David Streitfeld, As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.
A dozen paragraphs or so into the article:
Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former.
Love ’em or hate ’em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their peers exert similar influence on our modern kings, which is to say politicians. The American economy is being propped up by spending on A.I. The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms with dizzying speed and unknown effect.
The old religion challenging the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.
Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the sweep and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and instructing them to be cautious or even suspicious of A.I. — especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity — could put a dent in tech’s global ambitions.
“How much influence does the pope have in our secular Western world?” asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the development of A.I. in religious institutions. “We’re about to see. I doubt that tech executives in Palo Alto are going to be reading this encyclical.”
In the best-case scenario, said Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, the encyclical “will shape some moral deliberations.”
Popes have traditionally worked with the long term in mind, and any evaluation of the encyclical’s effect is years away. Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided. A decade ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech luminaries in for an annual A.I. conference called the Minerva Dialogues.
In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose.
The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the self-styled “good” A.I. firm, pointed to the possibility that Leo is trying less to undermine A.I. than simply participate in the conversation around it. When Francis released his scathing encyclical about climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak.
The new religion of A.I.:
Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,” closed it and then opened it again in 2023.
Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine.
Market share:
Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has to protest A.I., he also needs to defend his market share, much the way Walmart had to defend itself against the upstart Amazon.
The tech world’s initial reaction to the encyclical was muted on the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, recirculated it to his millions of followers on X.
For all the noise over religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn’t have many faithful there. A character on the satirical show “Silicon Valley” once joked that Christianity was “borderline illegal” in the tech community, although the reality is more complicated.
Is it too late? The article concludes with an observation by Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard:
“The pope is really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the strength, the communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman.” [...]
“Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence,” Mr. Epstein said. “Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”
Yes. But Silicon Valley does not yet rule the world. And lots of people are becoming wary of A.I.
There's more at the link.
Meta-level note: The New York Times is giving this encyclical a LOT of coverage today.
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