Is Pope Leo Joining the Anti-AI Resistance?

Having spoken out for the welfare of immigrants and against the war in Iran—and drawn the ire of some American conservatives in the process—Pope Leo XIV is now calling on the world to safeguard human dignity in the AI era.

His upcoming address on Monday, alongside a co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic and a collection of religious leaders and theologians, will serve to launch Leo’s first encyclical, a papal letter sent to all bishops in the Catholic Church. 

In a speech last May just days after being elected, Leo framed the rise of AI as “another industrial revolution” where “developments in the field pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

And on Friday, the pope noted “the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity and the damage caused when chatbots and other technologies exploit our need for human relationships” at a Vatican conference on AI.

In response to the announcement of Leo’s letter, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah wrote last week on X that “the questions posed by AI are bigger than the AI community. We urgently need the world—religions, civil society, academics, governments—to participate in creating a positive outcome.” Olah will be a speaker at the encyclical presentation.

Anthropic, which develops the AI chatbot Claude, has advertised itself as an AI giant that values risk mitigation. In February, the company refused the Defense Department’s demands to remove safety precautions on its technology, including mass surveillance of US citizens and autonomous weapons. The day after, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products.

But the relationship between the Vatican and Anthropic poses risks of laundering the AI company’s image with religious and moral leaders. 

Last fall, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit—compensating authors $3,000 for each of the 500,000 estimated books it was accused of training its AI technology on. In February, Anthropic said it was valued at $380 billion, putting it as a direct rival to Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

According to a Friday report in Religion News Service, AI companies have been speaking with the Vatican as far back as 2016 about ethics—including tech leaders like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who University of Arizona students booed at multiple times for drawing similarities between the rise of AI and the beneficial impact of the first computers).

Massive investment in AI companies is continuing at a rapid pace despite its unpopularity among the public. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has tracked across the last couple of months, most Americans don’t want data centers in their area, believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and broad adoption of the technology will shrink the number of available jobs.

Whether Pope Leo XIV’s entrance into the AI ethics debate moves the needle remains to be seen. But it’s not the first time a pope’s encyclical has been injected straight into a roiling planetary debate: Pope Francis used a 2015 papal letter to call for action on climate change to prevent the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem,” arguing that our planet was starting to “look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

المصدر: Mother Jones