As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words

Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams, dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms.

One of the oldest industry jokes has a programmer asking a computer, “Is there a God?” The computer answers: “There is now.” The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, tech leaders are signaling that those early dreams have been fulfilled. Next stop, transcendence.

Just as the new religion of A.I. seemed to be solidifying its control over mankind’s destiny, however, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world.

Its message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate the human. Machines are not gods.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, published with great ceremony on Monday his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity.” The 42,300-word policy statement is respectful and named no names, but is at heart a sharp rebuke to Silicon Valley’s assertions that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.

“A.I. can be a valuable tool,” the pope acknowledged, but the technology “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” Without adequate oversight and transparency, he warned, “those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems.”

That would be bad news, he said: “A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

The encyclical is expected to be at the center of the 70-year-old pontiff’s reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated for workers’ rights and a fair wage, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII’s papacy at the end of the 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley slept, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly restrain the A.I. boom.

President Trump last week came close to signing a measure that would have given the federal government the power to evaluate A.I. models before they were publicly released — then canceled the signing. The same day, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a measure to study A.I.’s impact on employment, an acknowledgment of the turmoil the companies insist is coming. Elon Musk, who has his own A.I. ambitions, tried to derail OpenAI, the leading A.I. company, with a lawsuit but was thwarted this month on technical grounds.

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.

Luke Burgis, the founder of the Cluny Institute, which explores how faith and reason bear on technology and innovation, was optimistic that Leo’s words would have an effect.

“This encyclical is a live wire that truly has the potential to change what is getting built in Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Burgis, also a former seminarian. “It could help to give people a vocabulary to understand a new thing, in the same way that Rerum Novarum helped people understand the concept of a just wage.”

But it won’t happen automatically, or quickly, or easily.

“The church is only beginning its work here,” Mr. Burgis said. “It needs to engage with a powerful counterforce that currently has it outnumbered, in both capital and compute.”

New religion, old religion

Twenty years ago, even the idea of a confrontation between a pope and Silicon Valley was unthinkable. But in recent years, tech has moved deeper into matters that used to be exclusively religious in nature. There are widespread efforts to ward off death through various forms of lifestyle hacking. The Singularity — the rapturous moment when man and machine merge — is another hot topic.

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.

“People are so ready to make A.G.I. their god,” said Garry Tan, who runs the start-up incubator Y Combinator, referring to artificial general intelligence, the next level of A.I. John Lennox, the retired Oxford mathematician who wrote “2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity,” said, “This race for A.I. super intelligence is to make God and be God.” Bill Gates, contemplating the glorious future, said: “You can almost call it a new religion.”

If A.I. is a new religion or God, that puts it in competition with the old religions and the old Gods. And Silicon Valley generally has one response to competition: Squash it.

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.

Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans are Catholic, a higher percentage than in the United States as a whole, according to a recent Pew poll. But the percentage of the religiously unaffiliated in the city is also much higher. The bottom line is that relatively few tech workers are likely to hear about the pope’s new encyclical from a priest.

Doing the Lord’s work

Many A.I. applications encroach on the traditional human role of the spiritual counselor. The popular app Text With Jesus now offers voice mail responses. Bible.ai describes itself as “here to simply be a helper, a listener, a friend.” Just Like Me offers a Jesus chatbot that it lauds for its “compassionate guidance” and “unconditional support.”

“People are turning to A.I. in their darkest moments,” said Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and M.I.T. “They’re turning to it like an object of worship. But Pope Leo is saying the true source of virtue is in humanity and God.”

Mr. Epstein, the author of “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation,” said: “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.”

Nonetheless, he fears it may be too late.

“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.”