New Forms of Slavery

The labor argument: what the encyclical actually names

Paragraph 173 opens with a claim about how the AI industry actually works. "Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people."

The "above all, people" is the move. Mainstream discussion of AI tends to treat the people in the chain as a regrettable implementation detail, the cost-of-doing-business that responsible procurement is supposed to address downstream. The encyclical refuses that framing. The workers are the foundation of the technology, not an externality to it.

The paragraph then names the specific roles. Data labeling. Model training. Content moderation, often involving "disturbing material." The workers, "young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages." The conditions are described in terms that do not soften them. This is not corporate-responsibility language. This is the language of a document that has decided the work of softening is itself part of the problem.

Then the harder section. "Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly."

The sentence about scarred and injured bodies is the kind of writing magisterial documents rarely contain. It is concrete in a way that requires the reader to picture what is being named. That is its purpose. The encyclical is asking the reader not to look away.

Paragraph 173 closes by extending the labor analysis to trafficking. "Criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods and profiling techniques in order to recruit, control and transport victims of trafficking, very often minors, reducing men and women to 'data' to be tracked and 'packages' to be moved around within the same digital circuits that support much of the global economy." The argument is that the infrastructure that enables the AI industry's productivity is the same infrastructure that enables human trafficking, and that the connection is not incidental.

This is the labor argument's full reach. It begins with data labeling and ends with trafficking. The claim is that these phenomena sit on a continuum of exploitation enabled by the same systems, and that addressing one without addressing the others is incomplete.

The moral test: paragraph 174

Paragraph 174 is the section's pivot. Pope Leo XIV writes: "The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation."

The word "test" matters here. The encyclical is not saying that the AI industry has a labor problem to be managed. It is saying that the AI industry's response to its labor conditions is the criterion against which the industry's broader ethical claims will be measured. If the industry cannot address the conditions named in paragraph 173, the industry's claims about safety, alignment, beneficial use, and human flourishing become difficult to credit.

The paragraph continues: "In continuity with the tradition inaugurated by Leo XIII, the Church renews her firm condemnation of all forms of slavery, trafficking and the commodification of persons. She likewise highlights the urgent need for reflection and action that keep the inalienable dignity of every human being and the common good, as both the focus and goal of society, as well as the guiding criteria for every personal, social and political choice."

The reference to Leo XIII matters. Leo XIII's 1888 encyclical In Plurimis contained one of the first formal, absolute, universal condemnations of slavery in Catholic teaching. By citing the predecessor whose name he took, Pope Leo XIV is locating his own intervention inside the same lineage. The Church's nineteenth-century condemnation of slavery is the precedent for the present-day condemnation of slavery's new forms.

Then the closing line of the paragraph: "Without this ethical and humanizing reflection, the growing power of digital systems could lead us toward new atrocities that are no less shameful than those of the past that we now deplore, while we continue to present ourselves as 'advanced' and 'civilized' societies."

The phrase "no less shameful" is doing specific work. The encyclical is naming a future judgment. The argument is that the labor conditions of the AI industry will eventually be seen as the labor conditions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism are now seen, that the geographic distance and technical opacity that obscure them in the present will not obscure them in retrospect, and that the moral claim being made today will be the moral claim ratified by the next generations looking back. This is a rhetorical move, but it is also a historical bet. The encyclical is betting that the present judgment will hold.

The apology: paragraphs 175 and 176

The historic content of this section is concentrated in two paragraphs. Read in sequence, they are doing four distinct things.

Paragraph 175 names what is being apologized for: "Human trafficking must be recognized as a contemporary form of slavery and a grave violation of human dignity. Failing to respond firmly, or tolerating these practices in any way, is in some way to become complicit in today's sins, which are akin to those of the past when slavery was being concealed and justified."

The "akin to those of the past" is the framing. The paragraph establishes the parallel between the present-day failure to respond to trafficking and the historical failure to respond to slavery. Both are described as forms of complicity through tolerance.

Paragraph 176 then turns directly to the historical record. "In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery."

The first sentence after the historical caveat is the operative one. "In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves." This is a factual claim about Catholic institutions, not just individual Catholics. Monasteries owned slaves. Bishops owned slaves. Religious orders owned slaves. The encyclical states this without softening.

Then the harder claim. "Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of 'infidels.'" Footnote 174 names the specific documents: Sicut Dudum (Eugene IV, 1435), Etsi Suscepti (Eugene IV, 1442), Dum Diversas (Nicholas V, 1452), and Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V, 1455). These are papal bulls. They are the formal magisterial acts of the office Pope Leo XIV now occupies. The encyclical is naming his own predecessors' documents as instruments of subjugation.

The paragraph notes that "it was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII." The temporal gap is enormous. From the early Church to Leo XIII's In Plurimis in 1888 is roughly eighteen hundred years. The encyclical does not minimize the gap. It describes it as "a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached."

Then, in the same paragraph, the formal apology: "It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon."

The historical significance of this sentence is hard to overstate. Past popes have apologized for Christians' involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. John Paul II issued a broad request for forgiveness during the Jubilee of 2000. Francis spoke about colonialism in Bolivia in 2015. But no pope has previously formally apologized for the magisterial acts of past popes that gave European sovereigns explicit authority to enslave. The naming of specific bulls in the footnote makes the apology operational, not just symbolic. The documents are identified. They cannot be redescribed.

This is what NBC News led with on launch day. The framing was correct: the apology is historic in the strict sense. Whether it will produce institutional consequences inside the Church is a question for the longer reception. The fact of the apology, made in a magisterial document with the dating and the citations and the explicit naming of papal acts, is itself an event.

The connective argument: why the apology is here

The apology could have been placed in any number of documents. The fact that it is here, in an AI encyclical, is the move.

Paragraph 177 makes the connection explicit. "This is why the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery becomes a call to vigilance. What we have learned must be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present. If we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith, it falls to us today to denounce, clearly and firmly, trafficking in its many forms and, together with all who are committed to this cause, to support concrete efforts of prevention, protection, liberation and rehabilitation."

The argument has four steps. First, the Church took eighteen centuries to formally condemn slavery. Second, that delay is a wound in Christian memory. Third, the present-day failure to respond to new forms of slavery would be a repetition of the historical failure, and the documents the next centuries write about it would be the documents the Church now writes about the fifteenth-century bulls. Fourth, the only way to avoid that future apology is to act now, in the present moment, on the conditions the encyclical has just named.

This is the connective argument. The apology is not a separate gesture inside an AI document. The apology is the credential for the critique. The Church is saying: we are the institution that took eighteen hundred years to formally condemn slavery. We have apologized for that. Now we are telling you that the labor conditions of the AI industry are slavery's new forms. We are asking you to believe us about the present partly because we have admitted what we got wrong in the past.

This is a particular kind of moral argument. It does not claim moral authority on the basis of doctrinal purity. It claims moral standing on the basis of acknowledged failure followed by correction. The standing comes from the willingness to name the failure specifically and to apologize for it formally. The encyclical is performing this argument as it makes it.

Whether the argument lands depends on the reader. Some will find the apology too late and too constrained by its historical disclaimers. Others will find the present-day critique tendentious because no major industry can survive the kind of language Paragraph 173 uses about it. The encyclical does not try to settle these reactions. It makes the argument and lets the reception sort itself out.

Colonialism in new forms: paragraph 178

The labor argument has one more move. Paragraph 178 extends the analysis from physical labor to data itself.

"Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new 'rare earths' of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter."

The "new rare earths" phrase pairs with the literal rare earths discussion from paragraph 173. The argument is structural symmetry. The mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo for AI hardware is one form of extraction. The mining of population-scale health data from regions without the regulatory or economic power to refuse is another form of extraction. Both produce inputs to the same AI development cycle. Both depend on the same asymmetry between the places where extraction happens and the places where the value flows to.

The paragraph continues: "Those who control the health data of entire peoples, often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation, possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated."

This is a specific claim about specific arrangements. Health data initiatives in low and middle income countries, often funded by Western philanthropic or commercial entities, often described in terms of capacity-building or humanitarian benefit, sit in the frame the encyclical is naming. The pretext language is sharp. The encyclical is not claiming all such initiatives are bad-faith. It is claiming that the pretext of aid or research can function to obscure the structural transfer of power from the data-providing population to the data-controlling institution.

The paragraph closes with the operational requirement: "This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form."

The "colonial in another form" phrase is the conclusion the paragraph has been building toward. The argument is that the digital age has not yet ended colonialism; it has changed colonialism's mechanism. Whether the present arrangements continue or end is a choice. The encyclical names the choice.

What action this asks for: paragraph 179

Paragraph 179 closes the section with operational specificity rare in magisterial documents.

"New forms of slavery are fueled by economic chains and digital infrastructures. Therefore, action is required on several fronts."

Four fronts follow.

First, supply chain transparency: "the supply chains that underpin the technological industry and the digital economy need to become more transparent, so that no competitive advantage is built upon hidden exploitation." For AI companies, the operational implication is that the conditions under which training data is labeled, content is moderated, and hardware is sourced should be auditable by external parties, not concealed behind contractor relationships that distribute responsibility.

Second, ethical due diligence: "companies and investors need to adopt clear criteria for preventive ethical verification (due diligence), placing among their priorities the protection of workers, the fight against forced labor and the assessment of the social impact of data-driven business models." The phrase "preventive" matters. The encyclical is not asking for remediation after harms become public. It is asking for verification before harms occur.

Third, platform cooperation against trafficking: "digital platforms must cooperate responsibly with authorities and civil society to prevent communication, payment and profiling tools from becoming channels for the recruitment and control of victims." Platforms whose tools enable trafficking carry responsibility for the design choices that enable that use. This is a stronger claim than the standard platform-liability framing.

Fourth, the affirmative direction: "When such efforts converge, the digital environment can be transformed from a space of exploitation into one of protection, prevention and the promotion of human dignity." The encyclical is not claiming the digital environment must be one or the other. It is claiming that the choice is open and that the actions named are the conditions under which the better outcome becomes possible.

None of these requirements is presented as optional. None is presented as aspirational. The paragraph reads as a list of practical preconditions for the AI industry to be able to make the moral claims it routinely makes about itself.

What this means for different readers

The section reaches different readers in different ways. Three matter most.

For AI developers and AI company executives. The encyclical is naming labor conditions in the AI industry's supply chain as akin to slavery and identifying these conditions as a moral test. The implications run from the upstream (where is your training data labeled, and under what conditions?) to the downstream (what content do your moderators encounter, and what support do they receive?) to the hardware (what rare earths does your compute infrastructure consume, and from what mines?). The encyclical does not require the reader to accept the slavery framing in order to take the operational implications seriously. It does require the reader to engage with the conditions in their specificity. For the audience-scoped read on what the document asks of developers, see Magnifica Humanitas for Developers.

For Catholics and Catholic institutions. The apology has internal implications. The Church is asking its own members to engage the historical record honestly, to receive the apology as part of the formation it provides, and to consider whether Catholic institutions today, in their AI procurement, investment, and partnership choices, are participating in the conditions the encyclical names. Catholic institutions deploying AI tools are addressed by this section as much as the AI industry is. For the broader Catholic institutional question, see AI and the Church.

For mainstream press and policy audiences. NBC News led with the apology because the apology is genuinely historic. The risk in that framing, taken alone, is treating the apology as the substantive content and the labor argument as a context for it. The encyclical does the opposite. The apology grounds the present-day argument; the present-day argument is what the apology is for. Coverage that engages both threads at depth, rather than treating either as background to the other, will give the section its actual shape.

Where this sits in the encyclical's structure

Paragraphs 173 through 179 close Chapter 4 of the encyclical. Chapter 4 is titled "Safeguarding Humanity at a Time of Transformation: Truth, Work, Freedom," and runs from paragraph 131 to paragraph 181. The slavery section sits at the chapter's conclusion, just before the chapter's closing paragraphs (180 and 181) and just before the encyclical's pivot to Chapter 5 on war.

The placement is structurally significant. The progression of Chapter 4 moves from truth (paragraphs 132 to 138) through education (139 to 147) through labor (148 to 169) through addiction and social control (170 to 172) to slavery (173 to 179). The section is the chapter's most morally serious moment, placed at the end where its weight can be carried into the war chapter that follows.

Chapter 5 then opens with "the culture of power and the civilization of love." The transition is deliberate. The encyclical is building toward war by first establishing that the digital economy already contains forms of violence the Church is required to name. The structural argument runs: AI ethics, then labor, then slavery, then war. Each step makes the next harder to escape.

Reading paragraphs 173 through 179 in isolation can miss this structural function. The slavery section is not a digression inside an AI document. It is one of the document's load-bearing arguments, placed where it is because the document needs the moral weight to carry into the chapter that follows.