Can We Disarm AI?

Why Pope Leo’s “Magnifica Humanitas” made me think of my work with nuclear disarmament.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega

WHEN POPE LEO XIV published “Magnifica Humanitas” in May, what struck me most was a verb. The Pope reaches twice for the same words—“to disarm”—as he reflects on artificial intelligence and the civilization we are building. As someone who spent more than a decade working on nuclear disarmament, including helping to build the campaign that produced the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that verb landed differently for me than it might for most readers.

This spring, I signed the “Pro-Human AI Declaration,” a document that calls for centering human dignity and equity at the heart of AI governance. Having worked inside the nuclear disarmament framework, I want to offer an honest accounting: what it can teach us, where the analogy breaks down, and why people of faith may be essential to making any of this operational.

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