Pope Leo XIV on May 25 (Vatican time) released his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas (Great Humanity), a nearly 43,000-word document that devotes extensive attention to warning about the development of artificial intelligence.
At the Vatican, the pope called for the 'disarmament' of AI, cautioning against 'a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets' driven by geopolitical or commercial ambitions of dominance. He emphasized: 'AI must be freed from the logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death. Like nuclear energy, it must serve all people and the common good.'
Pope Leo XIV specifically stressed that ownership of AI data must not rest entirely in private hands. He urged policymakers to protect workers' rights, keep children safe from technology, and cool the competition among AI companies. 'More active political involvement is needed to slow the pace when everything is accelerating,' he said, calling for 'robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibilities.'
The encyclical's launch event included AI experts, among them Christopher Olah, co-founder of the U.S. company Anthropic. Anthropic is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with the U.S. military over its objection to the use of its technology for autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance.
Olah acknowledged that AI companies 'operate within a set of incentives and constraints that sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.' He welcomed the involvement of institutions like the Catholic Church to 'push events in a better direction,' while pointing to three areas requiring urgent attention: the risk of widespread job loss, ensuring that the benefits of AI extend worldwide, and the challenge of explaining increasingly complex system behaviors.
In his encyclical, the pope also sounded an alarm about AI-driven weapons, arguing that 'it cannot be permissible to entrust lethal decisions to technology.' He declared that the doctrine of 'just war' – once championed by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump – is 'obsolete' and that 'no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.'
