The Pope just declared war on AI: machines are not people, disarm them

On Friday morning Pope Leo XIV received participants of a meeting on the future of AI, organised by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute, at the Apostolic Palace. He did not open with compliments: everyone shares the unease about AI, everyone knows which way to go, and not enough is being done.

Then came five points. The future of AI is not predetermined, people build it, so people are responsible for guiding it, changing it and, when necessary, rejecting some of its uses. The real question, he said, is not what AI can do but what it should serve. A reliable system that serves people is worth more than an extremely powerful one whose consequences nobody can foresee.

The second point hits the trendy idea of giving AI rights. "Machines are tools, not persons," Leo XIV said. AI has no body, feels no joy or pain and does not grow through relationships. Granting it legal personhood would blur human responsibility and leave victims facing a faceless entity.

The toughest part was the third. Decisions about life, freedom and the use of force must never be handed to a machine: a person on a target list or in a border control database becomes a mere data point. That is why AI must be "disarmed", and the Pope urged the states meeting in Geneva in November to take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons.

He also asked for technology to serve the common good, with fair access to care, knowledge and tools, and called for shared standards, independent oversight and clear accountability, so decisions about AI can be challenged and harm can be remedied.

This is not his first move: in May Leo XIV published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on the human person in the age of AI, and in 2024 Pope Francis told G7 leaders that no machine should ever decide to take a human life. The Pope cannot ban anything himself, but his voice is loud, and it landed a couple of weeks before the Geneva talks.