Catholic AI experts say calls for AI slowdown worth heeding

Catholic artificial intelligence experts say the Church should listen to technology leaders calling for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence.

Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, described the warnings from industry leaders as reasonable and overdue. Sanders leads the firm behind Magisterium AI, a Catholic answer engine trained on authoritative Church teaching. Brian Patrick Green, a member of a Vatican working group on AI ethics and director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the judgment of those closest to the technology should be respected.

The calls for a slower development pace come from several industry figures, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk. Approximately 1,400 employees from frontier AI companies have signed a statement requesting that the U.S. government support international efforts to pace the development of automated AI.