Pope Leo XIV and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Image: Pope Leo XIV: Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Jensen Huang: Office of the President of Taiwan (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Pope Leo XIV has singled out Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang for playing down the risks of AI. Speaking to reporters on his flight home from France on Monday evening, the Pope said experts’ warnings about AI “should be taken seriously” and are not “fake news”, according to the Vatican’s transcript of the press conference.
“I sleep at night”
The question came from Justin McLellan of the National Catholic Reporter, who asked how worried the Pope was that AI could pose catastrophic risks or even wipe out humanity, after a run of cyberattacks by rogue AI agents. Leo, the first American pope, answered in English and began by saying he wasn’t panicking:
If someone were to ask me, am I in panic mode? No, I’m not. I sleep at night. I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously.
Pope Leo XIV, on the papal flight from Metz to Rome
He then rejected the idea that those warnings are invented, saying he didn’t think they were “fake news, as some have said, to try and cause whether financial or some other kind of benefit”. That line lands close to home: President Trump has called AI safety fears a “hoax”, as we covered in our look at his administration’s contradictions.
“He’s the same one”
The Pope didn’t name Huang, but he was clear about who he meant. He said he had read that day that “the head of NVIDIA” claims to have found a way of building guardrails into AI so it won’t cause the damage people fear. That appears to refer to Nvidia’s new safety platform for AI agents, announced the same morning. Then he turned to Huang’s view on rules:
He’s the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation, etc. etc. This is a problem that I think we need to sit down and talk about.
Pope Leo XIV
Huang has been one of the loudest voices against AI doom talk. Earlier this month he said there was a “0% chance” AI will end the world and called extinction warnings “irresponsible”. Nvidia hasn’t commented on the Pope’s remarks.
A Vatican commission on AI
The Pope said simply saying “Oh, it’s not going to happen” and closing our eyes is “probably not the most responsible way to go about that”. He called for political leaders, AI companies and civil society to meet and look at “what is happening already and what could be down the road”.
He said the Vatican has set up its own commission on AI. It began as a way to coordinate how the Holy See itself uses the technology, but since his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas came out, people from many fields have been in touch. The aim, he said, is to make sure AI “does not get to a point where it could destroy humanity or remove humanity from the conversation”. He said he was “relatively optimistic” that could happen, but added: “We can’t sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen.”
The remarks follow his speech in Paris last week, where he warned that AI could become “yet another instrument of domination”. They also came on the eve of a White House meeting where Trump is hosting AI leaders, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Reuters reports.
Why it matters
The Pope leads 1.4 billion Catholics, and he has now taken a side in the fight over whether AI needs rules, directly against the head of the world’s most valuable chip company. It also puts him at odds with the White House, just as Trump sits down with the industry’s bosses.
Sources: Vatican News, in-flight press conference transcript (September 28, 2026), Reuters.
Latest Policy & Safety news
