Pope Leo / Eternal City Tip-Off · Syndicated article
The investment conversation around responsible AI
Original coverage by The Globe and Mail ·
Photo: Koshiro K / Adobe Stock, via Barchart.
Coverage overview
Published in The Globe and Mail’s markets press-release section, this syndicated article by Conrad Egusa examines how AI oversight and social outcomes are entering the investment conversation. It includes Crescite as an example of a business connecting financial activity with a mission of service. The piece is supplied by Espacio Media Incubator through Barchart.
Excerpt from The Globe and Mail
Pope Leo XIV told a room of AI researchers this past month that the world has largely settled on the ethical principles AI should follow. What it lacks, he said, are institutions able to put them into practice.
The meeting, co-hosted by the Pontifical Academy, gave a pope who studied mathematics at Villanova a room full of the people building the technology.
Pope Leo used it to argue against granting AI systems rights or legal personhood, warning that doing so would leave people harmed by them with no one to hold responsible. Decisions affecting human life, freedom and the use of force, he said, must remain under human oversight.
The timing gave the message weight. Pope Leo, 71, spoke 17 days after surgeons at Rome's Gemelli hospital removed the lower lobe of his right lung. He also spoke a month after President Trump and six frontier developers signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a voluntary pledge Trump called morally binding but which carries no penalties for companies that fall short.
For investors, the significance lies less in any single rule than in where scrutiny and demand are heading. Pope Leo's position, set out at length in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, gives a moral vocabulary to questions customers, employees and regulators were already asking about who AI serves and who answers when it fails. A growing number of founders are building their businesses around the answers.
The capital at stake is substantial. Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion this year, a 47% increase from this past year.
At the same time, investors have shown a growing appetite for returns tied to social outcomes: the Global Impact Investing Network estimated the impact investing market at roughly $1.76 trillion. Where those two pools of capital meet is where Pope Leo's message has the most commercial relevance.