House lawmakers visit Vatican to discuss AI — and meet the pope
The visit comes as the Catholic Church, including Pope Leo XIV, has increasingly focused on the rapidly developing technology.
Pope Leo XIV speaks during an audience in the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican on 1 June 2026, for a meeting with members of the Italian Association of Catholic Guides and Scouts of Europe (Photo by TIZIANA FABI / AFP via Getty Images)
Pope Leo XIV speaks during an audience in the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican on 1 June 2026, for a meeting with members of the Italian Association of Catholic Guides and Scouts of Europe (Photo by TIZIANA FABI / AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images
By Owen Dahlkamp
08/13/2026 07:51 PM EDT
A bipartisan House delegation met with top Vatican officials on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence during a visit that briefly included Pope Leo XIV, according to two people with knowledge of the trip granted anonymity to disclose details of the private meetings.
The delegation’s visit, which has not been previously reported, included eight lawmakers and was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the person said. Committee member Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and California Rep. Ro Khanna, the panel’s top Democrat, led the trip. A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.
Khanna said it meant guarding against a concentration of power in which “a few billionaires can make decisions about data and algorithms.”
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/13/house-lawmakers-vatican-ai-01037241
Isn’t very strange and concerning that the meeting was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party?
What Really Happens If China Wins the AI Race?
Many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America’s nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024. Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used to create “engineered humans,” akin to Marvel’s Captain America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/what-if-china-wins-ai-race/688256/
Pope Leo XIV says control of artificial intelligence must not remain in the hands “of a few” while warning that technology is fueling world conflicts
The next China shock will come from open-source AI
Countries adopting Chinese models will also absorb Chinese standards and governance
President Xi Jinping positioned China as a champion of low-cost, open-source AI. He framed this as a global public good in contrast with the US alternative.
Although Xi used the term kaiyuan, which translates as “open source”, Chinese AI models should be more accurately described as open weight. Their model weights are publicly available, but the full training data is not.
The original China shock came with the manufacturing revolution that followed the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization. China shock 2.0 was the cleantech wave of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. China shock 3.0 has been the diffusion of Chinese digital technology, from ecommerce to recent AI models. China shock 4.0, now on the horizon, will be quite different. It will be based not only on the export of Chinese technology but on China’s approach to innovation as a national project.
https://www.ft.com/content/2f705a5a-2c4e-4bca-b08a-ed9372ef3b2e
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