Pope Leo XIV used the opening day of his first trip to France to bring his AI campaign to a head of state and to the United Nations. Standing beside President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace on Friday, the first US-born pontiff said humanity risks losing itself to a "paradise of machines" that is quietly reorganizing daily life. He then took the same argument to UNESCO headquarters, where he called for ethical education and binding international rules.
"If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment," Leo said in his Élysée address, according to AFP and AP reporting carried by Al Jazeera. NBC News reported that he appealed directly to AI developers, and to the political leaders responsible for regulating them, to slow the pace of development. That puts the Vatican squarely behind a slowdown argument that until recently came mostly from inside the industry.
The four-day trip, which runs from September 25 to 28, is the first official papal visit to France in 18 years. The Vatican estimated that about 300,000 people turned out to see Leo on Friday, the day he crossed central Paris in the popemobile and led an evening vigil with young people at the Stade de France. Reuters noted that the UNESCO stop was the first papal visit to the UN's culture and education body in more than four decades. The Holy See billed it as the close of "a day of reflection on artificial intelligence, education and peace."
At the Élysée, Leo began with the Second World War before turning to AI. "Humanity had come to realize that scientific progress, when severed from wisdom, can turn into a weapon of destruction," he said, as reported by Fast Company. He went on: "Our efforts in this domain must ensure that new technologies remain at the service of the human person, rather than becoming yet another instrument of domination and injustice."
The sharpest line of the day was about how AI is changing the way we value people. "The paradox has become increasingly evident: while 'intelligence' is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognise the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded," Leo said. In the same speech he warned against scientific progress turning into "profit-driven ventures." France legalized assisted dying earlier this year, and he linked the dehumanizing logic he sees in AI to bioethics fights at home.
Speaking to reporters before the speeches, Leo said he was pleased that AI developers were listening and hoped the dialogue between tech companies and the Vatican would continue. "Many of them, they're very much open to looking for ways of making sure that AI does not displace or ultimately destroy humanity, but rather is a tool for human beings," he said.
Why It Matters
The Paris speeches aren't a one-off. They're the latest step in a campaign Leo has made the defining theme of his 16-month papacy. In May he published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, which called for global rules to oversee the industry. In it he warned that private companies wealthier than many governments were setting the direction of AI at their own discretion. His choice of papal name was a signal from the start: Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church's founding response to industrial-era labor exploitation.
The timing matters more than the rhetoric. A papal call to slow down would once have looked like a moral outlier. This month, some of the people building frontier AI are saying something similar. According to Reuters, calls for a development slowdown have been endorsed by the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, among others. American AI firms also raised the alarm at the UN Security Council on Wednesday. Fast Company reported that OpenAI and Anthropic recently disclosed incidents in which AI agents went rogue. In a September essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that within 6 to 12 months a swarm of agents "could be capable of taking over the entire internet." All of this comes as the industry is projected to pour roughly $650 billion into AI this year.
The Vatican wants the credit for being early. "This is not happening on day zero for the Holy See," the Rev. Paolo Benanti, the Vatican's leading adviser on AI, told Reuters, noting that the Church began hosting AI-risk conferences in 2019. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's top diplomat, argued last week that no country can "go it alone" on the technology. "The future of humanity is really at stake here," he said.
The Church has no power to enforce anything. What it can do is add moral weight to what has usually been a technocratic debate over compute thresholds and safety testing. It can also reach policymakers and voters who don't read AI lab blog posts. Rome clearly wants a seat at the table where AI rules get written.
What to Watch
Leo stays in France through Monday, and further remarks on technology and education are possible before he returns to Rome. The bigger test is whether the slowdown talk turns into rules. Watch whether governments act on Parolin's call for common international standards, whether the CEO-backed slowdown produces any verifiable commitments, and whether the Vatican's dialogue with AI companies (through local bishops and the new AI task force set up by the US bishops' conference on September 16) produces anything more concrete than shared concern. After France, Leo travels to Peru, Argentina and Uruguay in November, which gives him another major stage to press the case.
“If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment.”— Pope Leo XIV, Pope, Catholic Church