Pope Warns AI is Fuelling a “Spiral of Annihilation”

 During a visit to Rome’s Sapienza University last week, Pope Leo XIV issued a stark warning against artificial intelligence. He linked Europe’s accelerating military build-up, the spread of AI-directed warfare, and the hollowing out of diplomacy in a damning moral indictment. European military spending rose 14% in 2025 to $864 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and Leo told students not to call that “defence” when it drains money from education and healthcare, increases insecurity, and enriches elites who “care nothing for the common good”. He also said that the use of AI and high-tech weaponry in conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza, Lebanon and Iran is driving an “inhuman evolution” of war in a “spiral of annihilation”.

Pope Leo’s intervention was aimed directly at the political vocabulary now used to justify Europe’s military turn. In Reuters’ account, he said Europeans should not call rearmament “defence spending” when it increases tensions, weakens trust in diplomacy, and shifts resources away from social needs. These comments go to the centre of a debate running across the continent, where governments increasingly present higher military budgets as unavoidable realism rather than as a political choice with social costs.

European military spending just climbed by the largest amount since the end of the Cold War, following pressure from the war in Ukraine and US President Donald Trump’s demands that NATO allies contribute more. Leo said that this is not a simple budgetary adjustment to address new threats, but a reordering of priorities that is being sold to the public as prudence, despite redirecting money and political resources away from civilian life and towards permanent preparation for conflict...<<<Read More>>>...