Pope’s artificial intelligence guru admits he doesn’t use AI 

BERLIN — Pope Leo XIV’s cardinal who heads the Vatican’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence has admitted he doesn’t use AI — despite being four months into a job intended to engage the Church with the AI revolution.

Cardinal Michael Czerny was talking to host Anne McElvoy on the Brussels Playbook Week Ender podcast, and when asked whether he uses AI in his work, he replied: “No, not yet. I just haven’t had the time.” 

Pope Leo appointed the Czech-born Canadian cardinal in May to chair the Vatican’s Inter-Dicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, aligning the various administrative offices of the Vatican to study the impact of machine learning on humanity. 

Pressed on whether he had any principled objection to the technology, he declared, “I’m quite willing and happy to learn,” he added. “I feel it’s my moral duty also to use it so that I have personal experience, and I hope it helps me with my work.”  

Speaking on the fringes of Axel Springer’s WELT AI Summit in Berlin, Czerny called on European politicians and bishops to respond more clearly to warnings about the risks of frontier AI models forfeiting human control and oversight.  

“There should be a dialogue between the bishops and the European governments to express the concern of the population to handle this with openness and with creativity … Otherwise, we will say five months or five years from now, ‘Oh, I felt there was a disaster coming, but there was nothing I could do.’”

The Roman Catholic Church is stepping up involvement in recent discussions over the future of AI. Paolo Benanti, the Vatican’s adviser on AI, attended a meeting of tech executives convened by King Charles III in Scotland last week to discuss the opportunities and risks surrounding the technology.

Anne McElvoy is a Global Reporter for the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.