Pope Leo XIV has chosen “Disarming Technology, Serving Peace: Politics as Preventive Responsibility” to be the theme of the next World Day of Peace, on New Year’s Day – the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and the Octave of Christmas – January 1, 2027.

The 2027 iteration will be the 60th World Day of Peace, an annual occurrence begun by Pope St. Paul VI.

A press release from the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development explains that the pontiff chose the theme in order to set the “moral responsibility of those called to act in the political sphere” in relief.

In his recent encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas, the pontiff wrote of “disarming” artificial intelligence, calling the task “not only ethical or technical,” but “ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.”

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” Leo wrote, “which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.”

“AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage,” he wrote in the encyclical, the first-ever treatment of the subject in so significant a papal teaching document.

The pope said the race to develop new and more powerful AI “entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”

“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he also wrote, noting as well that disarming AI “does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

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