Pope Leo urges human control of AI and a ban on lethal autonomous weapons

Pope Leo XIV called on October 30, 2026, for people to retain responsibility for AI decisions affecting life, freedom and the use of force. Addressing a Vatican AI conference, he urged states meeting in Geneva in November to take steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons, according to Vatican News.

Leo met participants in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace. The one-day conference, called “The Future of AI,” was jointly organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute. His address connected decisions about individual people with a wider demand for institutions that can hold AI development and use accountable.

When a person becomes a database entry

The pope made the concern concrete through two examples: putting someone on a target list or in a border-control database. In those settings, he warned, a person can be reduced to a data point. He said decisions affecting human life, freedom and force must remain under human oversight that is effective, informed and responsible.

His appeal on weapons carried that principle into a specific diplomatic setting: the states gathering in Geneva in November. Leo urged them to take steps toward a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. He also recalled Pope Francis’ 2024 message to G7 leaders that no machine should choose whether to take human life.

A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.

Pope Leo XIV, addressing Vatican AI conference participants

Personhood could obscure who answers for harm

Leo described machines as tools, not persons. He argued that they lack human experiences, bodies, feelings and relationships, and do not understand love, work or responsibility. His objection to granting AI rights or legal personhood centered on the consequences for people harmed by the technology: responsibility could become harder to locate.

He warned that such a legal approach risks leaving victims to confront a faceless entity. Rather than treating AI’s development as inevitable, Leo said humanity has a responsibility to guide its applications, change them and, when necessary, reject them. The question, he argued, should concern the purpose AI serves, not simply what it can do.

Institutions to make ethical principles work

The pope described the need for institutions capable of putting ethical principles into practice as potentially the most urgent challenge. His proposed governance approach had three parts, aimed at making decisions about AI open to examination and challenge, with appropriate remedies when harm occurs:

• Shared standards to guide the development and use of AI.
• Independent oversight of decisions concerning the technology.
• Clear accountability mechanisms, including ways to challenge decisions and seek remedies for harm.

He also set a test for whose interests those institutions should protect. Intelligent technologies must serve the common good, he said, rather than become ends in themselves or serve only a privileged few. He called for solidarity and participation across the global community, with the benefits of progress enjoyed equally.

Conference participants also pressed for a change in direction. EWTN News, citing an October 30 press release, reported that MIT physicist Max Tegmark saw Vatican moral leadership as a way to steer AI onto a more pro-human path. Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell urged a retreat from what he called AI “super-development,” warning that success on that trajectory could threaten every human life. That was Russell’s warning about a possible outcome, not a finding presented by the pope.