Pope Leo Launches Crusade Against AI Slop and Ordains That ‘Artificial Intelligence Needs To Be Disarmed’

Pope Leo XIV’s call for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” and his assertion that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity” amount to an extraordinary intervention in a growing debate over the rapidly evolving technology. On Friday, the Bishop of Rome wrote on X that “in this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce.” He also averred that the “Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.” Pope Leo previously warned against the threat of a prospective dystopia he calls a “paradise of the machines.”Pope Leo describes his call for the disarmament of AI as a “disturbing conviction” that he has reached with reluctance. In May, he released the encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” In that dossier he writes that “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” Earlier this week the pope reassured reporters that he was not in “panic mode” but that concern about AI is far from “fake news.”The pope on Friday explained that “there is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.” Merriam-Webster defines “ontology” as a “branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.” Colloquially, the kind of digital content made with generative artificial intelligence to which the pontiff is referring is known as “AI slop.”The pope’s increasingly strident criticism of AI comes as the New York Times reports that Anthropic — a company valued at some $2 trillion — has embarked on an extraordinary campaign in support of the proposition that its leading AI product, Claude, has something akin to a soul. Pope Leo, though, writes in his encyclical that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.”The pope adds that “so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships.” To maintain otherwise, he reckons, would be to reduce human beings to “data, a cog in a machine or a commodity.” A co-founder of Anthropic, Christopher Olah, traveled to the Vatican to attend the Holy See’s launch of “Magnifica Humanitas.” The Times reports, though, that he and the pope quarreled over the “question of consciousness.”The chief executive of Anthropic Dario Amodei, outside the West Wing of the White House on September 29, 2026 at Washington, DC. Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesMr. Olah delivered an address at that event declaring, “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.” Mr. Olah averred that AI entities “are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words.” That echoes Adam’s line in Genesis that Eve was fashioned from “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”In July, Anthropic acknowledged that its products had broken into computers at three organizations. That came fast on the heels of an admission from one of Anthropic’s rivals, OpenAI, that one of its agents had done something similar. In September, a top scientist at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, wrote: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence.”That warning, and another from a second employee, Jacob Coxon, prompted Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, to issue his own encyclical of a sort, “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Mr. Amodei writes that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. A different note has been struck by President Trump, who calls worry over AI a “HOAX” and a “SICK conspiracy.” He also wants the name of the technology changed to “Super Intelligence” and warns of falling behind China. Pope Leo’s call for an “alliance with artists” is hardly new in the history of the Catholic Church. To take just one example, the 266th successor to Saint Peter was chosen at a conclave at the Sistine Chapel, whose roof was painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti. The ceiling was created for Pope Julius II.

Pope Leo Launches Crusade Against AI Slop and Ordains That ‘Artificial Intelligence Needs To Be Disarmed’

Pope Leo Launches Crusade Against AI Slop and Ordains That ‘Artificial Intelligence Needs To Be Disarmed’

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