In his first major document published on Monday, Pope Leo XIV called on governments to slow down and regulate the development of artificial intelligence systems.
He warned that advanced AI systems could spread misinformation, prioritize conflict and risk, and put the world on a path to endless war.
At a Vatican event announcing the document, the first American-born pope expressed concern that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced “virtually beyond the control of humans.”
Also in attendance at the event was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies.
Pope Leo, who has adopted a tougher tone in recent months and drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump for criticizing the Iran war, made several impassioned appeals to world leaders in a lengthy document known as an encyclical.
He advocated for policymakers to take broader ownership of AI data, rather than just leaving it in private hands, and to cool competition among AI companies, in order to protect workers’ rights and protect children from technology.
“What is needed is a more active political engagement that can slow things down when everything is accelerating,” Pope Leo said in a text entitled Magnifica Humanitas.
The Pope called for “a strong legal framework, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate responsibility.”
The encyclical is one of the Pope’s greatest teachings to the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion members. Monday’s long-awaited document is about 43,000 words long and has been in the works since Leo was elected pope a little more than a year ago.
With AI as a major theme, the document decried the number of wars in the world, lamented the weakening of multilateral institutions, and warned that military industry interests were the driving force behind conflicts.
“The past 60 years have been characterized by conflicts of astonishing brutality, often with large-scale consequences for civilians,” Pope Leo said in the English text.
“Humanity is descending into a violent culture of power, where peace is no longer seen as a responsibility to be fulfilled, but as a fragile interval between conflicts,” he said.
At a Vatican event on Monday, Anthropic co-founder Oler thanked the Pope for addressing the problems posed by new technology. He said companies like his faced strong commercial pressures and needed external oversight.
“All frontier AI labs, including Anthropic, operate within a set of incentives and constraints that are sometimes at odds with doing the right thing,” said Oler, whose company is developing the Claude AI tool.
In his encyclical, Pope Leo made one of the clearest statements ever by a pope rejecting just war theory, a doctrine the church has used since the fifth century to assess global conflicts.
