and that he signed the document on 15 May 2026, exactly 135 years to the day after Rerum Novarum, the encyclical of his namesake and predecessor Leo XIII, who, in light of automation of production processes, urged that social concerns and people not be neglected. The timing is the whole argument in miniature. And it shows: The questions above are timeless. As is steward ownership, which as a concept is essentially as old as the economy itself. Yet, as a legal framework, it offers new answers.
In this article, we want to dive a little deeper into the Pope’s reasoning and draw a connection to the topic of ownership, which we believe deserves much greater attention in the context of AI.
Leo's worry is concrete: that AI accelerates the concentration of power and widens inequality. The numbers back him. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index reports that industry now produces more than 90 percent of the world's notable frontier models, while the institutions meant to govern them are left jogging behind a sprint. The Pope's own diagnosis is sharper still. Global wealth, he writes, is “increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, widening inequalities both within and between countries.”
And the race to control AI is concentrating power in real time. For now, the big AI labs are still operating at a loss. One reason why, in early 2026, Elon Musk folded his loss-making AI company xAI into the far more profitable SpaceX, in a deal valuing the combined group at around $1.25 trillion. Now the IPO is just around the corner – and it’s likely to be the biggest one ever, potentially valuing the company at around $1.75 trillion. Meanwhile the investments in AI are enormous. Probably for one reason: without AI, nothing will work anymore, so the promise goes. And most tech companies are currently structured around common ownership patterns: Whoever controls it, profits. In monetary terms, but also in terms of power. The pursuit of maximum control and profits seems to be inherent to this business model.
And, of course, AI also has a profound impact on business goals and opportunities, as well as on the work itself. Medicine, for instance, is on the verge of a quantum leap. Early detection, the development of new therapies and medications in record time – AI has literally saved lives. In many ways, work becomes more effective, and results are achieved more quickly with the help of AI. But Leo refuses to pretend the “new ways” of working are automatically better ones, warning against systems that force people to keep pace with machines, de-skill them, and place them under automated surveillance.
He is equally clear-eyed about who pays for the magic. Nothing in AI, he insists, is immaterial. Every fluent answer rests on a long chain of human labor: data labeling, model training and content moderation, “often involving disturbing material,” much of it done by young people, “predominantly women,” for minimal wages.
And this is not papal hyperbole. As TIME magazine reports, the International Labour Organization estimates that many data workers earn as little as $2 an hour. The reporting also documented data workers (people who hand-label AI's training data) in Kenya paid as little as $1.46 an hour, with content moderators in Nairobi now suing over the trauma and poverty wages. Leo names it for what it is:
“The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation.”
And then there is the sharpest edge of all: war. AI, Leo notes at the encyclical's presentation, is “dramatically changing how war is waged,” and he said he had listened to “very troubling voices … about increasingly autonomous weapons systems practically beyond any human reach to govern them effectively.” In the encyclical he is categorical: “Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.”
His conclusion is not anti-technology, which would indeed be too simple. The pope does not want AI to be stopped. He wants it governed, made transparent and accountable, and turned back toward the human. Regulation, yes. But beneath the policy ask sits a moral axiom, stated with unusual bluntness:
“The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good.”
That alone already resonates with the idea of steward ownership a lot. You’ve probably heard this before: Profits not an end in themselves, but means to an end …
But before we dive into the ownership part, let that sink in: AI potentially making people and humankind a means to an end. The pope names the symptoms: concentration of power, precarious work, hidden exploitation, autonomous weapons: beneath each runs the same logic, the drive to dominate and to treat people as means. This is where his many threads converge on one demand: AI must be disarmed. He knew the wording was strong, the pope said, but chose it on purpose, drawing a deliberate parallel to the Church's long campaign for nuclear disarmament: a great technical power that must be bent toward the common good rather than toward domination.
And for Leo, “disarming” AI is not only about weapons: “In a similar sense, artificial intelligence now demands to be 'disarmed,' freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.” Interestingly, he is also very explicit that this logic is “not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” He then spells out what disarming actually means:
“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”
That is no longer a passage about war. It is a passage about ownership. And then comes the hinge, spoken in the same Vatican address: “Disarming, however, is not enough. We must build.”
This brings us to our topic: ownership. Because ownership literally is the basis on which companies are built. On which innovations are built. It's the very corporate DNA that determines how companies behave. It's the structure that attributes and distributes power and money.
In fact, Leo barely uses the word. It turns up twice in more than a hundred pages, and only once in anything resembling an economic sense.
"[O]wnership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few."
This brings us back to the questions raised at the beginning: Data – the very thing AI runs on – treated not as a private asset to be hoarded, but as a shared inheritance with obligations attached. In the same spirit, again and again, Leo describes property and economic activity as carrying a built-in social obligation:
“Certainly there is a right to private property, which has its own specific meaning and purpose, yet it is always subordinate to the universal destination of goods. … In the Church's tradition, property has been viewed as a means of protecting and managing goods so that they may better serve the common good.”
Property as stewardship, in other words, rather than as a private claim staked over the world. This is the deliberate middle the Church has held since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum: neither the socialist impulse to abolish private property nor the libertarian one to treat it as absolute. Ownership is real and legitimate, but never sovereign. A fair return is fine, but beyond a certain point what a company creates is meant to serve its purpose and the common good, not simply to enrich its owners.
This conviction is neither uniquely Catholic nor new. Its deepest and most absolute form lives in many Indigenous cultures around the world, where it is not even ownership but responsibility that lies at the heart of the relationship between people and their environment – nature, land, natural resources, other living beings. The relationship between humankind and the world is shaped not by possession and dominion, but by collective care and a sense of belonging and connection.
In a more measured, legal form, a kindred idea is written into the constitutions of many democratic states. Germany's Grundgesetz condenses it into two words, “Eigentum verpflichtet” (“Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.”) Mexico pioneered the social-function-of-property doctrine in its 1917 constitution, and comparable provisions exist in Brazil, Spain, Italy, South Africa and Japan. The intuition is old and widely shared: ownership comes with duties, not only rights.
This is the bridge to steward ownership, where a company belongs to no one in an extractive sense, its value bound to its purpose rather than available to be taken. Thus, the conviction Leo keeps circling back to is exactly what steward ownership encodes in a legally binding way. And what thousands of steward-owned companies around the world have turned into legal practice.
Steward ownership separates economic rights from control and anchors control with the people who carry the business and its mission – while making sure profits serve that very mission, the broader purpose behind it, and, after all, all different stakeholders. That way, a company can never be treated like an asset merely for the benefit of its shareholders.
And this kind of legal DNA changes how a company behaves. It tilts the company away from short-term shareholder-value thinking and toward long-term purpose, entrepreneurial independence and a genuine stakeholder orientation. It bears the potential of “freeing technology from monopolistic control,” and of keeping “the economic order … subordinate to human dignity and the common good”, as the pope has put it.
And this isn't just some religious or ethical moral code, it also makes economic sense. Economists are arriving at the same place through a different door. Oxford's Colin Mayer argues that the purpose of business is to produce profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet, and, crucially, not to profit from creating those problems. When solving a problem generates more problems than it removes, something has gone wrong. (Read a transcript Colin’s inspiring speech at our SO:25 conference here).
Because we think we have common ground here. An encyclical that spends its force warning against power "concentrated in the hands of a few" and against an economy that treats people as means is – whether or not it ever uses the word – making the case for challenging the conventional way companies are owned. Steward ownership is one concrete, legally robust answer to the wounds Leo has named. Our data and humanity's knowledge should not be for sale, nor become objects of speculation. They should, on the contrary, be used to benefit all of humanity.
A papal word on steward ownership would surely help anchor this still-underappreciated idea in many more minds across our shared home planet. ;-)
The invitation stands.
