In spring 2026, two influential world leaders addressed the age of artificial intelligence — and did so in strikingly similar terms. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (May 2026) is a major document of Catholic social teaching. It treats AI as a profound moral question, touching human dignity, truth, work, freedom, justice, peace, and the common good. Its central test is clear: Technology must be judged by what it does to the human person.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi (India AI Impact Summit, 2026 and the AI Action Summit, 2025), advanced the MANAV framework, a vision that closely converges with this: AI must be human-centric, ethical, inclusive, trusted, safe, and directed towards welfare for all. The traditions, vocabularies, and institutional settings differ. Yet the moral architecture is strikingly aligned.
There is convergence across seven dimensions. It is not an argument that the Pope and the PM have coordinated their thinking. Rather, it argues that serious moral reflection, across civilisational traditions, can arrive at shared truths when faced with a challenge as fundamental as AI: The human person must remain at the centre.
Human at the centre: The central convergence — the one from which all others flow — is the insistence that AI must remain centred on the human person, not the machine. Pope Leo XIV: “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanisation, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity — the splendour of which no machine can ever replace.” PM Modi, at the India AI Impact Summit: “Technology exists to serve humanity, not to replace it.” At the Global summit, he underlined the core purpose of AI to “make it human-centric rather than machine-centric.”
AI for common good: Both leaders judge AI not by its technical sophistication but by whether it improves human lives and advances what the Catholic tradition calls the “common good” and what Indian philosophy calls sarvajana hitaya — the welfare of all. So the Pope talks about using technology to “identify new paths for the common good,” and the PM makes it clear that the “end goal of technology should be ‘Welfare for all, happiness for all’.”
The inequality warning: Both leaders warn, with unusual clarity, that AI could deepen the inequalities it promises to resolve — if access to data, compute, talent, and decision-making remains concentrated in a few hands. The Pope points to a “new imbalance” that can “divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice”. The PM’s formulation is direct: “The more inclusive the development journey of AI, the more inclusive its results.”
The data-as-person danger: This is perhaps the strongest of the seven convergences — the one that most distinguishes both frameworks from purely technocratic approaches to AI governance. “AI must not reduce human beings to mere data points or raw material,” said the PM. The Pope urged avoiding the “pretence that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance”.
The hidden bias problem: On the question of algorithmic bias, both leaders display a sophistication that goes beyond the standard acknowledgement that bias is “a problem”. Both identify the specific mechanism — the appearance of neutrality — that makes AI bias particularly dangerous. For the Pope, the “exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity”. For the PM, the AI bias steeped in the Western context may not do justice to “our diversity, linguistic, cultural and regional”.
Work, dignity and the future of labour: Both leaders address directly the fear that most immediately shapes public anxiety about AI: The fear that it will destroy jobs, de-skill workers, and undermine the human dignity that comes from meaningful work. The PM strikes a hopeful note that history “has shown that work does not disappear due to technology…its nature changes and new jobs are created.” For the Pope, employment is basic to human dignity and needs to be protected.
Global governance and MANAV: Both leaders see AI governance as a shared human challenge — one that cannot be resolved by any single actor, nation, or tradition, and that requires ethical, participatory, and genuinely international frameworks. MANAV (M — Moral and Ethical Systems, A — Accountable Governance, N — National Sovereignty, A — Accessible and Inclusive, V — Valid and Legitimate) forms the cornerstone of the PM’s vision for AI. The Pope warns against allowing a “handful of actors to dictate (AI) processes on their own.”
The convergence reflects a deeper truth: When serious moral traditions confront the same profound challenge, they often arrive at similar conclusions because certain truths about the human being are universal. It also affirms that the Global South must not remain a passive recipient of AI systems designed elsewhere, trained on data that does not reflect its realities, and governed by rules it did not help shape.
Most importantly, the moral resources for governing AI already exist — in Catholic social teaching, Indian philosophical tradition, and other civilisational ethics. The challenge is not to invent a new morality, but to bring existing wisdom to bear on the decisions shaping AI’s future. Pope Leo XIV and Prime Minister Modi have each made that wisdom available. AI developers, investors, and policymakers must listen.
The writer is president, BJP Kerala, and former minister of state, Electronics & IT, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Jal Shakti
The challenge is not to invent a new morality, but to bring existing wisdom to bear on the decisions shaping AI’s future. Pope Leo XIV and Prime Minister Modi have each made that wisdom available. AI developers, investors, and policymakers must listen. 
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