Pope Leo XIV has stepped more forcefully into the fight over artificial intelligence, rejecting the suggestion that warnings from researchers are little more than a manufactured scare.

Closing a trip to France, Leo said he was not in “panic mode” over AI. But he drew a line against those who dismiss expert concerns: “the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously.” He added that such warnings were not “fake news” designed to generate financial or other benefits.¹

The intervention puts the first American pope at odds with President Donald Trump, who had described AI-safety concerns as a “HOAX” and a “SICK conspiracy.” A White House official told Axios that Trump was targeting what it called Democrats’ use of the issue for political advantage ahead of the midterms.¹

Leo’s position is not a call for paralysis or a rejection of the technology. He pointed to Nvidia’s new software aimed at securing AI agents, amid growing concern over agentic systems behaving unpredictably. Yet he also questioned the industry’s appetite for limits, singling out Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang’s resistance to government regulation.¹

The dispute follows Leo’s first major encyclical in May, which cast the Vatican as a moral participant in the AI debate and warned that the technology could weaken human judgment, widen inequality and destabilize democracy. On Monday, he pressed for a practical response: political leaders, AI executives and civic groups should examine both harms already visible and those that may be approaching.¹

A separate report on his remarks likewise said the pope insisted that safety issues raised by AI experts must be discussed and acted upon—not waved away as “fake news.”²