{"id":255113,"date":"2026-05-25T12:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T16:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/25\/church-vs-ai-pope-leo-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-artificial-intelligence-race\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T14:05:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T18:05:19","slug":"church-vs-ai-pope-leo-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-artificial-intelligence-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/25\/church-vs-ai-pope-leo-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-artificial-intelligence-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Church vs AI: Pope Leo issues sweeping manifesto blasting artificial intelligence race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/magnificent-humanity-pope-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-ai-race-1779709844448\">Church vs AI: Pope Leo issues sweeping manifesto blasting artificial intelligence race<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/magnificent-humanity-pope-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-ai-race-1779709844448\">https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/magnificent-humanity-pope-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-ai-race-1779709844448<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-25 12:31:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.wionews.com\">www.wionews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Pope Leo XIV on Monday called for the &#8220;disarming&#8221; of artificial intelligence and warned of &#8220;new forms of slavery&#8221; fuelling the technological revolution in his long-awaited manifesto on the rapidly developing technology. Leo, the first American pope, presented his first encyclical, &#8220;Magnifica Humanitas&#8221; (Magnificent Humanity), in person at the Vatican alongside AI experts, including Christopher Olah, co-founder of the US firm Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p>The head of the world&#8217;s 1.4 billion Catholics warned against &#8220;a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance&#8221;, and sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was &#8220;not permissible to entrust lethal&#8221; decisions to technology. &#8220;No algorithm can make war morally acceptable,&#8221; he wrote, describing the &#8220;just war&#8221; theory recently espoused by the Trump administration as &#8220;outdated&#8221;. Leo has repeatedly clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of &#8216;armed&#8217; competition,&#8221; the pope wrote. &#8220;To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.&#8221; AI should be &#8220;human-friendly&#8221;, accessible to all and open to debate, he added. Leo warned that &#8220;nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical&#8221;, noting that every response \u201crelies on the silent work of millions of people\u201d, from content moderators forced to view disturbing material to children extracting rare earth elements. They were &#8220;scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly&#8221;, he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>Greater efficiency or innovation did not excuse &#8220;a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden&#8221;, Leo added, while calling for more action to reduce AI&#8217;s environmental impact. In an unprecedented move, the pope also apologised for the Vatican&#8217;s role in the slave trade, saying: &#8220;For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/magnificent-humanity-pope-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-ai-race-1779709844448\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Church vs AI: Pope Leo issues sweeping manifesto blasting artificial intelligence race https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/world\/magnificent-humanity-pope-issues-sweeping-manifesto-blasting-ai-race-1779709844448 Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn1.wionews.com\/prod\/wion\/images\/2026\/20260413\/image-1776061048438.png?imwidth=1200&imheight=900","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255115,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255113\/revisions\/255115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}