Pope’s Anti-AI Warnings May Be AI-Written, Detection Tool Claims

Even the Pope’s warnings about artificial intelligence may have been written by artificial intelligence.

First reported by Wired, Pangram Labs, an AI-detection startup, said its updated Chrome extension flagged several posts from Pope Leo XIV’s official X account as likely AI-generated, including messages warning followers about AI’s effect on human thought and social structures.

One of those posts warned: “When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment.”

“Pangram uses a specialized machine learning model trained on millions of human-written, AI-assisted, and AI-generated documents,” Pangram Labs CEO Max Spero told Decrypt. “If a short piece of text is flagged as AI by Pangram, that means that there was likely at least some AI assistance used in the writing or drafting process.”

Pangram claims its detection model has a 99.98% accuracy rate and a false positive rate of one in 10,000. A December 2025 University of Chicago study ranked Pangram highest among tested AI detection tools and found its false positive rate was close to zero.

“Given that every detector is at least slightly imperfect, organizations still have to evaluate for themselves if and how to use them, trading off the potential for AI misuse with the risk of false accusations,” the study said.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

AI detection remains controversial, and false positives remain a concern across the industry. In 2024, AI detector ZeroGPT made waves online after it was revealed by Christopher Penn, Chief Data Scientist at Boston-based marketing analytics firm Trust Insight, to have labeled the U.S. Declaration of Independence 97.93% AI-generated.

“These tools are being used to do things like disqualify students, putting them on academic probation or suspension,” Penn told Decrypt at the time. That’s “a very high-risk application when, in the United States, a college education is tens of thousands of dollars a year,” he said.

According to Wired, Pangram’s extension also reportedly flagged posts from blue-check influencers on X, trending Substack writers, and a message from Apple CEO Tim Cook marking the company’s 50th anniversary.

The launch comes as concerns over AI-generated junk content continue to rise. Earlier this month, researchers at Stanford University, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive found that AI-generated or AI-assisted text accounted for roughly 35% of newly published websites by mid-2025.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to include comment from Pangram Labs.