What smart people are saying about Pope Leo’s letter on AI

Tech investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks wrote on X that the pope is right to say that AI should be a tool that helps humans, not one that leads to “domination or exclusion.”

Still, he asked, “If we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell foretold in 1984?”

“This is the real alignment problem,” he added. “The oldest questions of human nature and authority don’t disappear in the AI age. They become newly relevant.”

Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Technology, a company developing a supersonic airliner, disagreed with the pope.

On X, he 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.”

Yoshua Bengio, a professor, AI researcher, and Canadian computer scientist, wrote on X that he agrees with the pope’s sentiments.

“The Vatican and other global institutions can and must play a role in the global dialogue on AI to raise public awareness and mobilize society for the challenges ahead,” Bengio said.

Tanishq Mathew Abraham, a biomedical engineer and the founder of the medical AI research center, MedARC, responded to the pope’s encyclical on X.

He highlighted that Pope Leo XIV doesn’t view AI as “inherently evil,” but still acknowledges that technology is “never neutral.”

“Glad to see a nuanced, well-thought-out take on AI from the Catholic Church,” Abraham wrote.

Pope Leo XIV made it clear in his letter that he believes AI shouldn’t be monopolized by tech leaders.

Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator, said on X that the pope’s stance is “really important.”

“AI threatens to undermine the basic building blocks of humanity as it seeks to replace our most basic functions, like creativity, friendship, and critical thinking,” he added.

Gerald Leo Posner, an author and investigative reporter, dubbed the pope’s encyclical “Jesus AI,” or “what it would look like if the Pope, instead of Elon Musk, had created Grok.”

On X, he wrote: “I appreciate this historical moment for the Vatican trying to set some guardrails for AI and Silicon Valley. However, from all my reporting, tech is likely to rush past the generalized safety suggestions set out in this massive encyclical.”

Brian Burch is the current ambassador of the US Embassy to the Holy See. He attended the pope’s “Magnifica Humanitas” presentation on Monday.

Later, on X, the Embassy’s official account shared Burch’s perspective, beginning with a note that the Vatican leadership “contributes meaningfully” to the broader AI conversation.

“The United States shares the Holy See’s commitment to ensuring AI serves humanity and upholds fundamental values,” Burch said. “The Trump Administration believes that American leadership in AI innovation is essential to our national security and economic prosperity of our people. Our approach prioritizes pro-innovation policies enabling the private sector to develop transformative AI technologies that benefit people worldwide.”

He also said that the US aims to use American AI technology to create systems that “reflect democratic values rather than authoritarian control.”

Christopher Hale, a democratic politician, took to X after Pope Leo XIV shared his writings.

“A lot of folks in the media severely underestimated how much of an immediate bang Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI would have,” Hale wrote.

He also applauded Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah’s remarks, calling them “refreshing,” and said that the Catholic Church “has a lot of global main character energy this morning, even among those who declared the Church dead and irrelevant not too long ago.”