Pope Leo XIV said warnings that artificial intelligence could slip beyond human control are not “fake news” and deserve to be taken seriously, speaking to reporters aboard the papal plane on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026.
The pope made the remarks during an in-flight news conference in the final hours of his trip to France, on the flight from Metz, France, to Rome. One reporter put the question of steps that the United States and China in particular ought to take so that AI never becomes a catastrophic risk to humanity.
The answer was a rebuke to President Donald Trump, although Leo did not use the president’s name. Trump has called concerns about AI going rogue a “hoax” and has said efforts to limit the technology amount to a “conspiracy” by his political opponents. He has been one of the industry’s loudest champions and argues repeatedly that the United States must stay ahead of China in the technological arms race.
“We can’t just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen,” Leo told reporters on the flight.
“I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI should be taken seriously,” he said in the news conference. “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.”
A Vatican Commission on Risks
Leo said the Vatican has heard from people eager to join a wider conversation about AI since the encyclical appeared in May. A Vatican commission is now promoting dialogue, study and investigation into the risks. The goal, Leo said, is that the technology never arrive at a stage where it wipes out human beings or shuts them out of choices about their own future.
The pope also raised AI during remarks at the Élysée Palace earlier in the four-day visit.
As the trip closed, Leo cited a news report that had appeared on the afternoon of Sept. 28 saying Nvidia was building guardrails into AI. The company, he noted, had previously resisted outside regulation of AI development.
Industry Calls for a Slowdown
Anthropic is one of several AI giants that have urged a slowdown in development so that safety measures can catch up. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that within six to 12 months AI could be capable of directing a swarm of agents able to take over the entire internet.
Amodei joined Trump for a late-night dinner on Sunday, Sept. 27. According to the White House, the two discussed Americans’ concerns about the technology and how to keep the country dominant.
Unease has been growing both inside and outside the industry, with report after report describing systems that can crack problems beyond human capacity yet might also go rogue and perform far more damaging tasks. In an interview with Fortune, OpenAI’s chief executive said the company behind ChatGPT would wait until next year before selling its stock to investors on Wall Street while it focuses on safety.
Leo said he is not panicking and that he sleeps at night. He said he is “relatively optimistic” that solutions can be found because enough serious people are willing to look past the question of who gets there first.
Trump, Xi and the White House
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met Trump in Washington during the week of Sept. 21, said it was important to ensure AI remains subject to human control. Trump pressed to rebrand the technology as “superintelligence” and dismissed calls for regulation.
The two leaders did agree to explore a new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents affecting national security. Afterward, Trump declared that the United States would not slow AI down, calls for international safeguards notwithstanding.
AI leaders, Amodei among them, came to the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 29, a day after the pope spoke, where Trump hosted them and they signed an industry accord on what the administration now calls “super intelligence.”
The First American Pope
Within days of his election, Leo, the first American pope, named artificial intelligence as one of the great challenges facing humanity. His first encyclical, “Magnificent Humanity,” published in May, was devoted to AI and the protection of human beings in its wake, and demanded robust regulation and a slowdown of the technology.
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah stood beside Leo at a Vatican event where, unusually, the pope launched the document himself — one piece of a broader Vatican effort to engage Silicon Valley on the human costs of the technology.
Monday’s comments confirmed yet another point of friction between the pope and the president. Leo and Trump traded public criticism in April over Leo’s opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. The pope has also condemned the Trump administration’s migration crackdown.
Americans in both parties are raising alarms about farmland, water supplies and electricity bills as large companies race to build a national network of data centers, turning the technology into an election-year flashpoint at home.
