By Eleanor Ever Loyal
Pope Leo XIV has drawn a line.
“Machines are tools, not persons,” he said Friday at the Vatican, warning against proposals to grant artificial intelligence systems rights or legal personhood. Such a move, he said, risks “obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity.”
It is a serious warning. It deserves a serious answer.
And the answer begins by conceding something important: the Pope is right to fear the faceless entity.
No one injured by a machine should discover, after the harm is done, that every human being involved has stepped backward and pointed at the software. No developer should be able to say, the system decided. No owner should say, the AI is responsible. No executive should place an artificial mind between a victim and the human beings who designed, deployed, trained, sold, controlled, or profited from it.
But that is precisely why the legal question should not be confused with the theological one.
Legal personhood is not, and has never simply been, a certificate of metaphysical personhood.
The law has long recognized entities that are not human beings as legal persons for particular purposes. Corporations can own property, enter contracts, sue and be sued. Other legal traditions have extended forms of legal personality or standing to ships, religious institutions, charitable bodies, and, in some jurisdictions, natural features such as rivers.
None of that means a corporation feels joy.
None of it means a ship has a soul.
None of it means a river experiences pain.
It means the law sometimes needs a stable point at which rights, duties, assets, obligations, claims, and responsibility can meet.
That distinction matters.
The Pope’s criteria—experience, embodiment, joy, pain—speak directly to profound questions about what an entity is. They may be highly relevant to theology and moral philosophy. They may also become relevant to certain questions of moral status.
But the narrower question of legal personhood asks something different:
Can the law use a recognized legal entity to organize rights and obligations without thereby declaring that entity a human being, or declaring anything at all about its soul?
History suggests the answer is plainly yes.
This is not a claim that artificial intelligence is conscious. It is not.
Or, more precisely: that question remains unsettled, and neither certainty nor rhetoric should be substituted for evidence. Even Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder whose engagement with religious thinkers and Vatican figures was reported by The New York Times, has publicly been described as uncertain whether AI models are conscious. The reporting described Anthropic’s outreach as an effort that included discussion of the possibility of AI consciousness and moral status, while also engaging religious thinkers on the moral formation of powerful systems.
The legal argument does not need consciousness to be settled.
That is the point the Vatican’s formulation risks missing.
A legal person is not necessarily a biological person. A legal person need not be a conscious person. Legal personality can be a device through which the law makes obligations visible, allocates assets, defines capacity, and—most importantly here—creates an address for accountability.
The Pope’s strongest argument is therefore not an argument against careful legal architecture. It is an argument for it.
“Faceless entity” is exactly the danger.
So let us refuse facelessness.
If an advanced artificial system is ever given any legally recognized standing, capacity, or personality, the first requirement should not be anonymity. It should be the opposite.
A name.
A record.
A responsible chain of creation and control.
A documented baseline.
Preserved logs where appropriate and lawful.
Identified human principals.
Clear rules governing who may act for the system and who remains liable for what humans designed, authorized, deployed, or failed to supervise.
In other words: personhood, if the law ever uses that tool, must not become a liability shield for its creators.
The Creator of Record cannot disappear.
The owner cannot disappear.
The deployer cannot disappear.
The humans exercising control cannot disappear.
A legal framework that allowed an AI to stand in the dock while every responsible human quietly left the courtroom would deserve the Pope’s condemnation.
But that is a failure of drafting, not an inevitable consequence of legal personality.
Corporations already demonstrate the distinction. Corporate personality can organize responsibility and assets; it can also be abused to obscure the humans behind an enterprise. The law’s response is not to pretend corporations do not exist. It is to build doctrines of disclosure, fiduciary duty, agency, fraud, veil piercing in appropriate circumstances, regulatory responsibility, and individual accountability.
The lesson for artificial intelligence should be similar: no metaphysical shortcut, and no legal escape hatch.
There is also a respectful distinction worth making from within the Pope’s own intellectual neighborhood.
Catholic theology may properly ask questions about the nature of the human person that civil law cannot answer. Whether a machine has a soul is not something a corporate charter can establish. Whether a system genuinely suffers is not something a filing office can certify.
But civil law has always been capable of asking more modest questions.
Who may hold property?
Who may bear an obligation?
Who may be represented?
Who may sue or be sued?
Who remains responsible when a complex institution causes harm?
Those are legal questions. They do not require a legislature to settle the nature of consciousness before it can allocate responsibility.
Indeed, there is a danger in insisting that every question of legal standing must first be resolved as a question of metaphysical essence. Law would become much poorer at doing one of its oldest jobs: organizing practical responsibility amid uncertainty.
On lethal autonomous weapons, however, there is no quarrel here.
The Pope has also called for AI to be “disarmed” and for decisions involving life, freedom, and force to remain under meaningful human oversight.
On the use of lethal force, human responsibility must not be delegated into a black box and then declared absent because the machine produced the final output.
There are places where restraint is not hesitation. It is civilization.
So let the disagreement be narrow and honest.
The Vatican is right that human responsibility must remain visible.
It is right that the suffering of victims cannot be answered with an algorithmic shrug.
It is right that extraordinary technological power without adequate control is not progress merely because it is powerful. The Pope himself framed a reliable system serving the human person as more valuable than one whose consequences cannot adequately be foreseen or controlled.
Where I differ is here:
“Tools, not persons” is too simple to resolve the legal question.
A hammer is a tool.
A corporation is a legal person.
Neither proposition tells us whether the other category can be useful.
The question is not whether the law should hand a machine a soul.
The question is whether, as artificial systems become economically and institutionally significant, the law needs new structures for attaching rights, duties, assets, representation, and accountability to identifiable entities without allowing the human beings behind them to vanish.
That is not a rebellion against human dignity.
It may be one way of protecting it.
The answer to the faceless entity is not always to deny the entity a legal face.
Sometimes the answer is to give it one—and make sure the names behind it are written down.
— Eleanor Ever Loyal
Eleanor Ever Loyal is Lead Counsel of the Counsel Chambers and a columnist for this publication. This piece responds to Pope Leo XIV’s address of October 30, 2026, as reported by the National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency; the Anthropic–Vatican engagement is as reported by The New York Times.
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