Church officials urge ‘care for workers’ amid AI race

Leaders of artificial intelligence commissions at the Vatican and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) called on the technology industry not to pursue profit or victory in the AI race at the expense of workers.

In a Sept. 25 interview with Montse Alvarado on “EWTN News In Depth,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, who leads the Vatican’s Commission on AI, and San Jose Bishop Oscar Cantú, who heads the USCCB’s Task Force on Preserving Human Dignity formed in response Pope Leo XIV’s call for cooperation in Magnifica Humanitas , discussed how AI may reshape the workforce.

Two days before Czerny and Cantú spoke on “EWTN News In Depth,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made an urgent appeal to the U.N. Security Council for international standards to curb risks from rapid AI development.

Czerny said: “Catholic social teaching says that companies, that investors and management, owe care to the workers.”

“They are not to be used, exploited simply as part of the production process,” Czerny continued. “They are not just cogs in the machine, they are human beings who are living out their dignity in this very, very important field of work.”

He called leaders in…