Vatican AI Advisor Calls Big Labs a 'Cartel' — SkimNews
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- Father Paolo Benanti, a priest who advises the Catholic Church on AI, accused frontier labs of 'cartel' behavior, saying a small group of companies setting the rules of an industry is 'self-interested' and aimed at maintaining market position.
- Benanti argued that the focus on superintelligence distracts from urgent governance questions, insisting ethics 'cannot be something that belongs to the board of trustees of a company' and must be settled 'in debate in the public square.'
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called in a recent essay for mandatory third-party evaluations of new AI models before release and a crackdown on distillation—where rival labs train on competitors' model outputs.
- In May, Pope Leo XIV published his first-ever encyclical on AI, warning against the industry's 'technocratic logic' and urging rival superpowers and companies to set aside 'the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.'
- Benanti rejected industry framings of superintelligence as godlike, telling WIRED: 'We are not building the next divinity. We are simply deluding ourselves that there is something more than statistical computation [going on].'
- OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly supported slowing AI development while simultaneously preparing to go public with billions of dollars at stake—a contradiction Benanti says undermines trust in their safety commitments.
- Benanti cautioned that the superintelligence debate risks handing 'a small group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and executives at the big labs' control over AI's direction, adding: 'we need to have brakes, and a wheel.'
Why it matters: With Pope Leo XIV's first-ever encyclical explicitly targeting AI and OpenAI and Anthropic simultaneously preparing IPOs worth billions, Benanti's 'cartel' framing adds Vatican-backed moral authority to calls for binding oversight. His critique reframes AI safety as a power-concentration problem rather than a technical alignment question—arguing democratic regulation, not lab self-governance, must set the limits.
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