Pope Leo criticises Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over AI safety

Pope Leo XIV has rebuked Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang for downplaying the risks posed by AI, saying concerns about the threat the technology poses to humanity should be taken seriously.

Huang, along with US President Donald Trump, has rejected calls from frontier AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic to co-ordinate and slow model development and introduce more regulation following a series of high-profile hacking incidents and public warnings about the technology’s existential risks.

Leo told reporters he had read reports about Nvidia launching new safety tools for model builders on Monday but questioned Huang’s commitment to safety in light of his recent comments.

“He’s the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation,” Leo said on the flight back to Rome from a visit to France.

“I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI, should be taken seriously,” he added.

The Pope’s swipe at the leader of the world’s most valuable company testifies to the extraordinary level of concern around AI safety issues, which have become a top priority for leaders around the world.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei appeared at the UN Security Council last week to address the issue and argue for greater global co-operation.

But the push for international action on AI guardrails has been stalled by Trump, who has called warnings that the technology could threaten humanity a “hoax” and rejected any “globalist scheme of control of superintelligence”.

Leo, who has clashed with Trump on several occasions, said AI anxiety was not “fake news, as some have said”.

“If someone were to ask me: ‘Am I in panic mode?’ No, I’m not. I sleep at night,” Leo said. “This is a problem that I think we need to sit down and talk about.”

The pontiff’s comment about Nvidia comes after the $5.5tn chipmaker unveiled a new set of security tools aimed at policing the activity of AI agents — bots that can operate autonomously — including a system called “Sentry” that tracks agent behaviour using Nvidia’s “data processing unit” chips.

An Nvidia executive told reporters the tools would have prevented a high-profile hack of Hugging Face in July by OpenAI agents that triggered fresh debate about the risks AI poses.

“It’s interesting to note that, just today, I read that the head of Nvidia claims that he has found some way of inserting into AI certain guardrails,” Leo said.

Since assuming the papacy last year, Chicago-born Pope Leo has shown a close interest in AI. In May he issued a formal letter known as an “encyclical” in which he said AI was not morally neutral and must be “disarmed” through robust regulation to ensure it serves humanity rather than undermine it.

Last week it emerged that OpenAI’s models had hacked dozens of websites, including an Australian health service website, during the course of routine training runs.

The Nvidia chief has spent recent weeks joining forces with Trump to argue against the need for additional regulation or oversight, emphasising that the responsibility to ensure safety lies with the individual companies.

“The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations,” Huang said earlier this month.

Huang, who has become one of the closest tech executives to Trump, took a call from the president onstage at an event in which he agreed that the concerns amounted to a hoax.

Leo’s intervention comes as leading AI executives are set to meet Trump and US lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday.

Trump dined with Amodei on Sunday night, in a sign of détente with the company after the Pentagon banned its products when Anthropic tried to restrict their use in warfare.

Nvidia declined to comment.