Pope Leo / Eternal City Tip-Off · In the news
Pope Leo, responsible AI, and the Eternal City Tip-Off
Original coverage by The AI Journal ·
Photo: CNS / Lola Gomez, via The AI Journal.
Coverage overview
Conrad Egusa’s report for The AI Journal connects Pope Leo XIV’s call for accountability in artificial intelligence with the Eternal City Tip-Off gathering in Vatican City. The coverage includes Crescite CEO Eddie Cullen and considers how his approach to ethical finance relates to the article’s wider discussion of technology, human responsibility, and the common good.
Excerpt from The AI Journal
On Friday morning, a week before he is due to leave for South America and 17 days after surgeons removed part of his right lung, Pope Leo XIV sat in the Vatican’s Consistory Hall with a room of AI researchers and told them the ethics were largely settled.
What the world lacks, he said, are “institutions capable of putting these principles into practice.”
The meeting was co-hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute, and the Associated Press described it as a chance for the Vatican’s in-house AI commission to work directly with experts in the field. Leo used it to restate the core of Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical of nearly 43,000 words he presented in May alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah.
He warned against granting AI systems rights or legal personhood, because doing so would leave people harmed by them facing a faceless entity.
The timing gives the message weight. Leo, 71, announced on October 11th that doctors had found a growth on his lung. After the operation this month the Vatican confirmed adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer, and five days later he was back at the window of the Apostolic Palace addressing pilgrims, Reuters reported.
Earlier in the month he had used his Twitter/X account to argue that human art must be told apart from what machines generate, a theme he has returned to repeatedly since his election.
Saturday brings a lighter assignment. Invited guests are expected to attend the Eternal City Tip-Off in St. Peter’s Basilica, the burial place of St. Peter and one of the most iconic sites in Christendom.
The event will include a Private Mass presided by The Most Reverend Nelson J. Pérez, Archbishop of Philadelphia, and joined in concelebration by Villanova University President Rev. Peter M. Donohue, OSA, and University of Notre Dame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C.
This will be followed by His Holiness Pope Leo XIV in the Paul VI Audience Hall, offering guests a unique opportunity to gather in Vatican City for a special audience with the Holy Father.
Among those in the hall is Eddie Cullen, CEO of Crescite Innovation. Cullen’s own work sits close to the questions Leo raised on Friday. He co-founded Crescite with Karl Kilb III, and told EWTN News they started the company “because we love the Church.”
Cullen’s case for ethical finance, that a financial product should be judged by who it serves as well as what it earns, tracks closely with Leo’s insistence that new technology be directed toward the common good.