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30-05-2026
VATICAN CITY: Pope Leo XIV says artificial intelligence must be “disarmed” as world leaders and private companies increase the technology’s use in many human activities, including war.
On Monday, in the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, the pope warned against “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets” driven by “the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance”.
The leader of the Catholic Church presented the encyclical at the Vatican alongside AI experts, including Christopher Olah, the cofounder of the United States-based AI giant Anthropic.
Encyclicals are letters written by the pope and sent to Catholic bishops. In recent decades, they have become one of the highest forms of teaching from the pope to the church’s 1.4 billion members.
Since he was elected in May 2025, Leo has made the topic of artificial intelligence a cornerstone of his papacy.
According to the Vatican News, he spoke in November about how the technology must be used in a responsible manner in the healthcare sector. A month later, he said AI should not hinder new generations and added that it is important “to restore and strengthen” young people’s “confidence in the human ability to guide the development of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and not see this development as following an inevitable path” but in making AI the thrust of his first encyclical, the pope has turned his concerns into religious guidance to be communicated throughout the largest Christian denomination in the world, to which half the world’s Christians belong.
In his encyclical, which spans nearly 43,000 words, the pope insisted that AI must not be left solely in private hands and called on policymakers to protect the rights of workers and keep children safe from the technology. He also urged AI companies to cool down their competition. Issuing a “special appeal” to the developers of AI, he said: “Developers bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.”
“What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating,” Leo said.
Olah, who spoke at the presentation of the encyclical, said AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”. He acknowledged that AI developers need to focus on ensuring that there are no widespread job losses due to the technology and address the unresolved question about how to interpret increasingly complex and sometimes opaque system behavior. The pope called for “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility”. “Artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death,” he said. “Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all and of the common good.”
The pope also warned that AI is normalizing war.
In March, the US military confirmed using a “variety” of AI tools in the US-Israel war on Iran as concerns grew about mounting civilian casualties in the conflict. In 2024, media revealed that Israeli-linked AI systems, such as Lavender and Gospel, had helped generate thousands of military targets in Gaza.
“For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms,” the pope wrote. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
