Pope Leo issues horror AI warfare warning – 'practically beyond any human reach'

Pope Leo urged governments to slow down and closely regulate the development of AI systems in his first major document, released on Monday. The first US pope expressed concern at a Vatican event launching the text that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced “practically beyond any human reach to govern them”.

Pope Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of Donald Trump after criticising the Iran war, made a range of impassioned appeals to world leaders in the lengthy document, known as an encyclical. The leader of the Catholic Church called for ownership of AI data not to be left solely in private hands, for policy-makers to protect the rights of workers and keep children safe from the technology, and urged the cooling of competition between AI companies.

In the text, titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), he said: “What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating.”

The pope called for “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility.”

Encyclicals are ​one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the Church’s 1.4 billion members.

Monday’s highly anticipated text, spanning nearly 43,000 words, has been in the works nearly since Leo’s election as pope a little more than a year ago.

The document, which addressed AI as its main theme, also decried the number of wars around the world.

He said: “The past 60 years have been marked by conflicts of astonishing brutality, often affecting civilian populations on a massive scale.

“Humanity is slipping into a violent culture of power, where peace no longer appears as a responsibility to be taken on, but as a fragile interval between conflicts.”

In his encyclical, Leo also made one of the clearest statements yet from a pope repudiating the just war theory, a doctrine the Church has used since at least the fifth century to evaluate global conflicts.

The doctrine generally says that wars ⁠should only be waged in order to defend against aggression.

“The ‘just war’ theory which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” wrote Leo.

“The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”

The pope also said any use of AI in warfare “must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints” and called it “not permissible” to entrust AI systems with lethal decisions.