Pope Leo XIV urges rules for AI and warns against autonomous weapons

In short: Pope Leo XIV has published a long public letter calling for tighter moral and legal limits on artificial intelligence.

What happened

Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical, a formal teaching letter for the Catholic Church, called Magnifica Humanitas. It focuses on how AI should be used and controlled.

He says AI can help people, for example by speeding up science and improving services. The Vatican already uses AI for translation, meaning software that helps turn speech and writing from one language into another.

But the Pope argues that AI is not neutral. He warns that AI systems can copy human bias, like a mirror that also adds scratches. He also says powerful companies could use people’s personal data to increase control, and that could make inequality worse.

One of his clearest lines is about weapons. He says it is not acceptable to let artificial systems make decisions that can kill. He warns that AI could lower the threshold for violence by pushing military leaders to act quickly on computer-made threat predictions.

The Financial Times columnist John Thornhill contrasts the Pope’s approach with the US president, Donald Trump. The column says Trump scrapped an executive order that would have required some advanced AI models to be tested before release.

A senior figure from Anthropic, an AI company, appeared at the encyclical’s presentation. He said AI labs face incentives that can conflict with doing the right thing, and that “moral voices” still matter.

Why it matters

AI is already shaping what people read, buy, and believe, and it may soon shape life and death decisions in war. The Pope’s message adds pressure for clearer rules, especially around fairness, privacy, and keeping humans responsible for lethal force.

Source: Financial Times