Silicon Valley Wants to Woo the Pope on Matters of AI

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The tech revolution drove Pope Leo XIV’s decision to select his papal name, and gave the world a glimpse of his priorities leading the Catholic Church. WSJ reporter Margherita Stancati discusses the long-running dialogue between Silicon Valley and the Vatican. Plus, Oracle is lending a hand to small tech companies that want to do business with the U.S. government. WSJ CIO reporter Belle Lin brings us the exclusive details of a new program, and what’s in it for the multinational tech giant. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:33.9	Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, June 20th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal.
0:39.6	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.
0:47.8	Then, selling technology to the Department of Defense isn't easy. We'll explain how Oracle is linking small tech companies with the government.
1:00.0	But first, it's not often we talk about the Pope on a show about technology, but when the Catholic
1:05.4	Church's newest leader makes the potential threat of AI to humanity his signature issue. We're going to talk about it.
1:12.1	To do that, we're calling Margarita Stancati, a Rome-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
1:16.7	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.
1:28.1	Margarita will dive into those conversations, but first, talk to us about how the simple act
1:33.0	of choosing his papal name showed us how important tech is to Pope Leo the 14th.
1:38.3	Yeah, so when Cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope, as Pope, one of the first things you have to do is to choose
1:47.3	a papal name. And he called himself Pope Leo the 14th. And it was clear from almost immediately
1:54.0	that it was an homage to the previous Pope Leo the 13th. So that was the first hint we got that he was concerned about social issues,
2:04.8	because Pope Leo the 13th was known as the Pope of the workers. He shaped Catholic's social doctrine.
2:12.3	He was the Pope who stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age. Two days after Pope Leo the 14th became Pope,
	...

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