VATICAN CITY – Pope Leo XIV yesterday called for the “disarming” of artificial intelligence in his long-awaited manifesto on the rapidly developing technology, and warned of “new forms of slavery” behind its rise. 

Leo, the first US pope, warned against “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance”.

He presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity) in person at the Vatican, alongside AI experts including Christopher Olah, co-founder of US giant Anthropic.

Anthropic is embroiled in a legal battle with the US military after opposing the use of its technology for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance. At the presentation, Olah said AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”.

He welcomed input from outside actors like the Catholic Church, to “push events in a better direction” saying that “the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community”. In the encyclical, Leo also sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was “not permissible to entrust lethal” decisions to tech.

Leo has repeatedly clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict. The “just war” theory – espoused recently by the Trump administration – was “outdated”, Leo wrote, adding that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable”. AI could be worth up to US$4.8 trillion by 2033, a 25-fold increase in a decade, while concentrating its profits in the hands of a limited few, according to the United Nations.

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” the pope wrote.

“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” Leo wrote.
AI should be “human-friendly”, accessible to all and opened to discussion and debate, he added.

The head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has made the hot-button issue a cornerstone of his papacy by dedicating to it his first encyclical – a document which lays the basis for Church teaching and longer-term debate. The manifesto references a range of cultural giants, from Greek philosopher Plato to Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, even citing a character from JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”. –Nampa/AFP