ABOARD THE PAPAL FLIGHT — Pope Leo XIV said he takes seriously the warnings raised by tech experts about the dangers of AI — including risks to humanity — but he is not panicking over dire predictions.
“If someone were to ask me, am I in panic mode, no I’m not, I sleep at night. I do think the concerns raised by many experts in AI should be taken seriously,” the pope told reporters accompanying him on his flight to Rome from Metz, France, Sept. 28.
“I don’t think that is fake news, as some have said, to try and cause … financial or some other kind of benefit,” he added.
A former safety researcher at the AI company Anthropic warned earlier this month that he believes the technology’s rapid advancement could mean there’s a more than 10% chance that AI could “could kill all humans” within a decade.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded by calling on the AI industry to slow down the pace of advanced model development to address risks, and other industry leaders publicly supported his call.
That drew criticism of Amodei from President Donald Trump, who dismissed dire scenarios and said restrictions on AI development in the U.S. would benefit China. The two men dined together on Sunday in an apparent attempt to address their differences.
The pope’s encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, published just four months ago, included a broad call for regulation of the technology.
In recent months, concerns have grown over AI’s risks of creating advanced cyberattacks and autonomous agents that will get past human control and threaten humanity.
Pope Leo told journalists on Monday that the Vatican has organized its own commission on AI, both to coordinate its own use of the technology and to “continue to promote dialogue, study, investigation to find ways to make sure that AI doesn’t get to a point where it destroys humanity.”
“But we have to keep working. We can’t just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen,” he said.
Leo was returning to Rome after a four-day trip to France.
In response to another reporter’s question, the pope said it was vital for the Church to proclaim Catholic social doctrine even on controversial matters such as end-of-life issues and political extremism.
Asked if he had “crossed a line” in France, where there is a strict separation of church and state, by speaking against the recent legalization there of euthanasia and assisted suicide, he said: “I didn’t cross it,” because “we’re not entering into politics; we’re applying the Gospel to people’s lives.”
“The defense of life is something that, as you all know, the Church teaches, believes very deeply,” the pope said.
“Being in a place especially like Lourdes, where people are searching for something much deeper and understanding that their lives, even in the midst of sickness or disability or pain of different kinds, that their life has meaning, the Church, because of Jesus himself, wants to be close to those people and to affirm the values that that life itself I think holds for all of us,” the pope said.
Asked whether he thought clerical sexual abuse was “systemic” in the Church, Leo said he preferred “to express it in a different way.”
He said some organizations within the Church have, at times, “as a system, been abusive.”
“But I think itʼs important to make the distinction. Sexual abuse is first and foremost a human problem. … When it happens within the Church it actually has another whole dimension added to it, because peopleʼs lives of faith are deeply wounded and sometimes even destroyed,” the pontiff said.
“The Church, in certain ways, has been seen as being responsible, but in the same way, the Church, I think, is an important part of helping [victims] to find healing.”