Silicon Valley Wants to Woo the Pope on Matters of AI
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, June 20th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. A good name can tell you a lot about someone. And for the new pope, it tells us a lot about his focus on artificial intelligence. Then, selling technology to the Department of Defense isn't easy. We'll explain how Oracle is linking small tech companies with the government.

But first, it's not often we talk about the Pope on a show about technology. But when the Catholic Church's newest leader makes the potential threat of AI to humanity his signature issue, we're going to talk about it. To do that, we're calling Margarita Stancati, a Rome-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She's part of a team of journalists who spoke to nearly 30 tech executives, clergymen, historians, and futurists about detailed conversations, often in secret, between the church and Silicon Valley.

Margarita, we'll dive into those conversations. But first, talk to us about how the simple act of choosing his papal name showed us how important tech is to Pope Leo XIV. Yeah, so when Cardinal Robert Prevost became pope, as pope, one of the first things you have to do is to choose a papal name. And he called himself Pope Leo XIV. And it was clear from almost immediately that it was an homage to the previous papal

Pope Leo XIII. So that was the first hint we got that he was concerned about social issues because Pope Leo XIII was known as the Pope of the workers. He shaped Catholic social doctrine. He was the Pope who stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age. Two days after Pope Leo XIV became Pope,

is when he used the term artificial intelligence for the first time. So Pope Leo XIV gathered all cardinals in this big hall in the Vatican and laid out what his priorities would be for his pontificate. And in that

speech, he explained why he chose that name. And he made it clear the link was with artificial intelligence, and specifically the social challenges that come with innovations in this field and how it could disrupt the labor force, and also human dignity more broadly.

I think it may be a bit of a revelation to some listeners that this relationship between the Vatican and Silicon Valley is actually not new at all. Just walk us through how Silicon Valley has really made inroads in recent years with the pope.

So it may be surprising that Silicon Valley and the Vatican have this kind of decades-long relationship, but it's something that really emerged under the pontificate of Leo's predecessor, Pope Francis. Now, Pope Francis...

was not tech savvy at all. When he met Microsoft President Brad Smith in 2019, he didn't really know who he was. But as he began having these conversations with tech executives, he was quite quick to grasp the potential of artificial intelligence, both the positive potential, but he was also acutely aware and concerned about

about how disruptive it could be. So he started meeting tech executives more and more. And as he did so, he formulated quite clear ideas on artificial intelligence. And you mentioned

the current Pope's focus on the social impact of technology. Obviously, it's developing at such a rapid pace. And as you mentioned, the Catholic Church's recent focus has really been on inequality, inclusivity, and humanity. And with the rise of AI, it's turned or developed to include tech ethics, which is a central issue behind a Vatican push for a binding international treaty on AI. How is that going over

with the industry? The only reason the Vatican is really involved in these conversations at all is because the Vatican has been grappling with ethical issues for hundreds of years. And those issues in the past have been around a topic such as abortion or euthanasia. So when you

artificial intelligence began to emerge, the Vatican in some ways was actually well equipped to deal with the ethical and moral aspects of this technology, what it meant for humanity. The dialogue has been friendly, but the two sides have views that only partly overlap, specifically when it comes to how the industry should be regulated.

The Vatican is very clear that ultimately it would like to see binding international regulations on artificial intelligence. And that is something that some tech CEOs don't want. There are companies that do support voluntary ethical guidelines, such as the ones that the Vatican helped draft a few years ago, and see them maybe as preferable to top-down regulation, such as

the EU AI Act that is being gradually rolled out. So there is this mutual understanding that there should be some ethical principles guiding the evolution of this technology, and that competitors should be bound to these guidelines. The question is whether it should be about self-regulation or top-down regulation or something in between. And this is where

We will see some tensions between the Vatican and the tech industry. And in some ways, we have already seen that. Does it seem as though Pope Leo will be more aggressive in pushing for this than his predecessor was? He's in a watching and listening mode. So the Vatican is hosting a conference on AI this week. The Pope is expected to deliver a written message. It's very clear that Pope Leo is picking up

where Francis left off. But how exactly he plans to use his moral authority to influence how tech companies will think and develop AI still remains to be seen. That was Margarita Stancati, a journalist based in Rome for The Wall Street Journal. Coming up, Oracle is launching a new program that'll provide a path for small tech companies to work with the U.S. Defense Department. But what's in it for Oracle? We'll have that story after the break. ♪

No matter the industry, how businesses connect with customers defines their brand. And today, connection starts with a conversation. Sierra is the AI platform for businesses that want to provide better, more human customer experiences. With Sierra, your AI agent solves problems fast. No endless hold music.

No canned responses. Please press one. No frustration. Just better customer experiences built on Sierra. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.

Businesses of all stripes crave the best access to the biggest clients. Now, Oracle has a program called the Oracle Defense Ecosystem that aims to grant America's small tech companies better access to a really big customer, the Pentagon. Bell Lynn, a reporter for WSJ's CIO Journal, wrote exclusively about that plan. Bell, how will this new initiative work?

Oracle says that there are such a plethora of issues that smaller companies have to go through in order to sell to the DoD. I've heard that selling to the Defense Department has been compared to going through this Bible full of

obscure procurement law and issues that they have to pass through. And so it's been a long time coming that there's some easier way to sell to the DoD, but it's not been easy to get through all of the procurement processes so far. So the smaller tech companies that want to do more business with the government will have better access, as you write, to cutting edge technology. What kind of technology are we talking about here? Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. We're talking about things like AI. We're talking about geospatial mapping. We're talking about quantum security. So these are all types of technologies that are really more found in the startup ecosystem. And startups don't quite have the same sort of structural advantages that the big prime contractors, the big defense contractors typically have when selling to the Pentagon. Is this essentially...

Oracle giving its stamp of approval to these technologies. What does Oracle stand to gain from some of this? Because it says that it's providing the financial backing for those smaller companies to do it. Yeah, Oracle really does present this program as a win-win for the Pentagon and for the companies that it's helping. But at the same time, like their executives told me, it's not a charity. And so they are really aiming to entrench their cloud platform within the DoD's sort of technology ecosystem. And so they're really aiming to entrench their cloud platform within the DoD's sort of technology ecosystem.

Oracle already has this major cloud contract along with a number of other cloud players like Amazon and Microsoft and Google with the Pentagon. And so it's sort of already within the ecosystem, but it wants to further entrench its cloud platform because it wants these smaller companies to build on its cloud platform and then sell to the Pentagon in return.

If we zoom out a little bit, Oracle isn't really alone in this strategy to want to grow its business with the Defense Department. The Journal has reported that other tech giants are sending their chief technology officers to join a new Army Corps to advise on AI. So what is fueling this trend of private businesses wanting to be more entrenched with the DOD and the government?

Yeah, in particular, it's a lot of technology companies that see their opportunity to be out in front of being sort of patriotic and selling to DoD under that lens. Some of it is also a bit of...

sort of reversal of the past few years and the previous administrations where you had a lot more sort of left-leaning techies who opposed the selling of their company's technologies to the government, especially for defense and military purposes. And so what you see now is this reversal where you have this culturally rightward shift in Silicon Valley, but at the same time,

The executives who are in charge are proudly saying, we now sell our technologies to the government. We're very patriotic and America first. And so there is this sort of underlying ethos of wanting to sell to DoD for the purposes of putting America first. That really wasn't quite there when there were different administrations in charge.

But I guess there's the flip side of this Trump coin, which is that the president, as we know, has worked very closely with Elon Musk to start this Department of Government Efficiency, which has for the last several months been slashing government contracts. Is something like what Oracle is doing now to connect small tech with the DoD at risk from Doge in the future? I had the same questions for Oracle. And in their point of view, they're

What they're doing is very much in line with what Doge wants, which is to eliminate these longstanding contracts with established contractors, with established consultants, and to introduce an easier way of selling to the government, to cut through the red tape, if you will. But it sort of remains to be seen whether this program will actually do that.

That was Belle Lynn, a reporter for WSJ's CIO Journal. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show is produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Victoria Craig. Additional support this week from Melanie Roy. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Tinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

No matter the industry, how businesses connect with customers defines their brand. And today, connection starts with a conversation. Sierra is the AI platform for businesses that want to provide better, more human customer experiences. With Sierra, your AI agent solves problems fast. No endless hold music.

No canned responses. Please press one. No frustration. Just better customer experiences built on Sierra. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.