The digital pontiff: Pope Leo XIV makes AI a top issue

(OSV News) -- While the world is still just getting to know him, first impressions appear to hint that Pope Leo XIV doesn't seem like a pontiff to say, "I told you so."

But maybe he did.

When Pope Leo addressed the College of Cardinals on May 9, the day after his election, he referred to "developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor."

Almost as if to prove the pope's point -- and if an inanimate computer language model run through a batch of electronic components could say, 'Hold my beer' -- Claude Opus 4, an AI system marketed by developer Anthropic, recently demonstrated some startlingly bad behavior directed at its human creators.

Assigned a scenario to act as a fictional company assistant, Claude gained access to information indicating it would be replaced -- and that the engineer responsible for doing so was having an extramarital affair.

So Claude resorted to blackmail -- try to replace me, it threatened, and I'll expose your affair. Not just once, it was reported on May 22, but 84% of the time in simulations.

While Pope Leo's May 9 comments referred to the potential capacity of AI to impact human work and society through a sort of second Industrial Revolution, the implication of Claude Opus 4's artificial impropriety is still relative: Humanity is dealing with something very new, very powerful, and -- for all its obvious potential -- possibly very dangerous, absent a robust ethical framework.

"He chose Leo as his name as pope because of Leo XIII -- who wrote the important encyclical 'Rerum Novarum', back in the 19th century, about the Industrial Revolution," said Father Philip Larrey, a philosophy professor at Boston College, former dean of the Philosophy Department at the Pontifical Lateran University, and author of "Artificial Humanity" (If Press).

"And so Leo XIV understands that we're in a digital revolution -- and I think that he wants to do for our time what Leo did for his time."

Often referred to as the "Pope of the Workers," Leo XIII -- who held the chair of St. Peter from 1878-1903 -- articulated the church's defense of human dignity in the midst of a rapidly changing world.

"Leo XIII laid out the principles of the social doctrine of the church concerning solidarities, subsidiarity, a just wage, equitable distribution of wealth, no child labor, etc.," explained Father Larrey. "So we know what the principles of the doctrine are -- but I think now that Leo XIV is going to introduce us to some ideas that will apply to the digital era."

As a particularly ancient institution, some might question the Catholic Church's practical role in global AI dialogue -- but the Vatican has been busy.

During Pope Francis' pontificate, it regularly convened large-scale conferences engaging a broad range of topics such as "Big Data and Science," "Power and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence," "Artificial Intelligence, Justice, and Democracy," "Risks and Opportunities of AI for Children," "Common Good in the Digital Age," and more.

In June, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences will be the venue for a forum examining AI and business ethics -- an initiative of the "Core Relations" group -- while an "AI and Medicine" international congress is scheduled for November.

In February 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life, Microsoft, IBM, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, and the Italian Ministry of Innovation signed the "Call for an AI Ethics." The document is designed "to support an ethical approach to Artificial Intelligence and promote a sense of responsibility among organizations, governments, institutions and the private sector with the aim to create a future in which digital innovation and technological progress serve human genius and creativity and not their gradual replacement."

The Vatican City State's own first decree governing the use of AI -- "Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence" -- took effect in January 2025, prohibiting uses that create social inequalities or violate human dignity.

And on Jan. 14, the Vatican released the document "Antiqua et Nova" (Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence), observing that "as AI advances rapidly toward even greater achievements, it is critically important to consider its anthropological and ethical implications. This involves not only mitigating risks and preventing harm but also ensuring that its applications are used to promote human progress and the common good."

"In two years, we have seven major discourses by Pope Francis on this subject," noted Father Larrey. "And so I think that Pope Leo is going to take that as a base, and build on it."

Joseph Vukov -- an associate professor in the philosophy department at Loyola University Chicago and associate director of Loyola's Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage -- also emphasized the connections between Leo XIII and Leo XIV.

"The Industrial Revolution made us ask the question about what it means to be human; AI also does that," observed Vukov. "And in this case, it's because AI is able to mimic what humans do. It's able to do creative work that we would have thought that only humans could do just a few years ago, but it turns out a computer could do it as well."

"So now we really have to sit back and reflect on what is a human being, and what makes human beings what we are, and what gives us our dignity and worth," Vukov explained. "And, of course, the Catholic tradition has all kinds of things to say about both of those questions. So, I'm really glad that our new Holy Father is calling out this parallel explicitly -- because I think that the church has a lot to say, in the way that it's said a lot in the past under Leo XIII."

Vukov hopes to see specific guidance from Leo XIV concerning the integration of AI in the social and political lives of the faithful, as well as encouragement to embrace traditional devotional practices emphasized by Leo XIII.

"What the church really has to offer now is not so much knowing all the newest developments in artificial intelligence, but rather learning how to speak the church's wisdom into these new developments in sort of a large-scale way," said Vukov. "I think what's more important in some ways is what we've already seen under Francis and what we're already seeing under Leo: This willingness to think carefully and critically about how the church can speak into a new era; a new kind of technology."

Noreen Herzfeld -- a professor of science and religion at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict in Collegeville, Minnesota, and a member of the Vatican's AI Research Group -- is also encouraged by Pope Leo's AI outspokenness.

"I'm very happy to see that he is, in a sense, continuing a trajectory that was begun by Francis," she told OSV News, "Because it wasn't clear where the next pope would put his interest and concerns."

Even so early in his tenure, Pope Leo has already found himself the victim of AI deepfakes, with audio and video circulating that claim to show messages the pontiff never delivered. The Vatican was compelled to issue a statement warning of the wave of frauds.

"AI is a tool -- and it will be used by human beings for good and for ill," Herzfeld noted. "We're already seeing generative AI being used to produce deepfakes; to produce porn; to blackmail. I think when we combine the surveillance capacities of AI with generative AI. … These are powerful tools that, in the hands of the wrong people, could hurt a lot of people."

While artificial general intelligence, known as AGI -- a type of AI that would perform any intellectual task a human can -- is still hypothetical, "that does not mean," said Herzfeld, "that the technology that we currently have cannot create a great deal of social upheaval. And I think that that is also what Leo is looking at."

"The AI that we do have -- generative AI -- is going to displace some workers in some cognitively skilled areas," she added, "in the same way that the Industrial Revolution replaced physical labor."

Regulation is also a developing concern; the Trump administration's "Big, Beautiful Bill" budget package seeks to ban states from regulating AI for a decade. The United States has no federal laws concerning AI regulation, and President Donald Trump abolished the standing executive order on AI ethics and safety standards in January.

"We can already see that Europe is trying to develop ethical frameworks and standards," Herzfeld said. "China will simply ban certain programs and will make sure that they are only in the hands of those in power. And America," she added, "is probably not going to do a damn thing."

Still, Herzfeld imagines the Vatican isn't keen to wade into the regulatory environment; instead, she suggests that ethical counsel will be its strongest contribution to ongoing AI debates.

"I don't think that the Vatican and the new pope see their role as precisely stepping in where governmental bodies fear to tread," observed Herzfeld, "but more as providing a strong, moral call to regulate these technologies -- and to do what we can to mitigate the harms that they can cause."