Paolo Benanti, the Vatican's go-to adviser on artificial intelligence, says the industry's favorite doomsday debate is a distraction from a more urgent question: how a handful of AI labs are actually behaving.
In an interview with WIRED, Benanti said the ongoing hysteria over whether a godlike AI could destroy humanity is pulling attention away from public debate over how the technology should be governed right now. He described the behavior of the biggest AI labs as resembling a cartel. Benanti has built a reputation as the Vatican's point person on AI ethics, a role that puts him in conversation with both religious and technical audiences. His framing treats existential-risk talk not as wrong, necessarily, but as a convenient distraction from harder, nearer-term oversight questions.
That's a pointed break from how the AI industry usually frames its own safety debate, where warnings about human extinction tend to dominate headlines while questions about how leading labs actually operate get comparatively little scrutiny. If a Vatican adviser is now describing lab behavior as cartel-like, it suggests concerns about concentration and coordination among AI's biggest players are spreading beyond antitrust circles and into moral and religious institutions. That widens the pool of people asking who really sets the terms for how this technology develops.
Doomsday talk is easier to argue about than market concentration - which may be exactly the point Benanti is making.