TECH NEWS – The newly elected pope has taken a critical stance toward major tech giants, effectively picking up where his predecessor left off.

Not only did the Trump administration remove Biden-era restrictions and award OpenAI significant funding through various contracts, but the UK government also tried five times (eventually succeeding) to pass a bill allowing AI developers to scrape nearly any copyrighted material they want. Still, there are critical voices.

In a recent speech to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV spoke firmly about artificial intelligence, saying, “Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and innovations in artificial intelligence that challenge human dignity, justice, and labor.” Calling AI a threat to humanity in any capacity is, to put it mildly, a strong statement.

Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903, is partly remembered for standing up for workers’ rights during the Second Industrial Revolution. Given this history, it’s perhaps no surprise that Pope Leo XIV refers to the booming AI sector as another “industrial revolution.” With Duolingo replacing entrepreneurs with AI and Klarna already regretting its AI-based approach, it’s not hard to see why Leo XIV frames this as a labor issue.

This statement comes after years of Silicon Valley trying to win over the Vatican. Pope Francis met with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (back when the company was still Facebook) and granted private audiences to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Elon Musk. Francis himself has never been a big fan of artificial intelligence, and Leo XIV has made clear that he’ll continue this legacy. The Vatican will soon host Meta, Google, Anthropic, Palantir, and other tech giants at a Rome conference on AI, ethics, and corporate governance. Although Leo XIV has yet to meet with tech CEOs in private, he’s expected to deliver a written address at the event. Whether it will be a call for guidance or something stronger remains to be seen.

Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, who knew the pope when he was still Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, told The Wall Street Journal: “Leo XIV wants the worlds of science and politics to immediately address this issue, without allowing scientific progress to move forward arrogantly and harm those who must submit to its power. These tools shouldn’t be demonized, but they need to be regulated. The question is, who will regulate them? It’s not credible for their creators to be the ones. There needs to be a higher authority.”

It will be interesting to see how the companies respond to the criticism…

Source: PCGamer, WSJ, The Verge, TechCrunch, Vice, Reuters, WSGR