On Friday, October 30, 2026, Pope Leo XIV told the participants in “The Future of AI,” a meeting organized jointly by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute, that machines are “tools, not persons.” He flatly rejected proposals to grant AI systems rights or legal personhood, warning that doing so would obscure human responsibility and leave those who are harmed “to confront a faceless entity.” Then he named a deadline. From November 16 to 20, 2026, the states party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons will meet at the Palais des Nations in Geneva for their Seventh Review Conference, where they will take up the final report on lethal autonomous weapons systems that their Group of Governmental Experts adopted on September 4, 2026, and decide what comes next. Twelve days out, the pope’s message to those governments is blunt — some decisions belong to human beings alone.
Third, certain decisions must never be delegated. When a person is placed on a target list or entered into a border control database, there is a danger that he or she will be reduced to a mere data point. Decisions affecting human life, freedom and the use of force must always remain subject to effective, informed and responsible human oversight (cf. nos. 198-200). For this reason, artificial intelligence must be “disarmed” (no. 110), and I encourage the States meeting in Geneva in November to take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons.
— Pope Leo XIV, Address to the Participants in “The Future of AI: A Dialogue Between the Vatican and the Scientific World on the Developments and Applications of Intelligent Technologies”, October 30, 2026
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