Pope Leo: ‘Machines are tools, not persons’

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Key facts

• Nov 2026: starting his Latin America tour, Pope Leo XIV visited the Catholic University of Uruguay and called for human dignity in the AI era (News18, EWTN: ‘AI can never be a person’)
• Event (Vatican News): ‘The Future of AI: A Dialogue Between the Vatican and the Scientific World on the Developments and Applications of Intelligent Technologies’, organised jointly by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute; audience in the Vatican on Oct 30, 2026
• Personhood (Arab News/AFP): ‘Machines are tools, not persons’; ‘So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain’; treating them otherwise ‘risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity’
• Oversight: decisions affecting human life ‘must always remain subject to effective, informed, and responsible human oversight’ (Vatican News); headlines summarised the address as a call to ‘disarm’ AI
• Weapons: encouraged the states meeting in Geneva in November to take steps to ban lethal autonomous weapons (Vatican News); also warned about AI in border control, where a person in a database becomes ‘simply a data point’
• Governance: the future of AI ‘is not pre-determined’; people have ‘the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications’; he asked for ‘shared standards, independent oversight and clear mechanisms of accountability’
• Context: it follows the AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (May 25), the Sept 28 rebuke of Jensen Huang, and reports of Anthropic’s Chris Olah raising AI consciousness with papal advisers; the ‘not persons’ line was read by Futurism, Gizmodo and The Verge as a rejection of AI personhood and moral-status claims
• Follow-up (Buenos Aires, reported Nov 10): at the Argentine Catholic University, to business, unions and social movements, Leo said ‘unregulated artificial intelligence and automation can create challenges that put many areas of employment at risk’ and could ‘become a genuine threat to the integral development of the human person’