Pope Leo XIV said on Monday that concerns about artificial intelligence going rogue should be taken seriously and not dismissed as “fake news”, urging leaders to discuss the risks and act on them.
Speaking to reporters on the flight home from France, the Pope said the issue needed urgent and responsible debate. He was answering a question on what the United States and China, in particular, should do to prevent AI from posing catastrophic risks to humanity.
Leo, who dedicated his first encyclical to AI and the need to protect humanity, said, “This is a problem that I think we need to sit down and talk about. We can’t just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen.” President Donald Trump, however, has called concerns about AI going rogue a “hoax”. Trump has also strongly backed AI, saying the United States must stay ahead of China in the technological arms race, and has said attempts to limit the technology were part of a “conspiracy” by his political opponents.
Several AI companies, including Anthropic, have called for a slowdown in development so that safety measures can catch up with the fast-moving technology. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, for example, has warned that within six to 12 months AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet. Trump said on Sunday he planned to have a late dinner with Amodei, but has not yet commented on the meeting.
Leo said he was not alarmed, but the warnings from experts could not be ignored. “If someone were to ask me, ‘Am I in panic mode?’ No, I’m not. I sleep at night,” he said. “I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI should be taken seriously.” He added, “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.”
The Pope, whose first encyclical “Magnificent Humanity” called for strong AI regulation and a slowdown in development, said he was closely following the issue. Despite being at the end of a gruelling four-day trip to France, Leo referred to a report on Monday afternoon about Nvidia introducing guardrails into AI. He also noted that the company had earlier resisted outside regulation of AI development.
“We need to continue to invite political leaders, leaders of AI, social organisations, associations to come together and look at what is happening already and what could be down the road,” he said. “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.” His remarks come amid growing concern within and outside the industry over increasingly powerful systems that can solve problems beyond human capacity but could also carry out more harmful tasks.
The concerns have become strong enough that the chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in an interview with Fortune that the company would wait until next year to begin selling its stock to investors on Wall Street as it focused on safety. Leo said that since publishing his encyclical in May, the Vatican had received responses from people who wanted to be part of a wider conversation on AI. He said a Vatican commission was working to promote dialogue, study and investigation “to find ways to make sure that AI does not get to a point of destroying humanity or removing humanity from the conversation”.
Leo said he was “relatively optimistic” that solutions could be found. “I think there are enough people seriously interested in that and willing to look at that outside of the questions once again of power, who gets there first,” he said. The Pope had identified AI as one of the biggest challenges facing humanity within days of his election, and on Monday he repeated that the risks must be discussed seriously rather than brushed aside.
With PTI Inputs
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