Sometimes history has a way of placing two very different people in the same moment without giving them the same script. In the last week of September 2026, President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV were both speaking about artificial intelligence, a technology that is already reshaping the way Americans work, learn, pray, and vote. Trump, sitting in the White House with some of the most powerful technology executives in the world, was eager to keep the pedal down. After the meeting, he announced that the executives had agreed to create voluntary safety standards for AI, including allowing independent auditors to assess how the technology is developed and used. He called the agreement a kind of constitution. “It’s almost like a constitution, in a way,” Trump said. “And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president. And it really is a form of protection.” On the same day, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to adopt a new official vocabulary: instead of just saying artificial intelligence, government workers would be expected to speak about “superintelligence.” It was a rebrand as much as a policy shift, a way of insisting that America should not be timid when it comes to the next great leap forward. A few thousand miles away, Pope Leo XIV, speaking with journalists aboard the papal plane as he returned from a four-day visit to France, was also thinking about the future of AI. But his emphasis was different. The pope wanted Americans to remember that safety concerns about the technology are legitimate, not rhetorical noise. The juxtaposition was almost too perfect: one leader celebrating American creativity, the other urging moral humility. Both understood that something massive is happening, but they described it in very different spiritual and political languages. For one, AI is the future to be seized. For the other, it is a future to be faced with open eyes and a careful conscience.
The president’s confidence, however, is not shared by most of the country. Polls taken in early October show that the American public is far more worried than the White House seems to realize. According to an Oct. 1 poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 31% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of AI. At the same time, 65% of adults say that higher-than-usual prices are the result of Trump’s policies. Those numbers are a reminder that many Americans are not thinking about AI as a thrilling opportunity; they are thinking about it as one more source of instability in a world that already feels unstable. People look at their grocery bills, their rent, their medical costs, and they wonder whether new technology will make their lives better or only make their bosses richer and their jobs less secure. They hear the word “superintelligence” and they worry about surveillance, deepfakes, lost jobs, and the strange feeling that algorithms know more about them than they know about themselves. Even some Republican candidates have broken with Trump’s call for a rapid expansion of data centers, recognizing that their voters are not uniformly on board. Local communities have begun to fight back against the construction of massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water while promising uncertain benefits. But Trump has shown no sign of changing course. He told Time in an interview published Oct. 1, “I’m not going to kill a thing based on phony threats.” For him, fears about AI are obstacles to progress, not warnings to be heeded. Yet the polls suggest that the public has not fully bought the promise of a new golden age. They are holding their breath, waiting to see who will actually be protected by these new rules and who will be left behind.
Pope Leo XIV’s voice stood in sharp contrast to the president’s. In May, he had published his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document was an extraordinary moment in the life of the young papacy, because it placed AI at the center of the Church’s moral teaching. The encyclical did not pretend that AI is inherently evil. It acknowledged that the technology could do enormous good, from medical research to climate modeling to education. But it insisted that all of this progress must be measured by a deeper standard: whether it respects the dignity of the human person. The pope called for AI to be “regulated in such a way” as to protect human dignity, a phrase that landed with unusual force in Washington, where the conversation is more often about speed, scale, and economic competitiveness. Toward the end of September, as he flew home from France, a journalist asked the pope whether he was worried that AI could pose a catastrophic risk to humanity. His answer was honest and human. “If someone were to ask me, am I in panic mode? No, I’m not. I sleep at night,” he said. But then he went further. Without naming Trump directly, the pope said that the concerns raised by experts and specialists in AI should be taken seriously. “I don’t think that is fake news,” he said, “as some have said, to try and cause … financial or some other kind of benefit.” That line was a quiet and forceful rebuke to those who dismiss the dangers of AI as a hoax. The pope was not trying to scare anyone. He simply refused to make peaceful sleep an excuse for willful blindness.
At the heart of the pope’s encyclical is a question that no executive order can answer: what does it mean to be human in a world where machines can think, decide, and create? Catholic social teaching has long insisted that the economy, technology, and politics must serve the human person, not the other way around. In the age of artificial intelligence, that principle is being tested as never before. Algorithms now decide who gets a loan, who gets a job interview, what news people see, and sometimes even what messages people receive from their own government. They can spread lies faster than humans can correct them. They can be used to make weapons more deadly, to manipulate elections, to erode privacy, and to deepen the divide between the powerful and the powerless. In the encyclical, Pope Leo does not offer a simple list of bans. Instead, he asks society to slow down long enough to ask what pressures are pushing us forward and who benefits from that speed. He reminds Catholics that every human being is more than a profile, more than a consumer, more than a data point. A worker is not a function. A child is not a user. A patient is not a number. To safeguard the human person means creating rules that protect people from being crushed by the very tools they invented. It means insisting that when an algorithm makes a mistake, someone can be held responsible. It means remembering that technology is made by people and can be shaped by people. The pope is not a Luddite and he is not afraid of progress. But he represents a tradition that has always believed in the priority of the weak, the vulnerable, and the overlooked. That tradition has something essential to contribute to the debate over artificial intelligence, especially in a country where the loudest voices are often the biggest investors and the most ambitious entrepreneurs.
In an attempt to bring those concerns into the halls of American power, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has recently announced a new task force to engage with technology leaders and lawmakers. This is not just a symbolic gesture. More than a dozen U.S. bishops met with members of Congress on Sept. 16 to urge lawmakers to enact safety guardrails, including support for the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill with the unglamorous designation S. 1748. The House passed its own version of the legislation earlier in the year, but the Senate’s version includes a “duty of care” provision that would have significant consequences for tech companies. Under that provision, platforms could be held legally responsible for protecting minors from harmful design choices, addictive features, and algorithms that push dangerous content. It is a small clause with enormous implications. The White House has negotiated with senators on their version of the bill, but the Senate has since adjourned until after the November elections, leaving the path forward unclear. That uncertainty is itself a sign of how difficult it has become to regulate some of the most powerful companies in human history. The bishops are not trying to hinder innovation. They are trying to make sure that innovation does not come at the cost of children’s mental health, family life, and basic human well-being. They are saying what many parents have been saying for years: that these tools are being unleashed on kids faster than parents can understand them, let alone protect their children from them. The bishops’ involvement is a reminder that the debate over AI is not just a debate about technology or economics. It is a debate about morality, about what kind of society we want, and about whether we will have the courage to protect the most vulnerable before the damage is done.
In the end, the same week in 2026 gave the world two competing scripts for the age of artificial intelligence. In one script, the future belongs to the bold, the powerful, and the fastest. In the other, the future must belong to everyone, and especially to the voiceless, because human dignity cannot be outsourced to machines. The president sees AI as a race to be won. The pope sees it as a responsibility to be carried. But perhaps the two visions are not as completely opposed as they first appear. Even the voluntary safety standards that Trump signed with technology executives include a role for independent auditors, which is a step toward transparency. And the pope, despite all of his concerns, says he sleeps at night, which shows that he is not paralyzed by fear. The real challenge for the coming years is to hold both of those truths together: the wonder and possibility of new discovery, and the solemn duty to protect every person who might be hurt by it. Technology is not a destiny. It is a choice. We can embrace innovation without abandoning ethics. We can support scientific progress without ignoring the warnings of experts. We can build a world where machines are powerful and human beings are still sacred. The question is whether we will have the wisdom to do it. History will judge us not only by what we created, but by whom we protected, and by whether we remembered, in all our busyness and brilliance, that every human life is a gift, not a gadget. That is the deeper message of the pope’s encyclical, and it is a message that belongs not just in the Vatican, but in every home, every classroom, every boardroom, and every vote.