Pope's AI Advisor Calls Big Labs a 'Cartel' — SkimNews
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- Father Paolo Benanti, who advises the Catholic Church on AI as a scholar of philosophy, theology, and technology, says the frontier-lab narrative around superintelligence is 'self-interested, to gain or maintain a position in the market' and distracts from the need for democratic regulation.
- Benanti argues that when a small group of companies dictates industry rules, 'this has a really clear name: a cartel,' insisting that 'ethics cannot be something that belongs to the board of trustees of a company' and must instead be settled 'in the public square.'
- Pope Leo XIV published his first-ever encyclical in May on AI, warning against a technocratic logic that treats 'efficiency as the ultimate measure of value' and calling on rival superpowers and AI companies to set aside 'the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.'
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay published alongside the recent safety warnings, called for mandatory third-party evaluations of new AI models before release and a crackdown on distillation, where rival labs train on outputs of proprietary models.
- Benanti rejects the godlike framing of superintelligence — pointing to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's aspiration to build a 'magic intelligence in the sky' — insisting instead that 'we are not building the next divinity. We are simply deluding ourselves that there is something more than statistical computation.'
- Both OpenAI and Anthropic have supported public calls to slow AI development while simultaneously preparing to go public with billions at stake, a tension Benanti flags when questioning how seriously to take grand pronouncements about model capabilities.
Why it matters: The Vatican is now lending institutional weight to a regulatory critique that the frontier labs have tried to keep technical, with Pope Leo's encyclical and Benanti's 'cartel' accusation arriving at the same moment OpenAI and Anthropic are both preparing public offerings — giving democratic-regulation advocates a moral counterweight to lab self-governance right when the labs need investor confidence most.
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