As the world awaits Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence, expected to be signed 15 May and released by the Vatican by the end of the month, the pope has already emerged as a leading global voice on on the ethical challenges posed by AI.
Since his election, Pope Leo has addressed AI in a wide range of contexts, telling teenagers gathered in a sports stadium to use AI “in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think,” warning priests not to use chatbots to write their homilies, calling on the media to preserve “human voices and faces,” and telling legislators from 68 countries that AI is a tool meant to serve humans, not replace them.
From a speech in central Africa on AI’s potential to change humanity’s “relationship with truth” to a message to tech developers gathered in Rome, Pope Leo has returned to the subject of AI again and again in speeches, messages, leading Time magazine to include him on its 2025 list of the world’s most influential people in artificial intelligence before the publication of his much-anticipated encyclical.
