Paolo G. Carozza is a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School working in international human rights law and Catholic social thought. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) and, since 2025, chair of the Meta Oversight Board. He is a frequently cited Catholic-intellectual voice on AI governance, particularly on the relationship between religious-ethical authority and frontier-AI lab incentives.
Background and roles
Carozza is a Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, where his fields are international human rights law, Catholic social thought, and content-moderation governance. He formerly directed Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute. From 2006 to 2010 he served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, including as its president from 2008 to 2009.
He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS), which connects him to Catholic-intellectual circles around Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica humanitas encyclical (May 25, 2026).
Carozza chairs the Meta Oversight Board, the independent content-moderation appeals body Meta funds via an irrevocable trust; he was a member before becoming chair in 2025. The chairmanship gives him formal authority over Meta-platform content-moderation precedents and over the appeals the board adjudicates.
Positions and statements
At the Magnifica humanitas launch (May 25–26, 2026), Carozza voiced skepticism about the Anthropic–Vatican partnership, stating that "frontier AI companies would love to co-opt religious communities to bring an ethical imprimatur to their work." He spoke as a PASS member while cautioning the Vatican about the optics of co-launching the encyclical with Anthropic (Source: washingtonpost.com). Chris Olah presented at the same launch, where Carozza was a critical interlocutor.
The day after the launch, in TechCrunch's May 25, 2026 coverage titled "The pope's AI encyclical isn't really about AI," Carozza expanded the encyclical's central frame, saying AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes have "corroded our capacity to recognize what's true and what's not true," with consequences "for democratic politics." On this reading, the encyclical's deepest concern is democratic-epistemic rather than economic, extending its concentrated-power frame into questions of misinformation and democracy (Source: techcrunch.com).
Carozza's chairmanship of the Meta Oversight Board links his Vatican-adjacent commentary on AI and truth to platform content-moderation precedent: the same framing about AI's "corrosion of capacity to recognize what's true" bears on the deepfake and synthetic-media governance failures that Magnifica humanitas names, in the body that decides Meta moderation appeals.
Relationships
- supports: Pope Leo XIV — institutional ally; PASS-member voice within the Vatican AI posture
- regulated-by: Meta Oversight Board (chair) — Carozza directs the body that adjudicates Meta moderation appeals
- related: Meta AI — via Oversight Board chairmanship
- related: Synthetic Media / Deepfakes — Carozza's "corrosion of capacity to recognize what's true" framing addresses the deepfake-as-democracy-risk thesis
- related: AI Labor Disruption — Carozza extends the encyclical's concentrated-power frame into democratic-epistemic territory
- related: Chris Olah — Carozza was a critical interlocutor at the Magnifica humanitas launch where Olah presented
Sources
- Pope elevates AI ethics to a religious imperative with first encyclical (Washington Post, 2026-05-25; Source: washingtonpost.com)
- The pope's AI encyclical isn't really about AI (TechCrunch, 2026-05-25; Source: techcrunch.com)