Three days after the Vatican called for “disarming” AI, Mistral’s CEO defended his company’s work on defense AI, arguing that Europe cannot afford a unilateral restriction.
Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI startup Mistral, on Thursday directly rejected Pope Leo XIV’s call to “disarm AI” arguing that European companies cannot afford to take a step back from AI work in defense when adversaries are actively deploying the technology.
The statements, made three days after the Vatican published Magnificent humanityThe Pope’s first encyclical, marks one of the most direct corporate responses yet to what has quickly become the Catholic Church’s most consequential intervention on AI.
“We are all for peace” Mensch said: “But if you look at our rivals and adversaries in the world, they are using artificial intelligence. As long as we have adversaries that are threatening, and they are threatening, we need to have our own capabilities.”
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The Mistral CEO’s framing is the structural defense of military AI development that the European tech sector has been working on since the Ukraine war, but his decision to articulate it as an explicit rebuttal of a sitting pope is what makes Thursday’s comments notable.
The encyclical itself is the document to which Mensch responds. Magnificent humanityThe 42,300-word text that Leo published on May 25 calls for the disarmament of AI, the establishment of three binding requirements around any deployment of autonomous weapons, traceability of decisions, meaningful human control over lethal actions, and international standards to curb the technological arms race, and explicitly rejects traditional “just war” theory as “obsolete.”
The Pope further argued that military force can only be justified in “self-defense in the strictest sense.” The encyclical is the most direct papal intervention in technology regulation in decades.
Mensch’s position contains its own theological echo. The Pope’s approach of “self-defense in the strictest sense” and Mensch’s approach of “adversaries are threatening, so we need our own capabilities” are not, strictly speaking, in contradiction.
Both accept the legitimacy of self-defense; both reject offensive use. Where they diverge is on what self-defense requires in 2026. Leo’s position is that the threshold for the introduction of lethal AI is higher than any state has articulated so far.
Mensch’s is that Europe cannot confront credible adversaries with that threshold as long as those adversaries operate without it.
Business context matters here. Mistral has been visibly building a defense AI portfolio since at least early 2025. Helsing Partnership Announced at Paris AI Action Summit In February 2025 there was joint work on vision, language and action models designed for “a new generation of defense systems.”
Helsing has already deployed artificial intelligence systems on Eurofighter fighter jets, battlefield simulations and drone operations in Ukraine. Mistral has separately been bidding for defense contracts with multiple European governments.
Mensch’s public response against the Pope is therefore not a hypothetical stance, but a defense of an existing line of business that is now under formal moral censure by the Vatican.
On the other hand, the Pope’s influence on the political debate about AI has been greater than anyone expected six months ago.
Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic appeared at the launch of the encyclical, giving validation to the document in Silicon Valley. The European Commission welcomed it on Monday afternoon; OpenAI, Google and Microsoft issued formal expressions of respect.
The Vatican is not, in any meaningful sense, a regulatory authority for AI development. What he has produced with Magnifica Humanitas is a moral vocabulary that legislators and policymakers can use, and Mensch’s rebuttal recognizes, by its existence, how much that vocabulary matters now.
The clear rhetorical contrast obscures a calmer reality in European politics. Brussels is moving towards enforceable frameworks for AI warfare, but has not yet codified the kind of binding restrictions that Magnifica Humanitas demands. Member state governments are simultaneously expanding their defense AI procurement budgets.
The contradiction is real, and the next year of enforcement of the EU AI Law, defense spending by member states, and promotion of Vatican-aligned policies will indicate which side will win.
Mensch, in Thursday’s statement, has chosen to stake his company’s public stance on the defense procurement side of that argument.
