Normally, the Vatican would not be among the places where Silicon Valley would look for advice about how to regulate itself. However, an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIV called Magnifica Humanitasis not a theological statement that can be easily brushed aside by the AI industry – rather, quite the contrary. While Leo does not demand a ban on artificial intelligence, he calls for it to be disarmed – and the difference should not be overlooked. In Leo’s view, the problem has much less to do with a general hostility toward advanced technology as such, and much more with the way power is structured around AI. Private ownership of data, an arms race among competing companies fueled by profit motives, workers and kids carrying the burden of compute costs: all of this falls under the category of governance problems, rather than theological ones. What is more, all of this constitutes the list of problems that have thus far remained beyond the purview of regulators.
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His demand that politics learn to “slow things down when everything is accelerating” will read as naive in San Francisco. It shouldn’t. The argument isn’t against speed per se – it’s against the abdication of democratic oversight to private transnational actors whose resources now surpass those of many governments. That is not a papal fantasy. That is the current situation.
But the part of the encyclical which requires urgent attention and discussion and which has received the least amount of coverage is the passage on autonomous weapons.
According to Leo, AI technology must not be empowered with the decision-making process regarding the killing of humans. He explains that lethal autonomous weapons deprive war of its human moral element; they are therefore not just changing the nature of war, but creating an environment which is not conducive to the establishment of peace because the lethal autonomous weapons can target individuals independently of any human decision.
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Autonomous weapons have long been discussed by the International Committee of the Red Cross and a growing number of countries. But what Leo brings to this debate is the moral high ground and the ability to speak with authority. The Catholic Church speaks to 1.4 billion people worldwide. If the Pope states that using autonomous weapons is in violation of human dignity, the impact is felt in churches, armies and defense departments across the globe.
He also connects the dots that most AI governance conversations leave undrawn: the same private actors concentrating power in civilian AI are the ones bidding on defence contracts. The disarmament Leo is calling for is not metaphorical. He is asking whether humanity is genuinely comfortable outsourcing the decision to end a human life to a system optimised for performance – and whether, if we are not, we have the political will to say so before the moment passes.
We probably don’t. But at least someone said it clearly.
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