The Vatican’s “AI Monopolies” Talk Risks Encouraging Bad Tech Policy | Blogs

Source Domain: itif.org

Earlier this week, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV issued his much-anticipated encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which lays out the Pontiff’s position on a wide range of issues related to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of the Catholic social thought tradition. In so doing, Magnifica Humanitas raises a number of complex and important questions that encompass not just the technological, theological, and moral spheres, but also politics, law, and economics—including the extent to which it is “necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power” in the age of AI. But the encyclical’s discourse surrounding concentrated technological power risks reinforcing calls for heavy-handed AI regulation that are difficult to justify given the competitive and fast-moving nature of today’s AI market.

Magnifica Humanitas speaks of “the new monopolies of AI” and “major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life,” calling for the “freeing technology from monopolistic control.” Of course, from a technical antitrust perspective, it is very difficult to identify any AI monopolies whatsoever: at the model level, entrants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek thrive even without the troves of proprietary data enjoyed by the large digital incumbents like Google, Meta, and Alibaba with whom they compete. At the resource-intensive cloud computing level, robust competition nonetheless exists not just between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, but also among IBM, Oracle, and other players. And, while Nvidia’s revolutionary AI chips have unsurprisingly given the company an edge, firms like Amazon and AMD are poised to compete.

Even in cases where AI firms may enjoy some market power, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, concentration is also driven by economies of scale—such as in cloud—and the need…

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