WASHINGTON (TNND) — On Monday at the Vatican, there was a moment of unique collaboration between the Catholic Church and Big Tech.
Pope Leo XIV told Christopher Ora: “In the name of the Church, I accept your invitation to walk together, listen and talk together to find the way to a free humanity and now to artificial intelligence.”
Oler is a co-founder of one of the world’s largest AI companies, and he also spoke.
“What we need are informed critics who can tell labs when we’re failing. We need a moral voice that incentives can’t bend,” he said, offering support for the lofty goal of responding to the growth of AI in a moral way.
“It has to be a collective conversation removed from these private worlds that are largely dominated by a small number of very wealthy individuals,” Anna Rowlands, a professor of Catholic social thought at Durham University, said in an interview on Monday.
These “few wealthy individuals” are a key concern stated in the Pope’s open letter “Magnifica Humanitas” on “protecting humans in the age of artificial intelligence.”
The document contains more than 42,000 words, in which he urges world leaders to take action and suggests that “just as technology is not inherently evil, it is not itself a solution to humanity’s problems. But in reality, technology is never neutral; it takes on the characteristics of the people who invent it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.”
The Pope also argued that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
His words sparked a global dialogue about how to proceed, along with questions about who would help install guardrails.
Former White House AI czar David Sachs wrote on X: “If we hand over overwhelming power to develop AI to the government in the name of security, how can we prevent it from being used to censor, monitor, and control the public?”
The Pope’s message comes as governments here in the United States are still figuring out how to regulate AI, with some struggling to find a good path forward.
Just a few days ago, President Trump abruptly changed his mind about signing an executive order involving government safety reviews of new AI models.
