Bottom Line: Tech giants are conducting a targeted lobbying campaign at the Vatican to influence the Church’s stance on artificial intelligence. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on this subject is expected to have groundbreaking impacts on global AI regulation.
Executives from Meta, Google and Amazon have traveled to Rome to discuss artificial intelligence with Vatican officials. This lobbying campaign is taking place ahead of the publication of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, which will represent the Catholic Church’s stance on AI.
On a sunny spring day, Father Eric Salobir led a group across Saint Peter’s Square in Rome to meet Pope Leo XIV. In their luggage, executives from Meta, Google and Amazon carried an urgent concern: the protection of children in the age of artificial intelligence. The meeting with the Pope was brief, but the subsequent event at the French Embassy to the Holy See stretched on for hours. There, Paolo Ruffini, the head of Vatican Communications, sat across from the tech executives and discussed a central question of Leo’s new pontificate: How should one of the world’s oldest moral authorities judge the revolutionary technology that Silicon Valley is feverishly developing?
The meeting on April 29 is part of a broader, discreetly conducted lobbying campaign by the technology industry ahead of Leo’s first encyclical. An official Vatican document, to be published on Monday, is intended to represent the position of the Catholic Church on artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley has been trying for years to convince governments and the public that AI can be developed responsibly. In recent months, representatives of the technology industry have visited Rome to exchange views with Vatican officials. Through embassy events, intimate meetings and via Catholic intermediaries with strong ties to the technology industry, they are positioning themselves as partners in ethically responsible AI development.
Sarah El Haïry, France’s commissioner for children’s rights and a participant in the April meeting, emphasized the extraordinary significance of this encyclical. She compared it to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on workers’ rights, which shaped Catholic social doctrine during the Industrial Revolution. The impact of the papal encyclical could extend far beyond the Vatican and provide a comprehensive framework for managing the AI revolution.