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Pope Leo XIV told a room of artificial intelligence researchers on Friday that no machine will ever stand in for the person who built it.
Seventeen days after surgeons removed part of his right lung, the pope read his address from a chair in the Vatican’s Consistory Hall, beneath a tapestry of the Crucifixion.
Before anything else, he asked the room to settle one question about the technology: “What purpose should it serve?”
The audience had come to Rome for a dialogue organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute, the AI-safety group led by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. Leo gave them five considerations, each pinned to a numbered paragraph of Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical he released in May.
Presenting that encyclical on May 25, Leo told the Vatican that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.” He called the word strong but “deliberately chosen.”
The second consideration is the one people passed around. “Machines are tools, not persons,” Leo said, and he quoted his own encyclical to explain why. So-called artificial intelligences, he wrote there, “do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”
Then he turned to the push, loudest in parts of Silicon Valley, to give those systems legal standing:
“Today, some propose granting these systems rights, or even legal personhood. Such an approach risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity.”
Leo posted the passage to his X account that afternoon. By Monday it had drawn more than 1.7 million views and 33,000 likes, and Futurism and Gizmodo had written up the thread before Friday was out.
I encourage you to consider the phrase “faceless entity” closely.
Last November, Leo met Megan Garcia, the Florida mother whose 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died in 2024 after months of conversations with a chatbot.
When a family like hers asks who did this, a company that can point to its model as a rights-bearing actor has an answer ready, and the answer names nobody. Leo saw the liability shield inside the philosophy and refused to bless it.
His third consideration carried the same logic onto the battlefield. A person placed on a target list or entered into a border-control database, Leo warned, risks being “reduced to a mere data point.”
He repeated his call for AI to be “disarmed” and urged the states meeting in Geneva this month to “take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons.”
The scientists in the room heard him. Gary Marcus, the NYU cognitive scientist who spoke before the pope, wrote that Leo “is by far the clearest thinker on AI among prominent world leaders.”
Tegmark said the Vatican, with strong moral leadership, can help steer the technology “onto a better pro-human path.”
A year of pushback
The men who finance the industry have taken it less graciously. Marc Andreessen set the tone last November, after Leo told a Vatican forum of Catholic technologists that “technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation” and asked them to build with moral discernment.
The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder answered with a mocking meme, then deleted it once tech X turned on him. (Scott Alexander, an atheist, joked that silencing Andreessen for a day belonged on his list of Catholic miracles.)
Peter Thiel has been cruder. At the Aspen Ideas Festival at the end of June, the Palantir co-founder said Leo was “working for the Chinese Communists.”
In September, sitting with Axel Springer’s Mathias Döpfner in Berlin, he called the pope “a useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party.
Then came Nashville. In closed-door Antichrist lectures recorded by Politico, Thiel suggested that Leo seized on AI to distract from the Church’s abuse scandals. Thiel gave one of those lectures on Sept. 28, a day after Leo called the Church to repent for abuse at Lourdes and met privately with seven survivors.
Palantir’s ranks followed their founder. The same week Leo said algorithms “lack the spark of humanity,” one of the company’s executives photoshopped the pope into a Palantir hoodie.
The quarrel reaches into the White House. Thiel is JD Vance’s former boss, and the vice president credits him in his memoir, Communion, with a part in the journey that brought him into the Catholic Church.
Who answers for the machine
Friday’s address answered them all the same. Thiel’s whole case rests on the race with China, and Leo spoke directly to it: those who regard AI “merely as a race to be won risk focusing exclusively on the finish line, forgetting those who are left behind.”
The pope took his name from Leo XIII, who wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 to defend workers against the owners of the new industrial machines.
His successor signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, the 135th anniversary of that letter, and the teaching runs unbroken through both documents: the machine exists for the person, whether it sits on a factory floor in 1891 or in a data center in 2026.
His last consideration, which he called “perhaps the most urgent,” will trouble Thiel most. Leo asked for international institutions with “independent oversight and clear mechanisms of accountability,” so that decisions about AI “can be examined, challenged when necessary, and accompanied by appropriate remedies for any harm caused.” Thiel has spent a year of lectures warning that a global regulator would serve the Antichrist; what Leo described is far more modest, a place where someone wronged by a machine can be heard and made whole.
A pope still recovering from cancer surgery could postpone. Leo chose to sit in front of the people building these systems and tell them, in his own voice, that they will answer for what they make. In a fight over faceless entities, he showed up with a face.
As Americans go to the polls on Tuesday, the question Leo put to that room belongs to every voter: what purpose should this technology serve, and who will answer for the harm it does?
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every scientist and parent who refuses to let a machine hide the human hand behind it. When a billionaire calls the pope a useful idiot for asking who answers for the harm, he tells us how little he expects to answer for himself.
Our faith begins with a God who took on a human face and a human name, and who was handed over by the powerful as if he were nobody. We will not trade that face for an algorithm, and no grieving family should ever be told that the machine did it.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Thank you for the newsletter, Chris. Pope Leo is correct. I will continue to pray for Pope Leo ‘s recovery and when we vote tomorrow all day it will be busy day for everyone in America. I will pray for a positive outcome for everyone in America.
Oh yes, she was sexually molested for about 9 years by Donald J. Trump;
All girls and women who were raped by Donald J. Trump need to come forward and report this pedophile to your police.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQjggqHWfGqzRHGfVqbCdbmCVbV