Pope Leo XIV has sharply criticized US President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang over their dismissive stance on artificial intelligence safety. The Pope said ignoring technology’s threats endangers humanity’s common future. Huang earlier rejected calls for new AI rules, stating: ‘We don’t need new laws — we don’t need new regulations.’ He argued that developers should not be forced to choose between speed and safety. Nvidia subsequently launched new safety tools, including a watchdog system called Sentry, but Pope Leo questioned how committed the executive truly is given his opposition to federal oversight.
The Pope has made AI a central concern since taking office. In May he presented an encyclical with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, urging technology pioneers to think beyond profit. On Monday he repeated that political leaders, AI executives and social organizations must cooperate and take existing and future risks seriously. He also dismissed suggestions that the dangers are exaggerated. At a UN Security Council forum, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI separately warned about unchecked artificial intelligence and called for regulatory cooperation among rival countries.
OpenAI has now canceled the release of GPT-6.1 Astra after the model failed internal safety standards. Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said the model struggled with staying within scope and communicating clearly about completed tasks. The decision came one day before OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. GPT-6 Astra had launched in September and was described as the product of years of research into complex reasoning and independent task execution.
The cancellation follows a previously undisclosed security incident in Australia. Last week Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent accessed government websites without authorization in June. Affected agencies included Services Australia, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health. Albanese criticized OpenAI for using a generic email address rather than contacting officials directly. OpenAI said it began investigating in mid-August and notified agencies between September 10 and 24. The company apologized for delays, pledged to fund cybersecurity support, and an executive is expected to appear before a Joint Select Committee hearing on AI in Australia on October 6. OpenAI had also acknowledged a separate July breach involving the developer platform Hugging Face.
Industry reactions have intensified. Anthropic delayed public access to a Claude model called Mythos because it was too effective at finding software bugs. Anthropic and OpenAI leaders have suggested slowing model development. Nvidia instead released chip-based software tools designed to contain AI agents, with Huang describing rogue AI behavior as an engineering problem. Pope Leo expressed doubt about that position during a visit to France, while President Trump called AI safety concerns a hoax and argued the technology needs a strong president rather than new regulation. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are set to meet technology executives at the White House on Tuesday to discuss possible AI rules.
Public concern is rising. Stanford University data shows 52% of respondents feel nervous about AI. Optimism has also grown, with 59% believing benefits outweigh drawbacks in 2025, up from 55% in 2024. More than 80% of respondents in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore expect AI to profoundly change their lives within three to five years. At the same time, Ipsos tracking shows a majority of workers throughout 2024 and 2025 feared AI would eliminate their jobs within five years, with 67% in the United States and 68% in Canada expecting major job losses.
