Pope Leo XIV Will Have Things to Say About the Future of AI

Plus, Coatue slides on private market AI investing.

Jonathan Weber

and

Madeline Renbarger

Jun 20, 2025

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The Week in Short

Pope Leo, like his predecessor, is a big-tech skeptic. Coatue sees AI boom times continuing for VCs. Decacorns Applied Intuition and Ramp charge ahead. Elon Musk faces fresh headwinds at SpaceX and Tesla, while Waymo hits NY and Zoox preps a big SF launch. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross are said to be abandoning Safe Superintelligence — and VC investing — in favor of Meta. And TikTok is forever as Trump delays ban again.

The Main Item

The Vatican is Worried About AI & Humanity

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV has a message that a lot of people in Silicon Valley — not to mention the White House — are not going to want to hear: AI needs to be regulated to protect the future of humanity.

The first American Pope has a math degree and is more sophisticated about tech than his predecessors, notes a fascinating Wall Street Journal story about the Vatican’s relationship with the tech world. His ascension comes at a particularly dramatic moment for an AI industry whose ultimate impact on life as we know it could dwarf that of previous tech revolutions.

President Trump has rejected any guardrails for AI development. He scrapped Biden-era guidelines and attacked European regulatory efforts, and his “big beautiful bill” includes a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation at the state level. With right-wing, anti-regulation “techno-optimists” like Elon Musk and David Sacks in power in Washington, it’s easy to view questions about the safety and social impact of AI as yesterday’s news.

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A Papal Perspective

Pope Leo XIV, though, brings a powerful counterpoint. He spoke to the College of Cardinals about the dangers of AI on his second day as Pontiff, noting that his namesake, Leo XIII, had stood up for factory workers in the age of industrialization.

“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told them, per the Journal.

His focus on the issue reflects the remarkable historical moment where computers have gotten smart and powerful enough to force a spiritual reckoning. Tech leaders were invited to the Vatican this week for a conference on AI, ethics, and corporate governance co-led by David Berger of Wilson Sonsini.

Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had a deep interest in the impact of tech, hosting industry executives including Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg at the Vatican in 2016 to discuss how their innovations could be used for good.

That kicked off a series of conversations at the Vatican about tech and the devine called the Minerva Dialogues. Subsequently, the Journal reported, Brad Smith of Microsoft developed a particularly close relationship with Pope Francis, and helped craft the 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics. AI-makers who joined agreed not to violate the rights of users and to take “responsibility” for how the tech is developed, but Google and OpenAI were among those who never signed up.

The minimal impact of that initiative could be seen as a sign of the Vatican’s lack of influence. The Holy See warned this year about the dangers of a few tech companies controlling the technology and the prospect of an inhuman world where children are taught by chatbots; the industry barely noticed.

On the other hand, the public until very recently has had no sense of what generative AI is or how it might change their lives. And Pope Leo has been thinking about these issues deeply for many years, those close to him say, giving him a more nuanced understanding of the issues and the stakes.

Plus, he’s an American, which may offer him a little further juice in addressing an American-dominated industry. It will be interesting to see how avowedly devout Catholics in the Trump Administration, led by JD Vance, respond to the new Pontiff’s social justice bent.

Existential Questions Still Out There

AI-driven unemployment could provide an early test of public sentiment on societal issues. The tech is beginning to take white-collar jobs, as Amazon and Microsoft and others have shown in recent weeks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is warning of sweeping job losses within a couple of years. College graduates are reporting far fewer opportunities than before.

The existential questions haven’t gone away either. OpenAI on Thursday warned that upcoming models could readily be used to create bioweapons, and it’s working on precautions.

Pope Leo hasn’t said anything publicly about AI regulation, but Cardinal Giuseppi Versaldi, who is close to him, had this to offer: “These tools shouldn’t be demonized, but they need to be regulated. The question is, who will regulate them? It’s not credible for them to be regulated by their makers. There needs to be a superior authority.”

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