VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV has created a study group on artificial intelligence, the Vatican said Saturday, as he prepares to release his first encyclical, which is expected to emphasize the need for an ethics-based approach to technology that prioritizes human dignity and peace.
The Vatican said Leo decided to create the in-house study group because of the accelerating use of AI, “its potential impacts on humans and humanity as a whole (and) the Church’s concern for the dignity of every human being.”
The announcement came a day after Leo signed his encyclical, which comes 135 years after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, dated his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum” or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers during the Industrial Revolution.
It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current Pope has already cited it in connection with the AI revolution, which he believes raises the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution raised a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the Church’s social teaching, which also includes issues such as labour, justice and peace.
“I think in many ways the Catholic Church is going to be the adult on some of these debates about how we are going to integrate AI into the rest of our society,” said University of Notre Dame philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan, who directs its Ethics Institute. “Certainly, the Pope is going to be one of the strongest advocates for human dignity in these discussions.”
Just days after his 2025 election, Leo told the cardinals who made him Pope that the Catholic Church has a duty to offer “the treasure of its social teaching” to meet the challenges posed by AI on “human dignity, justice and labour”.
The public release of the encyclopedia, expected in the coming weeks, will likely set off a new confrontation between Chicago-born Leo and the Trump administration, which has made the rapid development of AI a matter of vital national economic and security strategy. The United States has steadfastly rejected international regulatory efforts to rein in AI, and the Trump administration has removed bureaucratic barriers that slow its development domestically.
The Vatican’s activities gained momentum as US President Donald Trump completed a visit to China that also included AI business. Others traveling with Trump on Air Force One included Elon Musk, whose social media platform
Since the AI boom began with the introduction of ChatGPIT, the technology’s breathtaking capabilities have amazed the world. Tech companies are racing to develop better AI systems, while experts are warning about its risks, ranging from an existential but distant threat like rogue AI to everyday problems like bias in algorithmic hiring systems.
The United Nations last year adopted a new governance architecture to rein in AI after previous multilateral efforts, including an AI summit hosted by Britain, South Korea and France, resulted only in non-binding pledges. In 2024, the EU adopted its own Artificial Intelligence Act, implementing a risk-based approach in its AI rules.
The Vatican has sought to add its voice to the debate by introducing ethical guidelines for the application of AI in areas ranging from warfare to education and healthcare. The underlying call has been that technology should be used as a tool to complement, not replace, human intelligence.
The Vatican has also warned about the environmental impact of the AI race, noting the “huge amounts of energy and water” required for AI data centers and computational power.
“There are about a billion and a half Catholics in the world, so that alone is reason to pay attention,” said Thomas Harmon, a theology professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. “But beyond the numbers, the Catholic Church has a deep and sophisticated tradition of thinking about what it means to be human.”
In 2020, the Vatican enlisted tech companies to sign an AI pledge, known as the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which outlined core principles for AI regulation, including inclusivity, accountability, fairness, and privacy, among other things. Private sector companies that signed included Microsoft, IBM and Cisco.
In his final years, Pope Francis called for an international treaty to regulate AI and said that the risks of a technology lacking human values of compassion, kindness, morality, and forgiveness were too great to rely on the ethics of AI researchers and developers.
He asserted his authority on the Group of Seven while addressing a special session on the threats and promises of AI in 2024. There, Francis said politicians should take a leading role in ensuring that AI remains human-centered, so that decisions about whether to use weapons or even less-lethal tools are always made by humans. He ultimately called for a ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons, colloquially known as “killer robots.”
At home, Leo warns priests against using AI to write their sermons. But Pope, a math major who spends his free time scrolling on his phone, has also raised his voice on the broader implications of AI on world peace, labor and the meaning of reality.
For the Augustinian Pope, the ability of generic AI to misinform and deceive through deepfake imagery is particularly worrisome, given that the search for truth is a core element of the spirituality of his religious order.
In a speech at an AI conference in June 2025, Leo acknowledged the contributions of generic AI to health care and scientific discovery. But he questioned “humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, its potential impact on our distinctive ability to understand reality.”
Leo, who has stressed continued appeals for peace, also called for monitoring how AI is being used and developed in warfare in the Middle East and Ukraine, where automated weapons systems are using everything from aerial drones and maritime and land platforms.
“What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and Iran reflects inhuman development in a cycle of destruction in the relationship between war and new technologies,” he said last week at La Sapienza, Europe’s largest university.
