One of the strangest political developments so far in 2026 is that the most serious critique of artificial intelligence (AI) has come not from the democratic left, not from trade unions, not from social democrats, but from the Vatican.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV delivers a warning that cuts through the euphoric noise surrounding AI. He doesn’t see AI primarily as a productivity tool, a growth engine or a shiny symbol of modernisation. He sees it as a question of power, inequality and human dignity.

Sir Tony Blair, by contrast, in is recent essay sees AI much as he sees globalisation: an unstoppable force to be embraced, accelerated and managed: “there is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’.”

That difference matters. Because beneath the endless discussion about innovation, efficiency and economic growth lies a much simpler question: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Pope Leo’s central insight is that technology is not neutral. AI is not arriving in a vacuum. It is emerging within an economic system already characterised by extreme concentrations of wealth and power. To imagine that AI will somehow transcend those inequalities is not optimism; it is fantasy.

Leo XIV repeatedly warns about the concentration of technological control in the hands of a small number of corporations. He argues that AI risks deepening social inequalities, undermining workers, eroding democratic accountability and transforming human beings into data resources to be mined and monetised. He warns against what he calls a modern “culture of power” in which technological capability becomes detached from moral responsibility.

This is a profoundly political argument. And it is precisely the argument largely missing from Tony Blair’s vision. Blair’s recent essay reads like the final expression of a worldview that has dominated Western politics for decades. Technology will create growth. Growth will create prosperity. Innovation must be encouraged. Regulation should be careful not to get in the way. Governments should adapt quickly or risk irrelevance.

Blair speaks the language of managerial politics, or the language of consultants. This is the language of people who believe history is fundamentally a question of optimisation. But AI is not simply another tool: it is potentially the greatest mechanism for concentrating wealth since the Industrial Revolution.

The people building these systems often describe them as ‘democratising knowledge.’ What they rarely discuss is ownership: Who owns the models? Who owns the data? Who owns the infrastructure? Who captures the profits?

The answer is increasingly the same handful of corporations. Think OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Anthropic. A tiny number of companies are acquiring extraordinary influence over the future architecture of knowledge, communication, labour and governance itself.

The Pope gets this. He explicitly warns against allowing digital power to accumulate beyond democratic control. He argues that technological systems should serve the common good rather than private domination. He even raises the possibility that certain forms of digital infrastructure should be treated as common goods rather than monopolised assets.

That is a remarkably radical intervention. And it stands in sharp contrast to Blair’s persistent faith that the same economic model that produced today’s inequalities will somehow solve them. This is where the question of inequality becomes unavoidable.

For forty years, technological progress has been accompanied by soaring concentrations of wealth. Workers became more productive. Corporations became more profitable. Shareholders became richer. But wages stagnated, housing became unaffordable, wealth and regional inequalities widened, secure employment declined, and precariousness became the norm for many workers.

The digital revolution and globalisation generated immense wealth, but that wealth flowed overwhelmingly upwards. Britain itself is a rather stark example of this. The richest parts of the country became richer. Financial assets exploded in value. Property owners accumulated fortunes. Meanwhile many former industrial communities became ‘left behind places,’ experiencing decades of decline, insecurity and underinvestment.

The promise was that innovation would lift everyone. The reality was that it lifted some people much higher than others. Now AI threatens to accelerate that process. A lawyer equipped with AI becomes more productive; a corporation equipped with AI becomes more profitable; and a hedge fund equipped with AI becomes more powerful.

But what happens to the millions of workers whose labour can now be partially automated? What happens when entire sectors discover they need fewer employees? And what happens when productivity gains accrue primarily to owners rather than workers?

These are not theoretical questions. They are the defining political questions of the next twenty years. Yet Blair’s analysis treats inequality almost as an afterthought. The emphasis remains growth, competitiveness and adaptation. This is the same mistake that defined much of the globalised era.

The assumption was that if economies grew quickly enough, social tensions would take care of themselves. Instead we got stagnant wages, collapsing trust in institutions, populist revolts, political fragmentation and widening wealth gaps.

The social contract weakened because too many people could see that the rewards of economic change were being distributed unevenly. The winners were obvious. The losers were told to retrain (if they were offered any opportunities to retrain at all, rather than being thrown on the scrap heap).

This is why Pope Leo’s emphasis on dignity is so important. Dignity is not a fashionable concept in modern politics. It cannot be measured in quarterly GDP growth figures or productivity statistics. But it goes to the heart of what economic systems are supposed to achieve, as human beings are not simply economic inputs as ‘Labour’.

The Pope’s argument is that society should judge technology by whether it strengthens human flourishing rather than merely increasing output. That seems obvious, yet much of contemporary AI discourse assumes the opposite. People are constantly told (as by Blair) that disruption is inevitable; jobs will disappear, institutions must adapt, and that resistance is futile.

The burden always falls on ordinary people to accommodate technological change, never on powerful institutions to justify it. The result is a politics in which democracy increasingly chases markets rather than directing them. This is where Blair’s position becomes particularly revealing.

(By the way, one of the biggest sources of cash for the Tony Blair Institute is the foundation set up by Larry Ellison, billionaire founder of Oracle and Trump ally. The foundation gave the Institute £52m in 2023 and promised another £163m. Blair claims that he isn’t pushing AI because of such donations but because AI is “blowing my mind.”  Even if that’s the case, it leaves open the possibility that it was the ‘tech bros’ who blew his mind and that he is unwittingly pushing their agenda anyway).

Blair’s solution to technological disruption remains essentially the same as it was during the 1990s; embrace change, modernise government, partner with business and trust innovation. But what if the problem is not insufficient adaptation? What if the problem is excessive concentration of power? What if AI does not merely change the economy but fundamentally alters the relationship between citizens, corporations and governments?

A state dependent on private AI infrastructure isn’t fully sovereign. A democracy dependent on privately controlled information systems isn’t fully democratic. A society in which a handful of firms control the tools of knowledge production isn’t genuinely free. The Pope gets this.

In many ways, Magnifica Humanitas reads like a twenty-first century successor to Rerum Novarum (also by a Pope named Leo), the Church’s famous intervention during the upheavals of industrial capitalism. Then, the question was how societies should respond to the immense inequalities created by industrialisation. Today, the question is how societies should respond to the immense inequalities likely to be created by AI.

The parallels are striking. Then, as now, economic elites insisted that technological progress would eventually benefit everyone. Then, as now, wealth accumulated rapidly at the top. Then, as now, workers were expected to absorb the disruption.

The Church recognised that markets alone would not solve those problems. Leo XIV appears to be making similar arguments today. And that is what makes Blair’s position feel bizarrely dated. He still speaks the language of a world in which economic growth automatically legitimises economic power.

But we live in a very different age. People have watched inequality expand for decades. They have seen wealth concentrate. They have seen corporations become larger than many states. They have seen public institutions weakened while private platforms gained extraordinary influence over everyday life.

Against that backdrop, promises that AI will simply make everything better sound less like a vision of the future and more like an echo from the past. The real question is not whether AI will transform society; it will. The real question is who will own that transformation.

Will AI become another machine for transferring wealth upward while social risks are pushed downward? Or will democratic societies insist that technological power serves the public rather than dominating it?

That is the question the Pope is asking. It is also the question Tony Blair still seems reluctant to confront. And in an age increasingly defined by inequality, it may be the most important question of all.