Pope Leo XIV used a landmark address at UNESCO headquarters in Paris to deliver one of his most direct warnings yet about artificial intelligence, telling the international body that new technologies must remain at the service of the human person rather than becoming "yet another instrument of domination and injustice."
The speech came on September 25, during the pope's first visit to France, where he was welcomed by President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace before addressing UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural and scientific agency. The Guardian's live coverage of the visit described the address as a landmark speech focused on AI development and Europe's future, and Bloomberg reported that the pope warned technology must help people rather than enable what he called dehumanization.
"An Instrument of Domination and Injustice"
The pope framed his warning in the broader question of what it means to be human. "We are all born naked and in need; poor by birth, in need of bread, and words, and words of care and affection," he told the assembled diplomats and officials, according to The Guardian.
Turning to technology, he said: "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 pope also drew attention to the irony of the field's name. "Over the centuries, many tasks once performed by human beings have been entrusted to machines whose capabilities and applications have continued to expand," he said. "More recently, certain artificial systems have even been given the name of our human faculty of thought: intelligence."
For readers following the latest AI developments, the address places the leader of the world's largest Christian church squarely inside a debate that has mostly been dominated by lab executives, regulators and researchers.
AI and the Risk to Human Dialogue
The pope's concerns extended beyond labor and dignity to the effect of rapid technological change on public life itself. The Guardian reported that he warned rapid technological advancement, including AI, risks "hindering dialogue rather than fostering it" — a pointed message delivered at an institution whose founding mission is international cooperation.
That theme connected to a broader critique of the current moment. According to The Guardian's coverage, Pope Leo warned that international bodies face a "crisis of effectiveness," with some countries treating them as obstacles or a "charade," and that leaders in power increasingly treat law instrumentally and justice as "a commodity to be bought and sold."
A Consistent Theme of This Pontificate
Warnings about technology have become a signature of Pope Leo's pontificate. Earlier during the same French visit, he cautioned against what he called "a paradise of machines," The Guardian reported, an image of a world optimized for efficiency at the expense of human relationships. Bloomberg's account of the UNESCO speech similarly emphasized his warning that technology must serve people rather than enable dehumanization.
When he chose his papal name in 2025, Leo XIV explained that he did so in honor of Leo XIII, the 19th-century pope whose encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the upheaval of the industrial age — a framing that signaled from the start that he intended to make the challenges of a new technological era a central theme of his papacy.
The choice of venue for this week's speech amplified the message. UNESCO has spent years developing international recommendations on the ethics of artificial intelligence, and the pope's appearance there — during a state-level visit to France, one of the countries pushing hardest on AI regulation — offered the Vatican's most visible platform yet for its argument that AI governance is fundamentally a question of human dignity.
A Moral Voice in a Technical Debate
The address lands amid intensifying global debate over AI's trajectory, from safety incidents involving autonomous agents to geopolitical competition over the technology's future. Religious leaders have increasingly entered that debate: the pope's remarks at UNESCO followed earlier Vatican interventions on AI ethics, and faith groups have sought seats at international AI governance forums.
What the pope offered in Paris was less a policy prescription than a standard of judgment — that the measure of any technology is whether it expands or diminishes the human person. Whether AI development, at its current pace, can meet that standard is the question he left with the international community.
The visit continues over the weekend, with the pope scheduled for further engagements in France before returning to Rome. But the UNESCO address is likely to endure as its defining moment: a call, delivered at the birthplace of the postwar international order, for the AI revolution to be governed by the same concern for human dignity that inspired the institutions now struggling to keep up with it.
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