Friday, August 28th 2026 - 18:56 UTC
The pontiff called for acting so that “the good of the human family is not sacrificed to private interests,” and raised a question about the pace of technological development
Pope Leo XIV warned on Friday of the difficulty states face in overseeing artificial intelligence, which in his view is concentrated in the hands of a small number of major economic and technological players, and called for the use of such tools to be governed by ethical criteria.
“It is important that a certain ethics be established to accompany the use of these important tools which, unfortunately, are concentrated in the hands of major economic and technological players, and which the state finds it hard to control,” he said during an audience in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace with members of the Institut International des Sciences Administratives, a Brussels-based body, at the close of its annual conference held in Rome.
The pontiff called for acting so that “the good of the human family is not sacrificed to private interests,” and raised a question about the pace of technological development: “The speed at which innovations relating to artificial intelligence are developing leads us to ask whether in future it will be possible to control these machines, whether humanity does not risk becoming the victim of its own inventions.” He added that one of the grave problems of the present is seeing that “decisions about human life are entrusted to machines.”
