Pope Leo XIV has urged governments to slow down and regulate the development of artificial intelligence systems in his first ⁠major document, released on Monday.He warned that advanced AI systems can spread misinformation, and prioritise conflict and risk, leading the world down a path of unending ⁠war. At a Vatican event launching the text, the first Pope from the US expressed concern that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced “practically beyond any human reach to govern them”.The event was also attended by Chris Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies. Pope Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump after criticising the war in Iran, made several impassioned appeals to world leaders in the lengthy document, known as an encyclical.He called for wider ownership of AI data – not solely left in private hands – for policymakers to protect the rights of workers and keep children safe from the technology, and advocated the cooling of competition between AI companies.“What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable ⁠of slowing things down when everything is accelerating,” said Pope Leo in the text entitled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity).The Pope called for “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility”.Encyclicals are among the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the Catholic Church's 1.4 billion members. Monday's highly anticipated text, at a length of nearly 43,000 words, has been in the works 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 in the world, lamented the weakening of multilateral organisations and warned that arms industry profit was a driving force behind conflicts.“The past 60 years have been marked by conflicts of astonishing brutality, often affecting civilian populations on a massive scale,” stated Pope Leo in the English-language text.“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,” he said. At the Vatican event on Monday, Mr Olah, the Anthropic cofounder, thanked the Pope for addressing the problems raised by new technology. He said firms such as his own faced strong commercial pressures and needed external scrutiny.“Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Mr Olah said, whose company produces the Claude AI tools. In his encyclical, Pope Leo also made one of the clearest statements yet by a pontiff repudiating the just war theory, a doctrine the Church has used since the fifth century to evaluate global conflicts.