WASHINGTON (TNND) — On Monday at the Vatican, there was a unique moment of collaboration between the Catholic Church and Big Tech.
Olah is the co-founder of one of the biggest AI companies in the world and he spoke as well. (TNND)
Pope Leo XIV said to Christopher Olah, “In the name of the church, I accept your invitation to walk together to listen and to speak together to find the way for free humanity, and this time of Artificial Intelligence.”
Olah is the co-founder of one of the biggest AI companies in the world and he spoke as well.
“We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” he said, signaling openness to helping to achieve a lofty goal: responding to the growth of AI in a moral manner.
“That has to be a collective conversation removed from these private worlds, which are primarily dominated by a few very wealthy individuals,” said Anna Rowlands, a Catholic Social Thought Professor at Durham University, in an interview on Monday.
Those “few wealthy individuals” are a chief concern laid out in the Pope’s Open Letter, MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, on “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence .”
It contains more than 42,000 words and in it, he urges global leaders to take action, suggesting, “technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
The Pope also insisted, “Artificial Intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
His words have prompted a global dialogue about how to proceed, with questions about who would help set the guardrails.
Former White House AI Czar David Sacks posted on X, “If we hand governments sweeping power over ai development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens?”
The Pope’s message comes as governments here in the United States are still navigating how to regulate AI, with some struggling to come up with a good path forward.
Just days ago President Trump abruptly changed his mind on signing an Executive Order that would have included government safety reviews on new AI models.
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