Pope Leo XIV encyclical calls on EU to regulate lethal autonomous weapons (euobserver.com)

• Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas condemns lethal autonomous weapons as 'not permissible' and demands AI be disarmed.
• EU AI Act excludes military AI; European Defence Fund conditions funding but lacks binding rules on autonomy.
• FCAS and GCAP rely on US cloud infrastructure, creating a gap between EU's normative standards and industrial dependence.
• Author proposes binding meaningful human control for all EU defence procurement, sovereign AI investment, and a legally binding CCW instrument.

"Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, explicitly condemns lethal autonomous weapons as 'not permissible' and urges that irreversible decisions must not be entrusted to machines. The document calls for AI to be 'disarmed'. The Vatican's moral framework intersects with EU policy gaps: the EU AI Act excludes military AI, and major defence programmes like FCAS and GCAP rely on US cloud infrastructure. The author argues for binding meaningful human control standards across all joint procurement and exports, and for sovereign European AI capabilities to close the gap between normative ambitions and industrial dependencies."