Pope Adviser Warns 3 Big AI Labs Risk Cartel Behavior as $Billions Fuel Rule-Setting
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Sep 23
Pope Adviser Warns 3 Big AI Labs Risk Cartel Behavior as $Billions Fuel Rule-Setting
1 articles · Updated · WIRED · Sep 23
Summary
Father Paolo Benanti, a priest advising the Catholic Church on AI, said frontier labs are acting like a cartel by framing AI safety as a problem only they can solve and shutting out public debate.
Benanti argued for democratic regulation focused on keeping models under human control, rather than lab-written limits on techniques such as distillation or recursive self-improvement that could also entrench incumbents.
His warning comes as OpenAI and Anthropic back slower development while also pursuing markets worth many billions of dollars, with US-China rivalry adding pressure to race ahead.
In May, Pope Leo XIV made AI the subject of his first encyclical, warning against an industry logic that prizes efficiency and dominance over the common good and calling for stronger human control.