Report from the Vatican

Gary Marcus recounts meeting Pope Leo XIV on 30 October 2026 and endorses the Pope's five points on AI from the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: AI's future is not predetermined, machines are tools not persons, certain decisions must never be delegated, intelligent technologies must serve the common good, and institutions are needed to put ethical principles into practice. He also includes a transcription of his own improvised remarks at a private meeting, arguing that current AI systems are prediction machines that reason poorly and follow instructions unreliably, and calling for open-ended internet-connected agents to be taken off the market until fixed.