Pope Francis
Pope (2013–2025)
The late pontiff who made AI a moral priority — the first pope to address a G7 summit. He called it an “exciting and fearsome tool” in the same breath, praising its power to democratize knowledge and advance science while warning it must never displace human judgment: a deliberately two-sided verdict.
In his words
Artificial intelligence is an exciting and fearsome tool.
No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.
Biography
Pope Francis (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 1936; died April 2025) led the Catholic Church from 2013 and made the ethics of technology a recurring theme of his papacy. In June 2024 he became the first pope to address a G7 summit, choosing artificial intelligence as his subject.
Neither objective nor neutral
At the G7 in Borgo Egnazia, Francis called AI “an exciting and fearsome tool” and rejected the idea that its outputs are dispassionate, arguing that the algorithmic method “is neither objective nor neutral.” He was emphatic that life-and-death choices must not be delegated to machines, calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons and insisting that “decision-making … must always be left to the human person.”
His stance was cautionary rather than absolute: he acknowledged AI could democratise knowledge and advance science, while warning it could widen injustice between rich and poor nations. He backed the Vatican-brokered Rome Call for AI Ethics and set the template his successor Pope Leo XIV would build on with the 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
Where they stand in the war
Voices for AI
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/pope-francis