Pope Leo XIV issued a dire warning about AI this week, echoing widespread worries that the technology is moving too quickly with too little oversight.
During an address at the Élysée Palace in Paris, Leo warned that we risk “losing our humanity” in the AI revolution, which he described as a “‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives.” He emphasized that education and ethical judgement are urgently needed to shape a better future as the technology takes root in everyday life.
Leo turned his comments to the threat of AI after meditating on the ways that technology can be abused to power global conflict. “Humanity had come to realize that scientific progress, when severed from wisdom, can turn into a weapon of destruction,” Leo said, referencing the Second World War. “Our efforts in this domain must ensure that new technologies remain at the service of the human person, rather than becoming yet another instrument of domination and injustice,” Leo said.
He continued:
“Over the centuries, many tasks once performed by human beings have been entrusted to machines, whose capabilities and applications have continued to expand. More recently, certain artificial systems have even been given the name of our human faculty of thought: intelligence. At the same time, however, our ideas and relationships risk being impoverished by a process of dehumanization. The paradox has become increasingly evident : while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”
The warnings about the dangers posed by AI aren’t Pope Leo’s first. In May, the religious leader explored the topic deeply in a papal encyclical dedicated to artificial intelligence. In the document, titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Leo expressed his worry that private companies more wealthy and powerful than many governments are paving the way forward at their own discretion. Meanwhile, “most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best.”
Rogue agents and killer robots
The pope isn’t the only one who’s concerned. OpenAI and Anthropic both recently revealed that some of their AI agents went rogue, hacking into external systems and companies through the open internet. As worries about these apparently not isolated incidents mount, AI executives have banded together to call for an industry-wide slowdown on development. The sentiment is a stunning reversal for tech’s most cutting edge companies, which have been sprinting to outdo one another while pouring a projected $650 billion into AI this year alone.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months, such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a landmark September blog post. “The scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
Amodei’s post followed the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who accused the AI industry of “gambling with our lives” in a viral post on X published on September 8. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” the former employee, Jacob Coxon, wrote. A current science lead at the company quickly backed Coxon’s claim, offering little peace of mind for anyone hoping that Coxon was being hyperbolic. “…We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Anthropic Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger wrote in a reply on X. “I personally think it is [greater than] 10% within the next decade,” he added.
Until now, most AI leaders have insisted that the technology’s risks are outweighed by its theoretical benefits to humanity, swatting away critics who point to climate concerns, job losses, and copyright issues bound up in the explosive growth of AI models. Now, everyone seems to be worried about killer robots – the pope included.
