Pope Leo XIV - the first American Pope - released Magnifica Humanitas yesterday. “Magnificent Humanity.” Forty-three thousand words on artificial intelligence and whether it will enhance human dignity or destroy it. He signed it on May 15th - the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, his predecessor Leo XIII’s landmark response to the Industrial Revolution. The deliberate echo is the point. He is saying: we are here again.
The document raises five warnings about AI - that it erodes human judgment, substitutes for genuine human connection (Mingling!), deepens inequality, destabilizes democracy, and makes war easier to wage. On that last point, he writes that AI makes war more “feasible” and less subject to human control. He adds four words that cut through all of it: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
Consider the backdrop. The U.S. military used AI systems to identify targets during the Iran strikes - a system capable of flagging over a thousand sites every day. Meanwhile, the co-founder of Anthropic - the AI company the Pentagon blacklisted for resisting unrestricted military use of its technology - stood alongside Leo at this morning’s Vatican presentation.
Which is why today I’m asking: will AI-assisted warfare ultimately save lives? Resist the temptation to just vote “no.” Research has shown that fear, vengeance, and psychological stress cause even trained soldiers to commit atrocities that a dispassionate system would never commit. And there’s the deterrence argument - if AI makes your military so overwhelming that adversaries won’t engage, wars don’t start in the first place.