Church vs AI: Pope Leo issues sweeping manifesto blasting artificial intelligence race

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Pope Leo XIV on Monday called for the “disarming” of artificial intelligence and warned of “new forms of slavery” fuelling the technological revolution in his long-awaited manifesto on the rapidly developing technology. Leo, the first American pope, presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), in person at the Vatican alongside AI experts, including Christopher Olah, co-founder of the US firm Anthropic.

The head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics warned against “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance”, and sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was “not permissible to entrust lethal” decisions to technology. “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable,” he wrote, describing the “just war” theory recently espoused by the Trump administration as “outdated”. Leo has repeatedly clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict.

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” the pope wrote. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” AI should be “human-friendly”, accessible to all and open to debate, he added. Leo warned that “nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical”, noting that every response “relies on the silent work of millions of people”, from content moderators forced to view disturbing material to children extracting rare earth elements. They were “scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly”, he wrote.

Greater efficiency or innovation did not excuse “a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden”, Leo added, while calling for more action to reduce AI’s environmental impact. In an unprecedented move, the pope also apologised for the Vatican’s role in the slave trade, saying: “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for…

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