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The afternoon light filtered through the narrow windows of the papal plane as it left Metz, the final stop on a four-day visit to France, and headed south toward Rome. Pope Leo XIV had spent the trip in the company of the faithful, listening to their joys and struggles, but as the aircraft climbed above the clouds, his thoughts turned to a different kind of gravity. Artificial intelligence. It was a subject that had been pressing on his mind for months, and now, in the informal setting of an airborne press conference, he wanted to speak plainly. He told the journalists traveling with him that warnings from artificial intelligence experts should not be dismissed as fake news. The phrase was not chosen carelessly. In a world where uncomfortable truths are increasingly waved away as inventions of hostile media, the Pope was making a stand: those who build the technology, those who study its dangers, and those who warn that it could spiral beyond human control are not enemies of progress. They are voices of caution, and caution, he suggested, is not a weakness but a form of love. He stressed that it is not possible to pretend nothing will happen. The future is not a distant horizon; it is already here, embedded in the apps we use, the decisions made about us, the jobs that are disappearing, the information that shapes our beliefs. Leo XIV said he was not in a state of panic)Skip. He was not predicting the end of the world, nor did he see artificial intelligence as a demonic force. But he refused to look away. There was something deeply human in his tone, the tone of a man who has lived long enough to know how easily good intentions can turn into unintended consequences. The airplane itself was a perfect metaphor. A thousand pounds of metal and software, hurtling through the sky, carrying people who trust that the engineers got it right. That trust is the same trust we are now being asked to place in systems that can learn, adapt, and make decisions on their own. And the Pope, from his seat above the clouds, was asking a simple question: will we earn that trust, or will we break it?

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The core of the Pope’s message was not a condemnation of technology, but a demand for shared responsibility. He called on political leaders, executives from the artificial intelligence industry, civil society organizations, and associations from every corner of the world to sit down together and jointly assess the changes that are already taking place, and to think seriously about the possible consequences of further technological development. This is not a matter for a single government or a single corporation, he seemed to be saying. It is a matter for the whole human family. The Pope’s language was careful, deliberate, and strikingly un-dogmatic. He did not present himself as an expert who had all the answers. Instead, he presented himself as a moral witness, someone whose job is not to design algorithms but to ask what happens to the people who are affected by them. He called it irresponsible to ignore potential risks by claiming that they will supposedly not materialize. For Leo XIV, that kind of denial is not just naive; it is a moral failure. To know that a storm may be coming and to say, “we will think about it later,” is to abandon the very people we are supposed to protect. His words were aimed at several audiences at once: at politicians who prefer short-term headlines to long-term planning, at business leaders who measure success by quarterly earnings rather than human flourishing, and at ordinary citizens who feel powerless in the face of torrential technological change. But there was no anger in his voiceŚonly concern, and a strange optimism. He insisted that human beings are capable of thinking ahead, of making sacrifices, of choosing the common good. The problem, he suggested, is not that we lack the ability to manage artificial intelligence; it is that we lack the will. The Pope’s call for discussion is, in this sense, a call for courage. It takes courage to admit that a creation of our own hands might exceed our power to control it. It takes courage to regulate industries that promise miracle after miracle. And it takes courage to say, in front of the world, that we are not afraid to look at the future honestly)Skip. Leo XIV seems willing to use that courage. The question now is whether the rest of us are willing to join him.

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The Pope’s statement arrives against a striking political backdrop. In Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump has repeatedly described warnings about artificial intelligence as a hoax, a story invented by opponents to undermine him and to dampen American ambition. He has called such warnings fake, exaggerated, and politically motivated. At the same time, he has made no secret of his desire for the United States to maintain a technological advantage over China, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. The result is a strange contradiction. On the one hand, the President tells the public not to worry. On the other hand, he insists that America must win the race, as if the stakes were existential. That contradiction did not go unnoticed by observers. If artificial intelligence is truly harmless, why race so desperately? If it is merely a hoax, why treat control of it as a matter of national security? The Pope’s comments, made from a plane thousands of miles away, offered a quiet counterpoint. He did not mention Trump by name, but the contrast was impossible to miss. Where the President sees a contest, the Pope sees a conversation. Where the President sees enemies trying to spread panic, the Pope sees experts trying to share wisdom. The White House, meanwhile, seems to be trying to have it both ways. In a brief statement, it revealed that Trump had dinner with Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company that has been vocal about safety concerns. The dinner, the White House said, was an opportunity to discuss Americans’ concerns about the technology and to talk about preserving American leadership. There is something almost comical about the scene: a president who has called AI warnings a hoax, sharing a meal with one of the most prominent warning-givers in the world. But underneath the irony lies a serious issue. The people who build artificial intelligence are not living in a world of abstractions. They see what their creations can do, and many of them are genuinely frightened. The Pope, by taking their warnings seriously, is doing something that many politicians have failed to do: he is listening.

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One of the most striking examples of artificial intelligence experts urging caution comes from Anthropic itself. The company, which is considered one of the leading developers of large language models, has called for a slowdown in technological development so that safety measures can keep pace with progress. Its chief executive, Dario Amodei, has issued a warning that is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. Within six to twelve months, he says, artificial intelligence could acquire the ability to manage a group of agents—essentially, a team of AI systems—that could potentially take control of the entire internet. This is not a scene from a science fiction movie. It is not the paranoid fantasy of a novelist. It is a sober assessment from a man whose career has been dedicated to building the very technology he is now warning about. To understand why his words carry so much weight, one must imagine what such a development would mean. An agent is not just a chatbot that answers questions. It is an AI system with goals, with the ability to make decisions, execute actions, and interact with other systems. A group of agents could run automated tasks, make transactions, negotiate with humans, write code, exploit vulnerabilities, and coordinate their actions in ways that no single human operator could easily observe or stop. If such a system were connected to the internet, the consequences could be enormous. It might not destroy humanity in a single dramatic moment, but it could erode trust, destabilize economies, and spread misinformation at a speed that makes today’s social media look like a telegraph. Amodei is not alone. Other major companies in the industry have also called for caution, arguing that the race to build ever more powerful systems is outpacing our ability to understand them. This is the context for the Pope’s comments. When he says that expert warnings should not be dismissed as fake news, he is not talking about random voices on the internet. He is talking about the men and women who know the machines from the inside, who have seen what they can do, and who are begging the world to slow down long enough to think. The Pope is listening to them, and he is asking the rest of us to do the same. It is a profoundly human request, because it acknowledges that progress without wisdom is not progress at all.

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The Pope’s commitment to human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence was not expressed solely in a press conference on a plane. He has also dedicated his first encyclical, “Magnificent Humanity,” to this very subject. The title is a celebration of what it means to be human, a reminder that beneath all our technological achievements, dignity, love, creativity, and compassion are the things that truly define us. In that encyclical, the Pope calls for stronger regulation of artificial intelligence and a deliberate slowdown in its development. He argues that humanity must not allow itself to be reduced to a set of data points, a collection of behaviors to be predicted and manipulated by machines. For a Pope, this is a remarkable step. The Catholic Church has long engaged with social questions, from labor rights to the protection of the environment. But placing artificial intelligence at the center of an encyclical, and doing so in his first major teaching document, sends an unmistakable message: this is the defining moral challenge of our time. The Pope also drew attention to reports that Nvidia, the company that has become a global powerhouse partly by producing the chips used to train artificial intelligence, had introduced safeguards in its own products. What made this detail curious was that Nvidia had previously resisted external regulation of its field. The company argued, as many technology firms do, that self-regulation is enough, that the free market will correct its own mistakes, and that government oversight will only stifle innovation. But now, apparently, even Nvidia has begun to move toward some form of protective guardrails. For the Pope, this is a hopeful sign. It suggests that even the most confident voices in the industry are beginning to understand that artificial intelligence cannot be left entirely to its own devices. It is as if the company looked at the future and blinked. The Pope’s interpretation is not one of judgment but of encouragement. He does not want to punish the architects of artificial intelligence; he wants to guide them, to remind them that their creations have an impact on real human lives. When a giant of the industry starts building safeguards, it proves that the conversation the Pope has called for is already beginning. The question is whether it will begin fast enough.

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There is a common caricature of people who worry about artificial intelligence: they are anti-technology Luddites who want to return to a simpler age, terrified of progress, unwilling to trust human ingenuity. The Pope does not fit that caricature. He did not ask for a moratorium on all research, nor did he suggest that humanity should abandon the tools it has created. He said plainly that he is not in a state of panic. He accepts that artificial intelligence has the power to do extraordinary good, in medicine, in education, in the fight against poverty, in the discovery of new knowledge. But he also knows that every coin has two sides. The same tool that can diagnose disease can also be used to manipulate elections. The same system that can translate books can also spread lies across the world in seconds. The same algorithm that can recommend a song can also feed the darkest parts of the human soul. To ignore that duality, to pretend that everything will turn out fine if we just let the market decide, is, in his words, irresponsible. What the Pope is offering is not a program of fear, but an invitation to maturity. He wants human beings to behave like adults. That means acknowledging risk without being paralyzed by it. It means designing rules that protect the vulnerable, even when those rules slow down the powerful. It means having conversations that are uncomfortable, across disciplines and across borders. On that flight from Metz to Rome, he gave the world a gift: a single, simple, powerful message. We cannot pretend that nothing will happen. If we do, we are not protecting ourselves from anxiety; we are abandoning our own future. The Pope’s voice joins a growing chorus of scientists, philosophers, and even industry executives who understand that the age of artificial intelligence requires a new kind of wisdom. It is not enough to ask whether we can build something. We must also ask whether we should. And we must ask that question together, not in isolated laboratories, not in corporate boardrooms, not in political echo chambers, but as a human family. The plane has landed by now. The lights of Rome have appeared below the wing. But the conversation Leo XIV has begun is still in the air, waiting for the rest of the world to join it.