Pope Leo XIV Warns AI Risks a 'Paradise of Machines' as France Visit Opens

Pope Leo XIV opened a three-day visit to France on Friday with a pointed warning that artificial intelligence and other fast-moving technologies could quietly strip humanity of its dignity, telling officials at the Elysee Palace that modern life risks being swallowed inside a "paradise of machines."

The 71-year-old pontiff is making the first full papal state visit to France in 18 years. He used back-to-back addresses in Paris to argue that scientific progress without moral grounding ends up serving power instead of people, a message aimed well beyond the Catholic faithful.

His timing put the church at the center of a debate over how quickly new systems should be allowed to reshape work, medicine and public life, the same question now driving lawmaking in Washington.

A Warning Delivered at the Elysee

Standing beside President Emmanuel Macron, the pope said the advance of automation has created an urgent need for moral formation. He called for people to be educated in "ethical discernment, capable of seeing what is morally right."

Without that grounding, he warned, societies will not notice what they are surrendering. "If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need," he said.

Macron welcomed the visit as a rare moment when moral argument, not polling, sets the tone in a capital already looking past his decade in office toward next spring's presidential election.

Every Science Needs Ethics, Pope Tells UNESCO

The pope's second address of the day came at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations culture and education body, where he pressed the same theme in sharper terms. New technologies, he said, must "remain at the service of the human person rather than becoming yet another instrument of domination and injustice."

"Every science risks losing its proper meaning when pursued without ethics," he said. He noted the oddity of naming machines after human thought itself, saying intelligence has been attributed to computer systems while the worth of ordinary people is measured by their output.

The warning tracked a growing argument in Washington, where lawmakers have spent months fighting over a bipartisan push for AI guardrails after a departing researcher's grim forecast put the issue back on the national agenda.

The pope also aimed an indirect rebuke at leaders who treat law as a tool. "Instead of respecting the law, those in power invoke it when it serves their interests and disregard it when it restrains them," he said, naming no one.

Assisted Dying and the Cost of Efficiency

The visit lands months after France enacted a measure granting some adult patients the right to assisted dying. The pope said he is troubled by trends that turn science and technology into "profit-driven ventures," pointing to genetic manipulation, surrogacy, the trade in human organs, and the option of arranging one's own death.

He returned repeatedly to the same fear: a society that ranks people by usefulness. Those judged no longer productive, he said, are "rejected and discarded."

Pressed against that theme is the church's own reckoning in France over clerical abuse, an issue that has shadowed planning for the trip. France's bishops agreed to compensate victims after a 2021 report estimated that 330,000 children were abused over 70 years by priests and other church figures, describing what it called a systemic cover-up.

Lourdes, Abuse Survivors and a Plea for Peace

The visit's largest public moment comes Saturday, when the pope leads an outdoor mass at the Place de la Concorde. On Monday he travels to the eastern city of Metz to deliver a speech on European peace, and he will stop at Lourdes, the pilgrimage site, to meet privately with seven survivors of clerical abuse.

Some survivors' groups had argued that more people should have been included in that meeting. The church said the pope wanted in-depth conversation with individuals rather than a large ceremony.

Throughout, the pope has pressed governments not to accept conflict as permanent. "I urge you never to grow resigned to the prospect of war or to consider it inevitable," he told French leaders.

For observers in both Paris and Washington, the visit previews an argument likely to sharpen: who decides the limits of machine intelligence, and on what moral basis. The pope has now staked out his answer. Whether governments and technology companies adopt any part of it will be settled in the months ahead, as AI rules work their way through legislatures on both sides of the Atlantic.