Pope Leo: AI doom fears not "fake news"

Pope Leo has warned about the dangers of AI throughout his 16-month papacy, and his remarks came at the end of a four-day trip to France. Trump had told the U.N. General Assembly the previous week that fears about AI's dangers to humanity were a "hoax." Into that gap stepped the pope, who said he had read on Monday that Nvidia's Jensen Huang had announced a way to insert guardrails into certain AI models — while noting with skepticism that Huang also says there should be no limits and no government regulation.

The backdrop is a Washington meeting the following day: Trump is to meet tech CEOs on AI at the White House, with Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Greg Brockman among the attendees, alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson said the talks would focus on balancing innovation and oversight and warned the U.S. risks losing the AI race to China if it "hyper-regulates." Leo's intervention, framed as concern about expert warnings, sets a moral counterpoint to that deregulatory argument.

How much weight the pope's words carry in that room is likely to hinge on whether the Washington meeting treats safety concerns as a matter for regulation or as an obstacle to competitiveness. For the executives attending, the test is whether the pope's framing — that the concerns are real and not "fake news" — changes the political cost of arguing against limits.