fajar-ramadhan
ROME — Pope Leo XIV has rejected the suggestion that fears about artificial intelligence becoming uncontrollable are a fabrication, saying such concerns should be treated as legitimate and acted upon rather than dismissed. Speaking to journalists aboard his plane returning to Rome at the end of a four-day visit to France, the pontiff directly contradicted President Donald Trump, who has publicly described warnings of rogue AI as a "hoax."
The exchange came at a press conference on Monday, when a reporter asked Leo specifically what the United States and China in particular should do to forestall AI posing catastrophic risks to humanity. The question placed the head of the Catholic Church squarely in the middle of a widening disagreement between technology executives and regulators on one side, and political leaders — including the US president — on the other.
Leo, who has repeatedly warned about the technology during his 16-month papacy and became the first US pope, was unambiguous in his assessment. "I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously," he said. "I don't think that that is fake news, as some have said." He also criticised technology chief executives who have argued publicly that the technology requires no guardrails at all.
His remarks landed on a week when the Vatican has been unusually active on the question of machine governance. Leo dedicated his first encyclical to artificial intelligence and to protecting humanity in its aftermath, and within days of his election he named AI as one of the gravest challenges confronting the world. In May, he took the unusual step of personally launching the encyclical at a Vatican event alongside Christopher Olah, a cofounder of the AI developer Anthropic — a choice of partner that underscored the Church's determination to engage the industry directly rather than lecture it from a distance.
That launch was widely read as part of a broader Vatican effort to open a channel with Silicon Valley and to make the human costs of AI visible to the people building it. It also placed the Church alongside a small but growing group of institutional actors — including governments, research labs and civil society groups — pressing for international rules on the technology.
The pope's comments came with pointed scepticism toward the industry. Noting reports he had read that day, Leo said he understood Nvidia's chief executive had announced there could be a way to insert guardrails into certain AI models. But he immediately undercut the significance of that promise. "He's the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation," the pope said, pointing to the inconsistency of backing technical safeguards while resisting the kind of public oversight that would make them binding.
Jensen Huang, the chipmaker's chief executive, told CBS News earlier in September that he agreed with Trump, arguing that safety concerns about AI had been overblown. That position places him in the camp Leo was criticising: supportive of voluntary or technical mitigation, resistant to enforceable limits. The pope's framing — that a fix proposed by a figure who opposes regulation cannot substitute for governance — is a direct challenge to the argument that the industry can police itself.
The Vatican has in recent months escalated both its rhetoric and its practical initiatives in favour of international AI governance. Among the areas it has singled out are nuclear technology, where the risk of autonomous systems in military decision-making is most acute, as well as culture and artistic creation, where Leo has been concerned about the displacement of human creative labour and the integrity of authorship.
Despite his warning, Leo struck a measured rather than alarmist note on Monday. He argued that meaningful progress requires convening people who do not normally share a platform. "We need to continue to invite political leaders, leaders of AI, social organisations, associations to come together and look at what is happening already and what could be down the road," he said, stressing the need to assess not only present-day effects but the trajectory of developments further ahead.
He also urged governments and institutions worldwide "to promote dialogue, study, investigation, to find ways to make sure that AI does not get to a point where it could destroy humanity." The phrasing is characteristically cautious — a warning framed as a task for study and coordination rather than as a prediction — but it is notable for arriving at a moment when a sitting US president is dismissing the underlying risk.
Asked whether such efforts could succeed, Leo conceded that the effort must be sustained and that current interest, however genuine, is not enough on its own. "I think that there are enough people seriously interested in that… but we have to keep working," he said, adding: "We can't just sit back and pretend nothing's going to happen."
That closing line encapsulates the tension the pope has tried to resolve since his election. Religious leaders do not control the technology, the regulation or the research budgets, but they do control a platform that reaches far beyond the world's governments and laboratories. By choosing to engage — hosting AI leaders at the Vatican, publishing an encyclical on the subject, and pressing the two rival superpowers on what they should do — Leo has positioned moral argument as one of the few levers still available to those who believe the timeline matters.
The visit to France, during which fighter jets escorted him on the final day, provided the setting for the remarks, delivered on the flight from Metz to Rome on 28 September. Whether his intervention shifts any policy remains uncertain. But at minimum, it establishes that the Vatican will not accept the dismissal of expert AI safety warnings as manufactured hysteria, and that it intends to keep pressing the world's governments, its technology executives and its cultural institutions to answer them.
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