So, Pope Leo XIV just released his first official encyclical called "Magnifica Humanitas," and the entire thing is dedicated to AI. He's basically calling for the total "disarmament" of artificial intelligence and saying we need to rip it away from big tech monopolies before it completely dominates society. It's pretty fascinating to see the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics take such a direct shot at Silicon Valley.

The document is massive, about 42,300 words, and it covers a lot of ground. He completely condemns using AI in military tech, arguing that an algorithm can never morally justify a war. But he also gets into things you don't usually hear from religious figures, like the environmental toll of data centers burning through water and electricity, and what he calls "digital slavery" (referring to the exploited workers forced to do brutal content moderation and data labeling). His main philosophical point is that these AI models just mimic the human mind but are completely devoid of any real spiritual perspective. This is a huge shift from 2020, when the Vatican signed that pretty soft AI ethics declaration with Microsoft and IBM. This new text is way more aggressive.

Ultimately, this is the Vatican's first official doctrine of the generative AI era, and it's pretty clear it will set the tone for how they approach global tech regulation and digital ethics from here on out. What's wild is that Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, was actually at the Vatican for the official release event.

Source:https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pope-holy-war-artificial-intelligence

So let me get this straight. NVIDIA already controls the hardware you need to run AI. Now they’re partnering with Palantir, a company literally built on government surveillance contracts, to build what they’re calling an “AI Operating System.”

Think about what that means for a second. An operating system is the thing everything else runs on top of. You don’t opt out of it. You don’t compete with it. You just pay the toll and comply with its rules.

This isn’t a product launch. This is two companies trying to become the landlord of all of AI. Every startup, every enterprise, every government deployment would eventually be sitting on infrastructure these two entities control. NVIDIA takes the compute layer, Palantir takes the data and deployment layer, and together they’ve effectively boxed out anyone who doesn’t play ball with them.

And Palantir of all companies. The company with deep ties to intelligence agencies, a founder who openly talks about building systems for war, and a track record of selling data analytics tools to entities most people would find deeply uncomfortable. That’s who gets to co-own the foundation everything runs on?

People are out here worried about AI taking their jobs and the actual story is the infrastructure consolidation happening underneath all of it. When two private companies own the OS, they own the rules. They own the kill switch. They own the pricing. They own the access.

This should be front page news everywhere. Instead it’s a LinkedIn graphic.

So, the Director of AI from the US DoD is demoing Palantir's system, and honestly? It's terrifying. Not in a bad way. While we're asking AI how many R's are in "strawberry" and getting it wrong, the Pentagon's got a system that can probably see your cat from space and tell you what it had for breakfast. Same technology, completely different ambitions. Sort of humbling, really. Sort of makes you want to close your laptop and have a little lie down or to go for a walk in the park.

I've spent way too many hours on hold only to have a bot loop me back to the main menu, so "press 0 for a person" sounds like the bare minimum. Does this kill AI customer service, or does it just force companies to build bots that actually solve the problem?

Source: Semafor

Been watching this Salesforce situation develop for a while. Benioff confirmed on the All-In podcast that the company will spend around $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, mostly for internal coding work.

What's interesting isn't just the number - it's the whole picture:

• Hired zero software engineers since January 2025
• AI now handles 30 to 50% of overall company workload
• Cut support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 using agents
• Agentforce just hit $800M ARR, up 169% year on year

The money that used to go into payroll expansions is now going into token spend. That's a structural shift, not a cost-cutting round.

Source: https://www.techloy.com/marc-benioff-says-salesforce-will-spend-300-million-on-anthropic-tokens-this-year/

Full breakdown here if useful: https://youtu.be/WmZyStkMM1M

Is Salesforce the template everyone else follows, or is this specific to companies that already have AI-native products to sell?

He added that the abundance of wealth and resources in the AI era will even likely cause a labor shortage because many families will revert to single-income households, meaning one member won't have to work if they don't want to.
"You're not going to need to have a two-earner household. If you want it, fine. If you don't want to have it, one of the people might drop out," Bezos said. "It's going to be difficult to hire people, because the productivity in the economy will make it so that [if] people don't want to work two jobs, they won't have to."

What abundance of wealth? And resources?

Come on man!!!

Here is her actual quote from a press conference yesterday promoting her show. “The people who make this stuff are losers. They’re not artists. They’re not creative,” she said at the “Hacks” press conference last month at the London hotel in West Hollywood. “And they’ve wanted their whole lives to be special. And they’re not special. So, they’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. And even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard. You are a loser. You will never be cool. And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school. I wanna put your head in the toilet and flush.”

full interview here. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/hannah-einbinder-ai-creators-losers-1236706302/

When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead.

But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese patents suggests that framing misses the real story—and it’s a more unsettling one for the United States.

Harvard Business School’s Josh Lerner and his co-authors dug into who is actually filing the patents behind the 14 technology areas the Pentagon deems critical—advanced computing, space technology, AI, hypersonics and biotech. The answer: Chinese universities account for more than a quarter of the country’s inventions in those fields, 8x the U.S. rate at 3.3%, with state-owned enterprises and the government accounting for just 4%.  Fewer than one in 10 Chinese critical technology patents involve an inventor with U.S. work experience, undercutting the assumption that Beijing relies on returning U.S. talent for innovation.

Lerner told Fortune his team was “programmed” to expect a few large corporations like Huawei and Tencent to lead the charge on Chinese innovation through patents similarly to IBM and Samsung in the U.S. Instead, they found Chinese innovation in critical technologies “much more diverse—spread out across the parties,” with universities “more represented” there than anywhere else in the country’s patent system. That’s a reversal of the U.S. pattern, where academic patenting is “more of a sideshow.”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/china-us-ai-critical-technology/?utm_source=reddit/