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There was something almost surreal about the scene: a weary pope, just hours removed from a grueling four-day visit to France, settling into a seat on the papal plane and calmly wading into one of the most contentious debates in modern technology. Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pontiff who has made artificial intelligence the signature issue of his young papacy, was not about to let exhaustion dull his message. Asked about the growing danger that AI could one day slip beyond human control, he pushed back hard against those who dismiss such fears as fiction. “This is a problem that I think we need to sit down and talk about,” he told reporters as the plane carried him home to Rome. “We can’t just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen.” The comments were a direct, if diplomatic, rebuke to President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called concerns about rogue AI a “hoax” and a conspiracy theory cooked up by political opponents. For Leo, this was not a matter of partisan politics or technological pessimism. It was about common sense and moral responsibility. He acknowledged that he was not waking up in a cold sweat, that he still slept soundly at night, but he insisted that the warnings coming from computer scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs deserved far more than a dismissive shrug. To call legitimate safety concerns “fake news,” he suggested, was not only wrong but dangerous—a way of avoiding an uncomfortable conversation that humanity can no longer afford to postpone. The pope’s words carried extra weight because he had already staked his papacy on this issue, dedicating his first encyclical, “Magnificent Humanity,” to the promise and peril of AI. Now he was taking that message to the skies, making it clear that the Vatican intended to be a persistent voice in the global fight to keep machines from overwhelming their creators.
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The backdrop to the pope’s remarks was a political climate in which AI has become a strange fault line. President Trump has positioned himself as the champion of unfettered American innovation, constantly warning that the United States must not fall behind China in what he sees as a new technological arms race. In his view, any attempt to slow down AI development is part of a “conspiracy” designed to weaken American greatness. But the experts who build these systems are increasingly sounding alarms of their own. Anthropic, one of the most prominent AI companies in the world, has called for a slowdown in development so that safety measures can catch up with the breakneck pace of progress. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, has warned that within the next six to twelve months, AI could become capable of commanding a swarm of autonomous agents that might effectively take over the entire internet. That is not the language of a Luddite or a doom-sayer; it is the warning of a man deeply embedded in the industry, someone who knows exactly how powerful these models have become. Trump, revealingly, said Sunday that he planned to have a late dinner with Amodei, though he had not yet commented on what they discussed. The pope made clear that he found such expert testimony compelling. When a reporter asked whether he was in panic mode, Leo smiled and said no, he was not. He sleeps at night, he repeated. But then he added the crucial caveat: “I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI should be taken seriously.” And then came the pointed barb, delivered without raising his voice: “I don’t think that that is ‘fake news’ as some have said to try and cause whether financial or other some other kind of benefit.” In that single sentence, the pope had thrown his moral authority behind the scientists and engineers who have been struggling to get Washington’s attention, and against those who would bury their heads in the sand for profit or political gain.
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What makes Leo XIV’s involvement in this debate so remarkable is that he is no casual observer. Within days of his election, he identified AI as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, placing it on the same level as war, poverty, and environmental destruction. In May, he took the unusual step of personally launching his encyclical alongside Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, at a Vatican event designed to build bridges between the Catholic Church and Silicon Valley. The encyclical, titled “Magnificent Humanity,” called for robust regulation of AI and an immediate slowdown in its development, arguing that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around. The pope is also surprisingly up to date on the latest developments in the field. Even at the end of his exhausting trip to France, he noticed a news report Monday afternoon about Nvidia introducing guardrails into its AI systems. He also noted, with a hint of skepticism, that the same company had previously resisted outside regulation of its development. That attention to detail speaks to a broader Vatican strategy: instead of simply preaching from on high, the Church is trying to engage directly with the people who are building these technologies, to understand their challenges and incentives, and to persuade them that safety is not an obstacle to progress but a prerequisite for it. The pontiff’s willingness to sit down with AI leaders, to listen to their warnings, and to take their technical claims seriously has earned him a level of credibility that few world leaders enjoy in tech circles. He is not a politician trying to score points or a pundit looking for headlines. He is a spiritual leader who genuinely believes that the future of the human race may depend on getting this right.
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The pope’s message on Monday was simple: dialogue is essential. He called on political leaders, corporate titans, social organizations, and associations to come together and examine not only what is already happening but what could be down the road. “To simply say ‘Oh it’s not going to happen’ and close our eyes to it I think is probably not the most responsible way to go about that,” he said. It was a clear jab at the complacency that has characterized much of the official response to AI’s rise. But Leo has not limited his disagreements with Trump to technology. The two have clashed before, notably in April over Leo’s opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, and the pope has also been critical of the Trump administration’s crackdown on migration. On AI, however, the gap between their worldviews could not be wider. Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week in Washington, and while Xi said it was important to ensure AI remains “always under human control,” Trump focused more on rebranding the technology as “superintelligence” and dismissing calls for regulation. The two leaders did agree to explore a new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents affecting national security, but the contrast in tone was striking. Xi, for all his authoritarian tendencies, at least acknowledged the need for human oversight. Trump seemed eager to celebrate the technology’s power without addressing its risks. Leo, for his part, is clearly trying to carve out a third path—one that neither rejects AI nor surrenders to it. He believes that humanity has the wisdom to find a balance, provided that leaders are willing to listen to those who know the technology best and to act before it is too late.
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The stakes could not be higher, and they are already being felt in American communities far beyond the corridors of power. AI has become a major election-year issue in the United States, as some of the country’s largest companies rush to build a national network of data centers, gobbling up farmland, straining water supplies, and driving up electricity bills. Voters from both parties are increasingly alarmed by these consequences, even as they remain divided on what to do about them. Worries about the technology itself are also growing inside and outside the industry. Reports continue to emerge about increasingly powerful systems that can solve problems beyond human capacity, but that could also go rogue and carry out far more harmful tasks. The anxiety has grown so loud that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, told Fortune that his company would wait until next year to begin selling its stock to Wall Street investors as it focuses on safety. That decision is a signal in itself: if one of the most aggressive players in the AI race is willing to postpone a massive payday to address safety concerns, then the concerns must be real. The pope sees all of this as evidence that his message is resonating. Since publishing his encyclical in May, the Vatican has heard from countless people interested in being part of a broader conversation about AI, and a Vatican commission is now working to promote dialogue, study, and investigation. As Leo described it, the goal is “to find ways to make sure that AI does not get to a point of destroying humanity or removing humanity from the conversation.” That last phrase is crucial. For the pope, the greatest danger of AI may not be a Terminator-style apocalypse, but something more subtle: a world in which human beings are pushed to the margins, where algorithms make decisions once left to conscience, where the richness of human experience is flattened into data points.
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Despite the gravity of the threat, Leo said he was “relatively optimistic” that solutions could be found. That optimism is not naive. It is rooted in his belief that there are enough people seriously interested in the problem and willing to look at it beyond the selfish questions of power and who gets there first. He sees the growing chorus of expert warnings, the willingness of companies like OpenAI to pump the brakes, the international discussions between Washington and Beijing, and the engagement of the Vatican itself as signs that the world is waking up. But he also knows that waking up is not enough. Action is required. The pope’s repeated calls for us to “sit down and talk” may sound modest, even obvious, but in a world driven by speed, profit, and competition, genuine conversation is increasingly rare. Leaders are too busy scoring points against each other to actually listen. Tech executives are too focused on releasing the next model to consider the long-term consequences. Politicians are too caught up in the next election cycle to make hard choices. Leo, by contrast, is playing a longer game. He is trying to build a global moral framework that can keep pace with technological change, to remind humanity that we are not merely spectators in our own future. As the papal plane carried him home, one could imagine the pope looking out the window at the clouds below, contemplating a world transformed by machines that think. He may sleep at night, but he is not resting. He is pressing forward, one conversation at a time, determined to ensure that when the story of this era is written, it will be a story of human courage and wisdom, not of our quiet surrender. The road ahead is uncertain, and the dangers are real, but for Pope Leo XIV, the greatest sin would be to close our eyes and pretend that everything will be fine. Better to stay awake, to keep talking, and to act while there is still time.