The Pope’s Mandate on AI Is a Moral Safeguard for Our Times

David J. Scheffer focuses on international law and international criminal justice and served as the first ever U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues.

The global community desperately needs a powerful voice of reason and of justice that would fill the leadership vacuum in a world of widening conflicts, fraying support for human rights and use of force norms, and dizzying developments in the application of AI. Enter Pope Leo XIV, who delivered his Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, on May 25. 

The encyclical updates and anchors international norms on social justice and the laws of war, as well as the essential role of multilateralism, to stabilize a world order that has been seriously blown off course and into treacherous waters in recent years.   

Pope Leo’s bottom line, extrapolated from 42,300 words, is to orient economies and technologies to the common good and to “safeguard the human person in the era of AI.” He seeks not to directly assault or dismantle AI, but to shape its rapid development into an instrument of doctrinal morality. Pope Leo asks everyone to slow down and think through this phenomenon of the digital age before it swamps the most fundamental principles of humankind. In the encyclical, he speaks out prominently early in his papacy through this official teaching of the Holy See, explicitly addressing Christians (not only Catholics) and pointedly recognizing the value of all human beings. 

An updated mandate for corporate social responsibility

The entire document could be viewed as a bold updated articulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a blueprint for principled business practices that has influenced corporate operations and shaped how CEOs speak publicly about societal issues. CSR has its origins in the philanthropic efforts of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its modern origins arose during the last quarter century with the UN Global Compact, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and most prominently, the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights [PDF], which was endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 under the guiding hand of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative John Ruggie. Also, corporations continue to strive to meet long-standing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards reviewed by investors, government agencies, and organizations. CSR has survived in corporate culture to the present day, although CEOs have essentially gone mute on societal issues. 

Pope Leo’s encyclical presents a welcome opportunity to revisit what it means for corporations—as well as AI entrepreneurs and developers—to consider moral guardrails for these remarkable new tools of both promise and risk. AI introduces a whole new playing field for the principles undergirding CSR.

Upholding social justice

Social justice has long been part of the Roman Catholic tradition to call out injustices that affect the most vulnerable in society, including, as the encyclical describes, victims of “war, colonialism, racial or gender discrimination, or violence against entire peoples and exploitation,” and then to act to remedy them. With AI and the digital age in mind, Pope Leo writes, “The idea of ‘social justice’ helps us recognize that injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms, and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically.”

The encyclical warns that the digital technologies increasingly guided by AI should not be designed with new ways to exclude people and deprive them of their freedom by hindering or denying them access to basic technologies or exposing them to invasive surveillance. Rather, the digital age must reflect a “just social order” guaranteeing equal access to opportunities and subjecting “the use of data and technology to public oversight, so that the guiding principle is not solely profit but the dignity of every person and the common good of all people.”

Fighting new forms of slavery

Pope Leo even invoked the Church’s own role in the slave trade by first seeking pardon on behalf of the Church and then making the broader point about the potential exploitive role of AI that would result in a new culture of slavery “fueled by economic chains and digital infrastructures.” He calls for three actions—transparent supply chains, due diligence on ethics, and cooperation among digital platforms—to transform exploitation in the digital space into “protection, prevention and promotion of human dignity.”

International law and war

The pope’s views about constraints on waging war in the digital era are solidly grounded in the principles of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the laws of war, and international humanitarian and human rights law—which since World War II have formed a rapidly evolving body of modern law emphasizing human dignity and civilian rights. He muses about the force of international law being “replaced by the claim that ‘might makes right.’” He correctly refutes reliance by some leaders on “just war” theory of centuries ago and which “is now outdated.”

The encyclical acknowledges that “self-defense in the strictest sense” is legitimate, but that “the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms.” Ukraine, for example, has made enormous strides in using AI with autonomous weapons to legitimately defend against a war of aggression waged by Russia and has spawned a massive manufacturing industry of high-tech drones that few would deny a nation fighting for its survival. 

Nonetheless, the pope expresses distrust about the use of AI in warfare, arguing that the mere existence of autonomous weapons systems accelerates armed conflicts because such modern weapons lower the threshold for resorting to violence and reduce victims to mere data points. “No algorithm,” he writes, “can make a war morally acceptable.” He challenges the AI and autonomous weapons industry to set appropriate boundaries of use so that they “contribute to a moral ecosystem in which humans are better able to listen to their own consciences.”

Pope Leo is essentially cautioning that AI-guided autonomous weapons and the humans who deploy them do not escape with technological wizardry the moral dilemma of the “inhumanity of conflict.” For example, the ease of using AI to rapidly identify hundreds of targets and then rush to deploy conventional or autonomous weapons to destroy them can risk serious miscalculations of civilian casualties and property damage. However, in the future AI may spare civilian lives with technology that in the final seconds prior to an autonomous weapon’s impact could distinguish between civilians and military personnel and course correct to strike only the military target.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.