Pope Leo XIV warns generative AI risks eroding human identity

The Pope’s intervention on AI is less about technical detail and more about who gets to define the moral frame around increasingly agentic systems. By explicitly warning that generative AI can erode our cognitive, emotional and communicative capacities, and by calling out the small number of firms steering its trajectory, Leo XIV is aligning the Vatican with broader concerns about concentration and manipulation in digital platforms.([philstar.com](https://www.philstar.com/world/2026/01/25/2503386/pope-leo-xiv-warns-against-risks-ai-algorithms))

For the race to AGI, messages like this matter because they shape the social license under which labs and governments operate. If religious and moral authorities frame AGI primarily as a threat to authentic relationships and human dignity, public pressure for strict controls, watermarks and usage bans in sensitive domains will grow. That doesn’t necessarily slow research, but it can strongly influence deployment patterns—pushing more capabilities behind corporate or state firewalls and widening the gap between what’s technically possible and what’s publicly visible.