On a recent sunny spring day, Father Eric Saloville led a delegation through St. Peter’s Square and through the crowds toward Pope Leo XIV.
With him were representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon, part of a small group gathered in Rome to discuss child protection in the age of artificial intelligence. His encounter with the Pope was short-lived. The talks, which took place at the French embassy in the Holy See in central Rome, then lasted for hours.
There, Paolo Ruffini, the Vatican’s head of communications, sat across from the technology chief, working on an issue that is now central to Leo’s young pontificate. The question was how one of the world’s oldest moral authorities should judge the cutting-edge technology that Silicon Valley is rushing to develop.
The April 29 rally was the latest in a series of meetings that, taken together, amounted to a quiet lobbying push by the tech industry ahead of the publication of Leo’s first encyclical, according to seven people interviewed for this article. The Pope’s official document, scheduled to be submitted on Monday, will spell out the Catholic Church’s position on artificial intelligence.
Silicon Valley has spent years trying to convince governments and the public that AI can be developed responsibly. The industry is now making its case within the Vatican.
In recent months, representatives from the technology industry have traveled to Rome to meet with church officials participating in the discussions, calling themselves partners in the ethical development of AI. Their message reached the Vatican through embassy events, small group meetings, and Catholic intermediaries with deep ties to the technology industry.
This effort reflects the unusual stakes of Leo’s first encyclical. The document, which the pope will present personally on Monday, is being prepared with donations from cardinals, experts and businesses, all of whom are waiting to see how the church will engage with the technologies that are shaping the global economy, workplaces and ever-larger areas of daily life.
Salah El-Khairy, France’s High Commissioner for Children, who attended the April event, said the document could have repercussions far beyond the Vatican. She compared this to Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on the rights of workers, which helped define Catholic social teaching during the Industrial Revolution.
“Just as Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical helped establish an overarching vision for how to orchestrate the industrial revolution, a papal encyclical can have a pretty big impact,” she told POLITICO. “Several countries have taken inspiration from this doctrine in their own ways.”
AI Pope
From the beginning, Pope Leo XIV signaled that technology, particularly artificial intelligence, would be central to his papacy.
In his first address at the College of Cardinals, the pope acknowledged that his choice of papal name was a deliberate reference to Pope Leo
Even Leo’s public image offers a flash of modernity. As he raised his arms to celebrate his first Mass after being elected, the sleeve of his cassock slipped down to reveal his Apple Watch on his wrist.
Leo will be joined by Christopher Oler, co-founder of Anthropic, a US AI company that has put safety at the center of its public identity, when he releases the encyclical on Monday. Anthropic has clashed with the U.S. Department of Defense over its refusal to allow its technology to be used to surveil American citizens or power autonomous weapons, and has had a relationship with the Vatican over AI ethics.
This relationship existed even before Monday’s release. In January, Anthropic announced a “constitution” that sets out the values that will guide the development of Claude, the company’s flagship AI model. External contributors are confirmed to include two of the Holy See’s advisers, Bishop Paul Tighe, head of the Vatican’s Office for Culture and Education, and Father Brendan McGuire, a Silicon Valley priest and former engineer who advises the Vatican on technology issues.
roman network
Mr. Tye and Mr. McGuire are not the only figures linking the Vatican to the technology industry. Another key conduit is Eric Saloville, a French Dominican priest who began his career as an investment banker before joining the church.
Mr. Saloville, an expert on the Holy See, currently chairs the Executive Committee of the Human Technology Foundation. The foundation promotes ethical considerations about technology and its members include Google, Palantir, and Qualcomm.
Saloville, in cooperation with the French Embassy of the Holy See, helped launch the “French AI Observatory in Rome” in 2024, creating a forum for private exchanges between the technology sector and Vatican officials. Since Pope Francis became Pope, the frequency has increased even more.
The April 29th meeting was one of them. In addition to Saloville and senior French government official El-Khairy, attendees at the meeting included Benoît Tabaka, Google’s director of institutional relations and public policy for Southern Europe. Claire Charwat, Head of Public Policy at Amazon France. Claudia Trivilino, Public Policy Manager for Italy and Greece at Meta. Adrian Abecassis is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Paris Peace Forum and former advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron. The rally’s focus was on child protection in the age of AI, but discussion quickly expanded to include “the profound impact of artificial intelligence on human sociability,” said one participant, who spoke freely on condition of anonymity. “We have had long discussions about the fundamentals of human development and the risks posed by ever-available tools for seamless communication, such as artificial intelligence.”
According to one participant, the tone was “more humanistic than theological.” While some tech executives appeared to be privately engaged in the debate, others remained close to their talking points. “In any case, this conference shows that parts of the Vatican do not reject technology as such, but want to use it to serve humanity,” the participant added.
Participants then drafted a summary memo to be sent to Clara Chapaz, France’s representative to the Minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, to inform French digital policy discussions at the G7.
Washington also has an opinion.
The tech industry is not the only constituency trying to shape Vatican thinking.
The encyclical has also drawn attention from Washington, even as relations between the Trump administration and Leo have become publicly strained. In April, Trump criticized “the Pope for criticizing the president of the United States,” adding that he was “not a big fan.”
But behind the scenes of diplomatic tensions, U.S. officials have also been working to keep the AI channel open. In early May, the U.S. Embassy in Rome hosted a series of events on artificial intelligence and its work, sponsored by the embassies of Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Taiwan.
Among those in attendance was former British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who currently heads country relations for American tech giant OpenAI. Osborne and Tai’s discussion of the future of the workforce and the power of AI included the risk that the technology could deepen inequality.
Noam Yuchtman, a researcher at the London School of Economics who spoke at the U.S. Embassy event, said the effort was at least partly aimed at proving to the Vatican that there are “individuals and companies that are taking an ethical approach to AI.”
But even if the Vatican provides a moral platform for corporations, that doesn’t mean political leaders will accept Mr. Leo’s conclusions uncritically.
J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States and a convert to Catholicism, warned that he does not necessarily accept the pope’s encyclicals as gospel truth.
“If the Pope issues an encyclical on artificial intelligence, it will have some impact,” Vance said at a White House press briefing last week. “I’m sure this document contains a lot of insights, some of which you’ll probably agree with, some of which you might not. But I think this will be a very important document.”
A mixture of anticipation and alarm surrounds the final sentence.
After months of embassy events, private meetings and outside submissions, those who sought to shape the Vatican’s thinking are now waiting to see what arguments Leo will adopt.
“An encyclical is a text that is meant to last a long time,” said a contributor close to the Vatican, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The principle of the church is never to retract what we have written.”
Oceane Herrero is a technology reporter at POLITICO in Paris.
This article originally appeared on POLITICO and was published on Business Insider via the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. The network publishes major articles from the Axel Springer Publishing Network, a group of global news organizations that includes Business Insider.