Leo XIV warned against building a ‘new Tower of Babel’ with AI
Pope Leo XIV on Monday called for “disarming” AI in a letter that reads like a direct attack on Silicon Valley tech moguls, who are currently engaged in a years-long race to build more powerful AI models.
“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon,” the Pope wrote in a lengthy encyclical letter titled Magnificent Humanity. “This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”
It was the first such document from the US-born Pope, who became the Catholic church’s leader in 2025.
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