Leo XIV: conscience cannot be delegated to algorithms

At the general audience of Wednesday 16 September 2026, in St Peter's Square, Leo XIV warned against the habit of "delegating to algorithms decisions that belong to human conscience alone." He observed that relations are becoming "less and less personal, more and more virtual," under the effect of social networks and the growing recourse to artificial intelligence.

Conscience is the proximate judgment by which reason applies the law of God to the particular act. It is proper to man, alone among visible creatures made to the image of God, endowed with intelligence and free will, and therefore alone accountable for his acts. No mechanism bears this judgment in his place, for no instrument will answer for man: "we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ" (Rom. XIV, 10), and each one for himself. To unburden the machine of moral discernment does not set man free; it lulls him asleep in his responsibility.

To this extent, the warning rejoins the perennial doctrine. The Pope repeated, taking up the conciliar text, that everything opposed to life — homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia — as well as slavery, prostitution, the trafficking of persons and degrading conditions of labour, is "infamous"; the fifth commandment already held it as such. He presented the diversity of peoples not as "a danger or a threat," but as a call to "the logic of reciprocity, of sharing and of mutual care," recalling the respect due to the person, "love even towards adversaries," and the fundamental equality of all men.

That "confrontation, which sometimes degenerates into violence," is "the fruit of the power of sin" is likewise the constant teaching: it is concupiscence, the sequel of original sin, that arms the hand of man against his brother, since Cain. The algorithm changes nothing of this law; it dispenses no one from answering for it.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment and the examination of human acts; Genesis I, 26-27; Epistle to the Romans XIV, 10 (Vulgate).