This week Pope Leo XIV released his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
While a new pope’s first encyclical is typically devoted to broad questions of faith and human dignity, Leo has instead chosen to confront one of the most pressing issues of our time by placing lethal autonomous weapons and the militarisation of artificial intelligence at the centre of the document.
In a dedicated section on weapons and artificial intelligence, the pope calls for AI to be ‘disarmed,’ states bluntly that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable,” and insists that lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions must never be entrusted to machines.
He explicitly condemns lethal autonomous weapons as ‘not permissible’ and urges rigorous ethical constraints on AI in warfare.
The encyclical’s language on human control is unusually direct.
