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Jun 1, 2026 50 min

The Pope has AI Takes

from ChinaTalk Hosted by Jordan Schneider

Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means. Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria. We discuss… Why the encyclical's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role mediating between the US and China and speaking for the global South Tim's pitch for a Vatican alignment lab that buys GPUs and tries to beat Anthropic's benchmarks from Christian first principles Why frontier-lab researchers, including non-believers, are treating the Pope as a moral coordinating signal How Anthropic drifting from deontology toward virtue ethics in training Claude looks like a validation of the Christian approach The provocation underneath all of it: is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack? pope as chicago footwork: https://suno.com/s/1Qb9Ce3Bh6saeF2V

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This episode was published on June 1, 2026.

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