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Pope Leo XIV went viral on Monday with his warning about the threats AI poses to humanity and the steps he believes should be taken to ensure that “the idolatry of profit” does not “sacrifice the weak,” including helping workers made obsolete by the technology, creating rules about how AI can be used in war, and implementing regulations to ensure this stuff doesn’t destroy the planet. Pretty reasonable, and yet! It seems to have struck a nerve with a bunch of tech leaders and at least one Trump administration official, who suggested the American pope should zip it.
Commenting on Leo’s 42,300-word encyclical — titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence — Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of a company creating a supersonic airliner, wrote, “Bad take from the Pope. Tech revolutions tend to eliminate some jobs while creating others. If we cling onto jobs, we’d still be plowing fields by hand out of fear of disruption.”
While tech investor and former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks allowed that the pope “rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion,” he took issue with Leo’s call for regulation, claiming it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to some kind of 1984 nightmare in which the government uses AI to “censor, surveil, and control citizens.”
Sacks’s remarks reflect the stance he took on AI and regulation while working for the Trump administration and as he continues to advise the White House. In a call with the president in May, Sacks reportedly told the president that imposing regulations on tech companies could hamstring the industry as it races against its Chinese counterpart, claiming that a proposed executive order would “give a victory to so-called AI doomers who propose strong guardrails to limit the risks posed by the technology,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The order was scrapped.
Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum seemed to imply on Fox Business on Tuesday that the Catholic leader should stick to passing out wafers during Mass and leave the questions of humanity to Silicon Valley or something. “I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope,” he said.
A notable exception to the Silicon Valley and Trumpworld scoffing at the pope’s warning was Vice-President J.D. Vance. In an interview with NBC News, Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said he had scanned “bits and pieces” and synopses of the encyclical. “What I read of it sounds very profound,” he said, “and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the Church.”
Vance, of course, spent his pre-politics years working in venture capital and has enjoyed the backing of numerous tech-billionaire benefactors (most prominently Peter Thiel). At the same time, he’s long pitched himself as a man of the working class and wrote a whole book about being a “hillbilly.” And while he’s probably not about to go to bat for seriously reining in big tech, Vance surely understands that AI is deeply unpopular with many Americans.
As of Tuesday afternoon, neither Elon Musk nor Sam Altman — last seen facing off in a courtroom — appeared to have commented on the pope’s encyclical. However, Christopher Olah, the founder of Anthropic, was in the audience for Leo’s speech and received a shout-out from the Supreme Pontiff.
In February, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop using AI technology developed by Anthropic after the Pentagon demanded unfettered access to the company’s system without the safeguards Anthropic wanted. On TruthSocial, Trump called Anthropic a “radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.” It was subsequently designated a “supply-chain risk to national security” by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. For his part, the president has not yet offered his take on the pope’s warnings about looking out for humanity, though surely it’s coming.
