TL;DR
Pope Leo XIV denounced AI-led warfare as a “spiral of annihilation” during a historic visit to Rome’s Sapienza University on May 14, 2026. He criticized increases in European defense spending at the expense of education and healthcare, and called for stricter monitoring of AI in military and civilian use.
Pope Leospiral of annihilation.” Speaking at La Sapienza University in Rome on WednesdayThe pontiff called for stricter monitoring of how AI is developed and deployed in military and civilian settings, and criticized European governments for increasing defense budgets at the expense of education and healthcare.
The speech marked the first papal visit to La Sapienza since Pope Benedict XVI canceled a planned speech on campus in 2008 after protests from faculty and students. Leo received a warm welcome. Among those who greeted him were 72 young Palestinians who arrived in Italy this week from Gaza through a humanitarian corridor organized by the diocese of Rome, the Sant’Egidio community and the university. They will continue their studies at Sapienza with full scholarships, accommodation, academic tutoring and psychological support until 2029.
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Leo’s speech focused on the relationship between technology, conflict and human responsibility. He identified AI as one of the most critical problems facing humanity, particularly its application in war, and argued that the current trajectory of military investment is incompatible with the protection of human life.
“What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and in Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation.“The conflicts he cited span a variety of contexts in which AI-enabled systems have been deployed or proposed, from autonomous drone operations to surveillance and attack infrastructure. AI weapons are already transforming the nature of wara process that the Pope framed not as a future risk but as a present reality.
He called for better monitoring of AI development so that “It does not exempt human beings from responsibility for their decisions and it does not exacerbate the tragedy of conflict.“That language echoes the Vatican’s long-standing position, articulated in its 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics, that technology must serve human dignity and never replace human judgment in decisions about life and death. The challenge, as Leo put it, is that AI has already become a weapon so that they overcome the governance structures designed to limit it.
Criticism of spending
Leo reserved special criticism for European defense spending, which increased in 2025 and 2026 amid the war in Ukraine and broader geopolitical instability. European NATO members increased military spending by 14 percent in 2025, to $864 billion, the fastest growth rate since 1953, according to SIPRI. NATO allies agreed at the Hague summit on a new benchmark of 3.5 percent of GDP for core defense spending, up from the previous target of 2 percent.
The Pope argued that this rearmament occurred at the direct expense of public services. He denounced military budgets that enriched “elites who don’t care at all about the common good,” while education and health care suffered. He urged students and professors at the university to move in the opposite direction, toward research and education that values life, “the life of people who cry out for peace and justice.”
It was a direct message delivered to a precise place. La Sapienza, founded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303, is now a secular institution with more than 100,000 students. The fact that a pope was warmly received there, 18 years after his predecessor was effectively disinvited, suggests that Leo’s willingness to address political and technological issues in secular terms has broadened the Vatican’s audience.
The encyclical and the commission
The La Sapienza speech is part of a broader campaign by Leo to position the Vatican as a serious interlocutor in AI governance. Two days after the speech, the Vatican announced the creation of an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a body made up of representatives from seven Vatican departments, including the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The commission will examine the effects of AI on humanity and is coordinated by the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development.
Leo’s first encyclical, supposedly titled Magnificent humanityexpected in the coming weeks and will place AI at the center of Catholic social teaching alongside work, human dignity and peace. The encyclical is understood to draw a parallel between the current AI revolution and the industrial upheaval sparked by Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 encyclical. new thingsthat addressed workers’ rights. In choosing the name Leo, the American-born pope, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, signaled from the beginning that he intended to address the economic and technological disruptions of his time. The question of how AI is governed, who it serves and whether Governance frameworks can keep pace with technology.it is now formally part of the papacy’s agenda.
Why it is important beyond the Vatican
Papal statements on technology have no regulatory force. But the Vatican’s convening power over AI ethics is not trivial. The 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics was signed by Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It established principles, including transparency, accountability and the prohibition of AI systems that override human action, which have informed subsequent regulatory frameworks, including the EU AI Law.
Leo’s intervention comes at a time when the practical application of AI in war is no longer theoretical. Autonomous drone systems are The point is approaching where they can select targets without human intervention. Ukraine’s defense technology sector has carried out tens of thousands of combat missions using unmanned systems. The United States, China and Russia are investing heavily in AI-based military capabilities. The Pope’s argument, that this trajectory leads to a dehumanization of conflict and a transfer of moral responsibility from people to machines, is shared by a significant number of AI researchers, ethicists, and arms control advocates. But it has yet to produce binding international restrictions on autonomous weapons, despite years of debate at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
The gap between the Pope’s moral framework and geopolitical reality is wide. European governments are increasing defense spending because they believe the security environment demands it. AI-based military systems are being developed because they offer tactical advantages that no major power is willing to unilaterally give up. Leo’s speech at La Sapienza did not offer a political mechanism to close that gap. What he did was reaffirm, with the institutional backing of the Catholic Church, that the question of whether machines should be responsible for making decisions about the murder It is not merely technical. In the Pope’s approach, this is a question about what kind of civilization humanity is building, and the answer so far is that it values annihilation over life.
