The Pope Went to X. Silicon Valley Replied.

The encyclical dropped Monday. By Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV was on X posting follow-up warnings — and the tech world was firing back.

According to Forbes, Leo posted directly that 'powerful private actors cannot be allowed to control data and algorithms.' He argued that decisions about digital platforms and data must be subject to 'public oversight' guided by 'the dignity of every person and the common good of all people' — NOT solely profit.

This is a direct challenge to how Google, Meta, OpenAI, and every other data-hoarding tech giant operates.

Who Said What — By Name

Business Insider catalogued the responses. Here's the unfiltered breakdown.

David Sacks — tech investor and White House AI and Crypto Czar in the current Trump administration — gave the pope partial credit. He agreed AI should be a tool that helps humans, not one enabling 'domination or exclusion.' But he pushed back hard: '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?' He called it 'the real alignment problem.' Government power doesn't disappear once handed over.

Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Technology, was blunter. He called it a 'bad take from the Pope,' arguing that tech revolutions eliminate some jobs while creating others. 'If we cling onto jobs, we'd still be plowing fields by hand out of fear of disruption.' That argument tracks historically. Whether it applies cleanly to AI is the actual debate.

Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the University of Montreal and one of AI's so-called 'godfathers,' sided with Leo. According to Business Insider, Bengio wrote that the Vatican and serious AI researchers are aligned on the core concerns. Bengio has been one of the loudest scientific voices warning about AI risk for years.

The Trump Collision

Time magazine's Andrew Chow laid out the direct policy clash: Leo's encyclical targets the exact worldview driving Trump's AI strategy.

Last week, Trump delayed signing an executive order that called for pre-deployment safety testing of AI systems. His stated reason: he didn't want to do anything that would slow America's technological lead over China. According to Time, Politico reported Trump pulled the order after hearing concerns directly from industry executives.

Leo's encyclical directly criticizes this framing. He calls the U.S.-China AI race part of a larger 'remote clash between opposing imperialisms' and says there 'seems to be no limit to the race — driven by a dehumanizing ambition — to develop ever more powerful technologies.' His alternative: 'disarming' AI, meaning slowing adoption enough for ethics and governance to catch up.

Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Initiative, told Time the pope is pushing the Church toward what Leo called 'digital sobriety.' That's not a technology ban. It's a demand for guardrails.

Trump's team isn't buying it. The gap between Rome and Washington on this is real.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

The New York Times coverage gestures at but doesn't say plainly: Silicon Valley has its own religion. It's called techno-optimism, and its high priests genuinely believe superintelligent AI is the path to human transcendence. According to the paper, Leo's warnings landed at an 'epicenter' where AI enthusiasts are pursuing their own spirituality through the technology — immortality research, post-scarcity economics, the whole package.

This is mainstream Silicon Valley theology right now.

The Times also notes that during Leo's public address urging AI leaders to slow down, the co-founder of a prominent AI company was standing right next to him. The outlet doesn't name the executive. Who was it? Why were they there? What was said?

The Real Stakes

Forbes points out that Leo is framing algorithms, data, and digital infrastructure as modern forms of property — things that require broad access and oversight the same way physical resources do. That's a radical reframe of the entire tech economy, and almost nobody in the mainstream AI debate is engaging with it seriously.

Leo's argument isn't 'slow down because change is scary.' It's 'concentrated control over transformative technology creates a permanent underclass.' That's a coherent economic argument that deserves a real answer — not a shrug from a guy at a standing desk in Menlo Park.

The Sacks question is legitimate: government control over AI carries its own dangers. Both things can be true simultaneously. A small group of billionaires running the world's most powerful technology unchecked IS a problem. Handing that control to governments with authoritarian instincts is ALSO a problem.

The pope raised the question. Silicon Valley is answering it with dismissal. Washington is answering it with deference to industry.

Neither is good enough.