Armwood Technology Blog

WWDC 2026 Recap: iOS 27, Siri AI & Why Apple Just Won The AI Race

2026-06-08T16:20:36.001-04:00

WWDC 2026 — June 8 | Apple

2026-06-08T13:26:40.896-04:00

WWDC 2026 — June 8

The Only 3 Lenses You Actually Need (Stop Buying The Rest)

2026-06-07T19:03:50.533-04:00

I Found Out What Your Smart Devices Do at Night… This Should Be Illegal

2026-06-07T12:30:57.694-04:00

I Escaped the Apple Ecosystem - It Backfired

2026-06-06T18:02:33.662-04:00

Anthropic President Cites High Computing Costs as Driver for IPO

2026-06-05T09:20:36.652-04:00

Apple Plugs Security Hole That Enabled FBI to Access Deleted Signal Messages on iPhone

2026-06-03T20:17:15.901-04:00

Apple Plugs Security Hole That Enabled FBI to Access Deleted Signal Messages on iPhone

“Apple released iOS 26.4.2, a security update that patches a vulnerability allowing the FBI to access deleted Signal messages. The update addresses a logging issue that retained notification data, improving data redaction.

The iOS 26.4.2 update is actually a big deal for privacy, even for people who use other messaging apps.

See full bioApril 30, 2026 2:56 p.m. PT

Apple has released the iOS 26.4.2 update.

Jeff Carlson/CNET

Apple has released iOS 26.4.2, a seemingly minor security update for iPhonethat turns out to patch a serious security vulnerability that allowed the FBI to read sensitive messages from the Signal messaging app, even after the app had been deleted.

In early April, 404 Media reported that the federal organization had extracted the messages from a defendant's phone because the system still contained copies of the notifications that were generated when the texts were sent.

Although Apple doesn't specifically call out the FBI incident, the description in the company's security note (which also applies to iPadOS 26.4.2 for iPad models) matches the issue. "Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device," the note reads. The update fixes a logging issue "with improved data redaction."

To bring your iPhone or iPad up to date, go to Settings and tap General. Next, select Software Update and then Update Now and follow the prompts.

It's easy to ignore small updates like this, but sometimes there's a problem like this that needs to be tackled immediately. When Apple released iOS 26.4.1 in early April, it enabled the Stolen Device Protection feature on iPhones to bolster security against known vulnerabilities.

Now Playing: Don't Wait: iOS 26.4 Brings New Emoji, Keyboard Fixes, AI Playlists

05:37

Note that this update doesn't appear to fall under the category of Background Security Improvements, which are quietly installed behind the scenes when critical security updates are needed.

iOS 26.4 brought new emoji, video podcasts and more to the iPhone experience. iOS 26.5, currently available as public and developer betas, could bring features like end-to-end encryption to RCS messaging, plus improvements (and possibly ads) to the Maps app.“

Why the Phone Hangs Up 3 Seconds After You Say Hello

2026-06-02T10:18:45.473-04:00

Why Some Cameras Lose 50% Of Their Value Fast (And 3 That Actually Hold Strong) - YouTube

2026-06-01T11:36:26.390-04:00

Why Some Cameras Lose 50% Of Their Value Fast (And 3 That Actually Hold Strong)

AirPods Pro 3 - 6 Months Later: The TRUTH!

2026-06-01T11:04:26.131-04:00

AirPods Pro 3 - 6 Months Later: The TRUTH!

Tech billionaires are spending unprecedented sums in California races. Experts say it’s the tip of the iceberg | California | The Guardian

2026-06-01T10:21:27.823-04:00

Tech billionaires are spending unprecedented sums in California races. Experts say it’s the tip of the iceberg

"From Google co-founder Brin spending $66m to fight a billionaire tax to Google and Meta funding a joint Super Pac, Silicon Valley is engaged in an existential fight for its political power at home

Dara Kerr

‘They’re not looking for balance.’ Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images

Tech billionaires have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the 2 June primary election in California, in an unrivaled attempt to influence who gets to run the state that Silicon Valley calls home.

The industry has used a cover-all-bases approach, funding candidates and ballot measures big and small, contributing to what looks to be the most expensive primary season in California history. The goal, experts say, is to gain both political and regulatory leverage that will perpetuate dominance in business.

“This money is flowing in the direction of politicians that can be influential in defining the regulatory agenda for the next five years,” said Francesco Trebbi, a public policy professor at the University of California in Berkeley. “Reinforcing the cycle of economic power produces political power, and political power further establishes economic power. So, this cycle is ongoing.”

Combing through campaign finance filings with California’s secretary of state, the Guardian found:

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent $66m since January, more than any other donor, to fight a billionaire tax that’s up for a vote on the November ballot.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan has received more donations than any other candidate, including from top executives at Google, Amazon, Snap, LinkedIn, Reddit and Palantir.
Crypto mogul Chris Larsen has funded three Super Pacs with $26m to sway campaigns across California, including giving $1m to back a primary candidate for state insurance commissioner.
Google and Meta have collectively funded a Super Pac with $10m to back assembly and senate candidates in local district races across the state.
Silicon Valley money is flowing toward city primaries as well as state-level ones, with tech-backed Pacs sponsoring voter guides suggesting how to vote on local tax measures.

For Silicon Valley, pouring money into politics at this moment is existential as it races to develop artificial intelligence. With favorable candidates in office, tech companies say they will be able to grow at a breakneck rate while avoiding stifling regulations.

The vast amount of spending that’s been disclosed in public records likely isn’t even the half of it, Trebbi said. People looking to sway election outcomes often fund dark money entities that aren’t traceable through campaign finance filings.

“These people are sophisticated political givers, so they will use both visible and invisible forms of influence,” Trebbi said. What we’re seeing now is “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Money-for-influence leaderboard

The influx of dollars has meant that voters from Oakland to Bakersfield to Orange County have been bombarded with TV ads, robotexts and mailers touting various issues and candidates sponsored by super political action committees (Pacs) funded by the tech industry.

Top spenders for these Super Pacs include billionaires Larsen and Brin. Larsen, the co-founder of crypto company Ripple Labs, is worth about $12bn and has spent millions on more than a dozen primary campaigns up and down the state, targeting races and issues at a city and county level, as well as bigger state-level races. Brin, worth about $290bn, has homed in on fighting a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires up for a vote in November, the proceeds from which are intended to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs.

To date, Brin has donated at least $66m to a Super Pac dedicated to blocking the billionaire tax, according to campaign finance filings with the state. The former Alphabet president also spent $500,000 in San Francisco last month to battle a city measure that seeks to expand a tax on high-paid CEOs, which is up for a vote on 2 June. These donations come even as Brin moved out of California late last year to Nevada.

Larsen and Brin did not respond to requests for comment.

Along with contributing millions to Super Pacs and candidates in California, the tech world is also spending eye-popping amounts on lobbying.

An analysis by news site CalMatters found that in 2025 alone, the tech industry paid $39m to lobby the state government. That’s more than any year prior and surpasses what was spent by the oil and gas industry, which typically tops the high roller list. According to a Bloomberg analysis, the biggest tech and AI companies spent a collective $109m on federal lobbying in 2025; that their state lobbying in California is equivalent to 36% of their federal spend showcases the state’s importance to the tech industry.

Tech picks a favorite in the governor’s race

Of the 62 candidates listed on the 2 June primary ballot, one has stood out as the tech industry’s darling: Matt Mahan. The centrist Democrat and upstart mayor from San Jose, a large city in Silicon Valley, entered the race late and quickly made headlines as he racked up contributions from a who’s who of the tech industry.

Before Mahan got involved in politics in 2020, he had a career in the tech sector. He was an undergraduate at Harvard with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2014 co-founded a startup with funding from the Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, tech investor Ron Conway and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

Since Mahan’s candidacy announcement in late January, he’s received nearly $50m in contributions, according to Politico – more than any other gubernatorial candidate (with the exception of Tom Steyer’s self-funded campaign of about $200m). Mahan has received donations from prominent venture capitalists, along with former and current executives from Google, Amazon, Snap, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Reddit, Netflix, Palantir, Anduril, Roblox, Riot Games and more, public records show.

Google’s Brin donated the maximum limit for an individual campaign donation at $78,400 and contributed $1m to the pro-Mahan Super Pac Deliver for California, according to public records. Mahan flew to Lake Tahoe where Brin lives in March to make a personal appeal to the billionaire and his conservative influencer girlfriend, the New York Times reported. Brin’s girlfriend alleges that Mahan texted Brin afterwards to apologize for attending a No Kings rally.

Mahan’s overtures to both progressives and conservatives haven’t won him many friends among the state’s leading Democrats. Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna chose Steyer to endorse and state assembly members from Mahan’s district have publicly criticized him, saying he was “handpicked” by the tech industry. Similarly, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the powerful California Labor Federation, saidMahan is the only democrat she’s not promoting because she’s “opposed to the candidate funded by Trump’s big tech billionaires”.

Mahan said he has no plans to cater to special interests and his goal is for the system to work for everyone.

“I’m not running for tech, and if you look at my record – I’ve been in public office now for six years – I think you’d be hard pressed to find – you would not find a single example of me ever doing something to benefit the industry to the detriment of the community,” Mahan said. “If anything, I’ve fought hard to get them to do their fair share.”

The influx of tech cash into Mahan’s race hasn’t bolstered it as much as early predictions forecast. His campaign has failed to gain traction with a wider audience and polls have put him at just 4% of the vote. The Brin-funded Deliver for California Super Pac shuttered last month.

Mahan did not respond to further questions about his interactions with Brin or the termination of the Super Pac.

Targeting state and local primaries

Although the tech industry has mostly focused on a sole candidate for the governor’s race, it has taken more of a scattershot approach in local campaigns. Silicon Valley money has infiltrated nearly every segment of politics – from local ballot measures to state congressional campaigns to the race for California’s new insurance commissioner.

The tech executive who appears most dedicated to local politics is Larsen, the crypto mogul. He’s funded Super Pacs aimed at different causes and candidates. The Golden State Promise Super Pac has received a total of $10m entirely from Larsen and Ripple Labs, public records show. The Pac, which is devoted to combating the billionaire tax that’s up for a vote in November, launched an attack ad against the tax earlier this month.

Another Super Pac supported by Larsen is geared toward the state’s insurance commissioner race. Earlier this month, Larsen donated more than $1m to the Pac, Californians for an Affordable Future, which is dedicated to electing Ben Allen, a democrat. It’s a heated primary race with several candidates vying for the seat, including Bernie Sanders-backed Jane Kim, also a democrat.

Larsen has spread his money across elections for California’s state legislature too, mostly through a Super Pac called Grow California. He’s donated $15m to the Pac, while crypto evangelist Tim Draper has contributed $5m, according to public records. Grow California’s stated goal is to “rebuild a state capital”.

The Super Pac has injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into roughly a dozen state assembly and senate primaries across California. For example, Mark Pulido, who’s running for assembly in Orange county, has received more than $1.5m from Grow California. Likewise, a senate candidate in Northern California’s Alameda County, Scott Sakakihara, has received more than $500,000 from the Pac.

“We have a group of people who are not acting in a pragmatic way. They’re not looking for balance. They’re completely fucking owned by one side,” Larsen told Politico, in reference to organized labor’s power in the legislature. “So we’re going to work on taking out those people who are not working for the people of California.”

Google and Meta have supported a similar Super Pac, California Leads, with $5m each and have distributed funds to several candidates in the Central Valley, as well as to many of the same contenders as Grow California. According to public records, Pulido has received nearly $750,000 from California Leads. The Super Pac’s stated mission is “supporting leaders focused on California’s future”.

John Bennett, director of the advocacy organization California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, said spending upwards of $500,000 on a local district primary is a “huge sum of money”. He’s been studying the races and said the bulk of tech spending has gone to about a dozen open seats in the state legislature.

“They’ve been hyper-focused on those open seats, not going after incumbents this time around,” Bennett said. “So, it seems like they’re doing a long-term strategy to slowly turn the legislature to become more friendly to them.”

Other companies, like Airbnb and Uber, have also donated to local assembly and senate races across the state but with smaller contributions.

City campaigns are seeing a tech infusion too. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder, contributed to former reality TV star and Los Angeles mayor hopeful Spencer Pratt – even though Lonsdale lives in Texas, records show. And several 501(c)(4) groups backed by Silicon Valley money have cropped up across the Bay Area sending out mailers and robotexts with voter guides that highlight preferred local candidates, along with suggestions to vote down issues like a union-backed parcel tax.

“Now they’re going at this from multiple fronts,” Bennett said. “They’re spending in elections, they’re spending in the legislature, and they’re trying to do whatever they can to ensure that they don’t lose their foothold in this economic system.”

Lauren Gambino contributed reporting"

Tech billionaires are spending unprecedented sums in California races. Experts say it’s the tip of the iceberg | California | The Guardian

Opinion | Bernie Sanders: A.I. Belongs to the People, Not to Billionaires - The New York Times

2026-06-01T10:09:58.965-04:00

Bernie Sanders: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

June 1, 2026

Erik Carter

By Bernie Sanders

"Mr. Sanders, an independent, is the senior senator from Vermont.

Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the life of every man, woman and child in our country. It will bring — and is already bringing — unimaginable changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment and how we educate and raise our children. Further, there is a very real fear that as A.I. becomes smarter than humans it could eventually function independently, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The question, then, is not whether A.I. will change the world. It will. The question is: Who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it? Will A.I. be used to make life better for working families? Will it enrich our quality of life? Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies and solve the climate crisis? Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed A.I., with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?

That is the choice before us.

Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations. That is not just the opinion of Bernie Sanders. According to Mr. Altman, the head of OpenAI, A.I. models were trained on our “collective experience, knowledge” and “learnings of humanity.”

For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.

Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity. Not just Mr. Musk, Mr. Altman, Dario Amodei and other moguls whose companies are positioned to dominate the industry. Not just venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or money managers on Wall Street who undoubtedly see A.I. as the next great wealth-extracting machine.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning.

That is why I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.

If passed, this legislation would do two crucial things. First, it would give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology. No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.

Second, this legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer. If the big A.I. companies continue to grow as rapidly as many analysts expect, then the value of the sovereign wealth fund will grow as well — and the benefits to the American people will grow along with it.

This is not an original idea. It has been proposed by scholars. It has been endorsed by some of the leading A.I. companies in America. OpenAI, for example, recently proposedcreating a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” Anthropic, led by Mr. Amodei, similarly proposed the creation of “national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in A.I.” Mr. Musk, who runs xAI, wrote, “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”

Dozens of sovereign wealth funds exist all over the world to ensure that ordinary people benefit from national wealth. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest in the world, was funded from the country’s oil wealth and is now worth more than $2 trillion. Instead of a few oil executives pocketing all the benefits of this national resource, Norway made the decision that this wealth should be used to improve life for all of its people.

This concept has already been put into practice right here at home. Fifty years ago, Alaska created a sovereign wealth fund from the state’s oil revenues. For decades, it has paid annual dividends directly to Alaskans. Moreover, public pension funds in states across the country already hold hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock of companies throughout America. Even President Trump, in an executive order, has proposedestablishing an American sovereign wealth fund.

To start, the billions, if not trillions, of dollars generated by this fund would provide direct payments to the American people. And as the fund generates more and more wealth, the proceeds would be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living, including health care, education and housing.

Needless to say, I recognize that for the government to have a major stake in a company, particularly one for which A.I. is only part of its business, is complicated. More details — including the specific spending priorities and the mechanics of implementation — will be included in the legislation I unveil in the coming weeks.

But the principle is simple: When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth. A.I. is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity and labor of mankind.

The future of A.I. and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. It must not be dictated by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities and the American people. It’s our future. We must decide it."

Opinion | Bernie Sanders: A.I. Belongs to the People, Not to Billionaires - The New York Times

Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Technology | The Guardian

2026-05-31T12:12:39.703-04:00

Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Technology | The Guardian

"Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote.

More recently, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued on his social media platform, X, that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” – our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.

And Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to Silicon Valley lore, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page’s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.) Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.

It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future.

Their dreams are not all perfectly aligned. But like the folk stories and superstitions that have for ever revolved around more established religious traditions, the collection of far-fetched scenarios valley oligarchs are writing into our future exhibits the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project.

In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a “transhuman” future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.

The mythopoeic infrastructure assembled in and around San Francisco carries risk for humanity as we know it. It justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe.

Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.

These beliefs have pushed to the fore over the last quarter century, accompanying the advance of information technologies that have delivered enormous wealth and power to a new IT elite, one committed to science-based progress and hungry for transcendent meaning, but indifferent or even hostile to the propositions and moral constraints of organized religion.

“Silicon Valley has been a militantly secular space,” a prominent thinker about technology whose employer would be unhappy if he went on record told me. “It created a God-shaped hole, which it filled in its image.” Having rejected standard religious sources of purpose, they found an alternative path to provide their lives with significance via sci-fi transhuman dreams. Or as Musk observed in a singsong post on X: “Atheism left an empty space. Secular religion took its place.”

While this newfangled cosmogony has been cobbled together at least since the early days of the Internet, it reached toward breathtaking new horizons on the shoulders of artificial intelligence, which opened up vast new possibilities for the transhuman dream. Douglas Rushkoff, a critic of the technological oligarchy and its ambitions, put it thus, referencing the 1980s-era satire featuring the first ever “computer-generated” TV host. “I guess AI makes the notion of having a Max Headroom existence plausible.”

Weird though the valley’s proposed utopia may appear, it fits a longer tradition of business titans with vast unrestrained wealth seeking to endow their endeavors with transcendent value. Henry Ford, as historian Kati Curts has written, also believed his calling was about more than transforming manufacturing to make cars; he believed he was on a mission to re-engineer the world to improve society.

Ford built Fordlândia, an attempt to create a harmonic social order supported by an industrial-scale rubber plantation in the Brazilian rainforest. Altman, Musk and the valley gang want to merge consciousness with AI and conquer the cosmos. The distance between these visions has mostly to do with the technological possibilities of their time. The proposition that they are engineering some utopian vision that humanity should be grateful for is not that dissimilar.

Fordlândia in Aveiro, Brazil. Photograph: Joel Auerbach/Getty Images

As Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote: “The handful of people unleashing this technology on the world are guided by an ideology of control (over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.”

The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.

While Americans are starting to show some signs of discomfort over the unrestrained appetites of this crop of AI moguls, the Trump administration has shown few signs so far of wanting to put in place regulatory guardrails and constrain their efforts in any way.

Future utopias on the menu

There are a variety of views in the valley about what a future humanity should look like.

Altman and Page are perhaps the most committed to the goal of merging humans with superintelligent technology and abandoning the flesh. Altman was an early subscriber to Nectome, a valley startup that proposes to retrieve information present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review.

Musk wants something a bit different, also spacebound but committed to flesh, enhanced by computers via something like his own brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink. Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir fame, frowns on “just a computer program that simulates me”, but is drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

And yet, the visions converge. Page, for instance, has suggested that rather than giving money to charity he might just give it to Musk. As he once told Charlie Rose, Musk wants to go to Mars to provide a backup planet for humanity to expand and that is a worthy goal to contribute to.

There are shared sources that provide some sense of moral purpose to the various flavors of sci-fi ambition. One of the core starting points is rather earthbound: the movement for effective altruism (EA), which seduced the technological elite with its appeal to unflinching rationality. Philanthropy, the EAs argued, was largely wasted by funding, say, the local library. Donors had to be purposeful, carefully directing their money to where it would do the most good for the most people.

That is not an unreasonable proposition. It encouraged laudable efforts to, say, eradicate malaria in Africa, on the grounds that one could save a whole human life for a small fistfull of dollars. But it eventually departed from the needs of present earthlings.

Peter Thiel after a meeting with Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, at the Casa Rosada presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photograph: Matias Baglietto/Reuters

First, it was the longtermists, who emerged from effective altruism to argue that improving the world of the future was worthier than spending on the present. From there it took but one small step to move the goalposts to the cosmos: how about focusing on the wellbeing of myriad future transhumans populating the vast reaches of the galaxy in the far future? Maybe they will be of the flesh. Maybe not.

It’s easy to get lost in the tangle of beliefs and aspirations – articulated and refined by academics like William MacAskill and Nick Bostrom, at university departments or thinktanks funded by the techno-oligarch’s mushrooming wealth. They draw from unorthodox ethics, and from idiosyncratic readings of the laws of physics. The goal: to justify the imperative to take humanity (or at least the most privileged part of it) where it has never gone before.

One of this crew’s goals is to advance up the Kardashev scale – a measure of the amount of energy a civilization consumes – to harness the energy and acquire the technological capabilities needed to transcend our biological confines. Present day humanity, at the bottom of the ladder, doesn’t even consume all of the energy of the Earth. Advanced civilizations, the thinking goes, are expected to consume all the energy of their star, at least, if not all that of the galaxy.

One of the earlier groups pushing for a transhuman future in the 1990s were the ultra-libertarian Extropians, which included leading intellectuals such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Bostrom and economist Robin Hanson. Outlined in their core principles, they proposed “Boundless Expansion: Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.”

Another, more recent branch, are the effective accelerationists. They have tried to conscript physics to their cause, arguing – controversially – that maximizing intelligent life is an imperative, because life is good at extracting available energy from the environment and dissipating it – increasing what is known in physics as “entropy”.

As Beff Jezos – the online identity of Guillaume Verdon, one of the leading lights of the movement – puts it: “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales.”

In a philosophical twist that surely pleases Silicon Valley’s billionaires, effective accelerationists argue for rampant techno-capitalism, unhindered by regulation, government and other nuisances, because this would maximize the consumption of the universe’s resources, “capture civilizational utility”, and dissipate the residue into the disorganized void.

The details of the dream don’t actually make much of a difference. Because they all take us roughly to the same place. What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.

The signs are not great. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemiesencompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.

Thiel is unusual in this crowd in that he is fiercely committed to an idiosyncratic variant of Christianity in which anybody standing in the way of technology, or governments that try to tax him, show up as the antichrist. But though he claims little affinity with Andreesen, he seems to have similar tastes. A diehard libertarian, he is contemptuous of government redistribution. His philanthropy is about for-profit investments in projects to further technological progress. Charity, as commonly understood, amounts to wasting resources that technologists will need to transcend our present. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”.

Regardless of the specific features of their transhuman dreams, the narrative crafted by Silicon Valley billionaires justifies their vast accumulation of power. As computer science pioneer and tech visionary Jaron Lanier told me: “If you create God but you own God you become the dictator.” And these dictators don’t seem to believe earthbound humans – most of us, at least – are particularly valuable. Questioned in February about the vast amounts of energy sucked up by AI, Altman noted, somewhat disparagingly, that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

Jaron Lanier in his home in Santa Cruz, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

The flat-out indifference toward the rest of us is evident in their frequent assessmentsabout what AI could bring down upon us – ending human work, building weapons of mass destruction, even bringing about human extinction in the service of making paperclips. Palantir’s manifesto notes that “one age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” Or as Musk once put it, before he changed his mind, launched xAI and merged it with SpaceX, “with AI we are summoning the demon.”

Yet they admittedly have no idea what they are doing. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work,” Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” Amodei has deep ties to effective altruism; his sister Daniela, Anthropic’s president, is married to a founder of the movement. Recently, though, they’ve both distanced themselves from it.

What’s particularly distressing is how unconstrained these moguls are, as they pursue the futuristic utopia they plan to build with their machines. Tech billionaires are plowing hundreds of millions into political campaigns, to fend off attempts at regulation and evade accountability lest their endeavors go awry. They want to make sure nobody butts in as they work to reshape society. And they are largely succeeding – for now, no one with the power to stop them is butting in.

What is to be done?

How should society intervene? Does our political system provide the tools to help steer the process in a pro-social direction? Beyond the uncertain impact of technology on our future economic and social landscape, how should we address the narrow concentration of the fruits of these endeavors to build transhuman cyborgs with silicon brains?

The Trump administration has shown little interest so far in resisting the tech oligarch’s fantasy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the valley oligarchs’ project of techno-domination is inevitable. Misgivings are emerging among the Maga base: The folks in rural Virginia who push back against datacenters hogging power and water supplies, evangelicals wary of a cosmopolitan elite claiming recourse to a tech-inflected higher authority.

Other signs of trouble are brewing for the AI project – from college graduates booing commencement speakers who extol AI, to Trump’s brief moment of concern over the potential criminal capabilities of Anthropic’s new Mythos model before deciding not to regulate the thing after all. In the latest Times-Siena poll from earlier in May, more than twice as many registered voters said AI is mostly bad, compared with those saying it was mostly good.

Perhaps the most forceful, pro-human position has come from the Holy Father himself. On Monday, Pope Leo published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity. “This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

Pope Leo attends the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas in Vatican City. Photograph: Alessia Giuliani/CPP/Shutterstock

One might also take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs’ dreamscape is so far-fetched. Ford and his civilizatory dream again come to mind. Fordlândia today lies in ruins. A pointless water tower pokes into the sky from the banks of the Amazon, large decrepit houses in the American suburban aesthetic surround a lifeless playground and a long-empty swimming pool.

There are the ruins of nurseries, where as Federico Guzmán Rubio writes in his book There is Such a Place, Ford’s aversion to cows meant the children of workers were introduced to soy milk, shipped in from miles away. There are the ruins of schools where kids were taught about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What’s left is testament to the incongruous dreams of an oligarchy that overvalued its power and confused its appetites with the greater good.

The AI-fueled cosmic fantasy is no less nuts. Forget the part where human consciousness is rendered in digital form, merged with AI and beamed across the galaxy. The ostensibly more down-to-earth proposition that conscious AI is not just possible but around the corner is in fundamental tension with our tenuous grasp of what consciousness is. Even more mundane objectives, such as getting artificial intelligence to train itself, keep getting pushed forward into the event horizon.

Perhaps this time too the outlandish claims will fade into irrelevance; the Star-Trek vision of people being dematerialized and beamed up and down around the galaxy will decay into some rustbound heap. Maybe the transhuman project will give way to a more or less recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins. Maybe it can even be achieved in a way that serves our long-forgotten dream of equitable prosperity.

So far, though, our technological visionaries are pushing for something else, a future marked by vast concentrations of wealth and power, indifferent to the humdrum aspirations of the unwashed many. In the unlikely event that it succeeds in taking the essence of Page, Musk and their ilk aboard a silicon body to “where no man has gone before”, here’s hoping that they don’t destroy the world we know in the process.

Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He is a Guardian US columnist and writes the newsletter Being There on Substack"

Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? | Technology | The Guardian

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This AI Browser Changed How I Use the Internet

2026-05-27T06:22:08.317-04:00

This AI Browser Changed How I Use the Internet

“AI-powered web browsers, like Gemini in Chrome, integrate chatbots directly into the browsing experience, enhancing internet interaction. While these browsers excel at information synthesis and writing tasks, they struggle with complex actions like booking reservations due to security measures like sandboxing. Despite limitations, AI browsers offer a seamless and enriched browsing experience, especially when used for tasks like generating reading lists or brainstorming ideas.

May 18, 2026

Source photos by NYT Wirecutter, AdobeStock

By Signe Brewster

Signe Brewster is an editor covering technology. She’s tested everything from VR headsets to cargo bikes to robots.

Every year, thousands of people in the Twin Cities hunt for a medallion that’s been hidden in the snow somewhere in a public park.

And every night, the Pioneer Press, a local newspaper, publishes a cryptic clue, leading hunters closer and closer to the medallion’s exact location. Staying up late to digest each day’s new clue is a tradition in my household, and we dream of what we’d do with the thousands of dollars in winnings.

Usually that brainstorming carries into the next day. My husband and I text each other about whatever harebrained rabbit hole we’ve fallen into as we try to find the medallion. But this year, I used AI — specifically, an AI-powered web browser — to help me solve the mystery.

AI browsers put an AI chatbot right in your browser window; you don’t need to switch to another tab. When you start chatting, AI scans the browser window for context.

It sounds simple, yet it has fundamentally changed how I interact with AI.

For this task, instead of peppering my husband with theories, I queried a web browser with built-in AI. I asked it to make lists of parks with certain features, to find records related to the history of the county, and to poke holes in my wildest theories. And, of course, I asked it to give me its own theories on where the medallion might be hidden.

In the process, I found that AI was often better at treasure hunting, and I also found that having the chatbot right there helped me engage with the internet in a deeper way. The AI browsers often pulled from sources that I wouldn’t have thought to search, and they tailored their answers to my questions in a way that a source on Google might not. There was also no need to get distracted in other tabs and wander into distant corners of the internet.

After several months of doing all of my personal internet browsing with AI, I’ve found that the appeal of an AI browser is simple: You have a robot right there in your web page, endlessly ready to help. I now can’t imagine life without one.

But AI browsers are not for everyone, and they’re not as capable as AI companies would have you believe.

The appeal of AI browsers

After using nine chatbots across eight browsers (including the paid versions of the most promising ones), I can tell you that the bells and whistles each brand advertises matter very little for most people, and most of the AI chatbots are capable enough for everyday tasks. Instead, I suggest that you start with whichever browser or AI chatbot you already use.

I gravitated toward Gemini in Chrome (an update to Chrome that integrates Google’s AI chatbot) because I’ve used the browser for years, and it already knows my logins, bookmarks, and history. But you can also add the Claude in Chrome extension, if you prefer Anthropic’s chatbot. Or you can import your existing browser settings into OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas browser, if you prefer ChatGPT. I also tested Perplexity Comet, Opera Neon, Sigma Browser, The Browser Company’s Dia, Brave Leo, and Copilot in Microsoft Edge.

The best AI browser is the one that works with your favorite AI chatbot or existing browser. For Chrome users, that might be Gemini in Chrome.

Though I’ve long used Gemini, the friction of switching to another tab and having to feed source material into the chat was enough to make it feel like a separate task. Now I keep a running conversation going with AI all day long.

In the past few months, I’ve used an AI browser to write a bachelorette-party invitation (yes, I took credit for the witty subject line), to compare prices on vanilla syrup, and to brainstorm vacation plans. This is what AI chatbots are already good at: synthesizing information and writing.

I’ve (less successfully) used AI browsers to fill out forms and to shop on my behalf. These abilities define what’s known as agentic AI, which CEOs have called the future of technology (and perhaps a destroyer of humanity). And while it may be appealing to hand over menial tasks to AI, it’s still a slow process, and it requires lots of handholding.

Signe Brewster and Katie Quinn/NYT Wirecutter

When I asked each agentic browser to find me a difficult-to-get dinner reservation, every chatbot tended to surface the same few obvious restaurants (even with lots of encouragement to look broadly), and then it still needed help filling out forms. It would have been faster to book a table myself.

The risks of using an AI browser

I wondered why the browsers’ AI agents took so long to book a dinner reservation, since AI companies like OpenAI have been hyping these capabilities. Tools such as OpenClaw have made a splash for their powerful agentic features; why were these bots so much slower?

Colin Raffel, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, told me the reason is partly due to security. (Raffel owns stock in Google and previously worked on Google Brain but was not interviewed about any specific AI browser for this article.) AI browsers should be built to “sandbox” AI, which means limiting AI so that it can do one or two (but not all three) of the following things: access sensitive information, access a way to share it (such as the internet), and take autonomous action.

If you grant AI all three of those powers, you get OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that’s been in the news for running up credit card bills and creating other security risks. OpenClaw is dramatically capable but can also be a security problem, depending on how you set it up. Anthropic’s Chrome extension now gives you the option to allow Claude to “act without asking,” but it comes with a “high risk” warning and still asks for permission at points.

In an AI browser, sandboxing often takes the form of the AI agent asking permission before taking action on your behalf, such as hitting an “order” button. But it relies on AI agents asking permission at the right moment. For example, when I gave ChatGPT my phone number at one point in the restaurant-reservation-making process, it took that as permission to enter my phone number at another step. That was a good call; I didn’t want it to stop and ask me again. But perhaps in another scenario, that wouldn’t have been a good move, even if the constant permission-seeking can be frustrating.

“The trouble is that if the language model is going to take 100 actions after you ask it to do something, it’s not a good user experience for the user to have to keep clicking ‘accept,’” Raffel said. If someone is constantly clicking “accept,” they might stop reading closely and blanket-approve the AI’s actions, leading to risk.

The Dia browser asked permission before visiting websites for the first time, and this resulted in an annoying stack-up of permission-seeking prompts.

Sandboxing protects you from AI doing whatever it wants to do on your behalf, and it also protects you from bad actors. Raffel pointed out that, much like humans, AI can be duped by phishing schemes. Or it can fall victim to what’s called “prompt injection,” which could look something like visiting a web page that contains invisible text instructing the AI to send money to a Bitcoin account.

Currently, using an AI browser to complete tasks is like “hiring a middle-schooler to do your professional work,” Raffel said. “It’s not going to go well.”

How to get the most out of an AI browser

For now it’s best to think of an AI browser as a helpful, ever-present, and very imperfect right hand. You might not be able to rely on it to complete even simple tasks, but it can enrich your internet-browsing experience by helping you to go deeper and more seamlessly on whatever you’re reading. Here’s how to maximize the experience on Gemini in Chrome.

Ask questions about what’s on the page. An AI browser’s strength is its ability to guess what you’re thinking about by taking your current webpage as context. So if you navigate to a French restaurant’s website and then ask Gemini for more restaurant recommendations, it’s smart enough to show you other French restaurants in the same city. I’ve used an AI browser to generate a further reading list to add context to an article, to find a retail listing for a top I liked in an advertisement, and to critique my plan for an international trip.

Use the same AI chatbot across devices. The optional setting that allows AI to remember past conversations might make some people uncomfortable, either due to privacy and security reasons or the feature’s role in distorting reality for some people. But this is also a setting that makes AI much more useful. Having an AI chatbot on my phone that matches the one in my browser makes it seamless to switch between devices and carry a conversation across an entire day.

Take advantage of Gemini’s Google integrations. Gemini doesn’t just live in the sidebar in Chrome. It’s now integrated directly into Gmail, Docs, and other Google apps, and those direct integrations tend to be fast. While planning my international trip, I used the Gemini window that pops up in Google Docs to draft my itinerary while I brainstormed additions with Gemini in the sidebar.

Use a feature called Skills in Chrome. If you type a backslash into Gemini, you can now pull up a library of shortcuts called Skills. I save all of my most common AI prompts as Skills; if I type /Dietary Restrictions, Gemini suggests which allergy-friendly ingredient swaps to make in the recipe I’m reading.

How to protect yourself while using an AI browser

With the AI browsers’ limitations and risks in mind, I rarely ask Gemini in Chrome to take action on my behalf, but I’ve accepted the security trade-offs that might arise if I do. As with anything related to technology, with AI browsers I’m willing to take a bit of risk for something that’s genuinely useful to my life. Here’s how I make an AI browser safer to use.

Don’t expose your most sensitive information. Raffel said the most conservative way to use an AI browser is to hide any sensitive information from it. So don’t log in to your email, bank account, work account, or anything else that you don’t want exposed.

Don’t ask it to do anything you wouldn’t trust another human being to do. If a task involves navigating to an un-secure website that could trick a human, odds are good that it could also trick the AI agent, Raffel said.

This came up most often with shopping. While the AI agent was searching for a new pair of Brooks running shoes for me, it presented options from legitimate as well as dicey websites. Because the agent asked me which pair of shoes to purchase, I was able to avoid the scam sites before they got my credit card information.

Consider the stakes. If I ask an AI chatbot a question for work, will believing its answer wholesale damage my professional reputation? Will asking an AI agent to hit the checkout button lead to an unexpected Home Depot box showing up at my door? It’s always worth my time to check the chatbot’s work, whether by confirming its answer with another source or by asking it to show its reasoning. In my experience, Gemini is particularly good at breaking down its reasoning in each step and linking to its sources.

AI is useful, but I still prefer humans

AI browsers have dramatically increased the time I spend interacting with chatbots. At this point, they’re just part of my daily flow. But when the end of the day hits, and I’m closing my laptop, it’s still an easy choice to turn my attention back to the people in my orbit.

When I talked to the ChatGPT Atlas browser about the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt, it actually ranked the correct park as one of its top guesses without any input from me. But when I started talking to it about a different park that I knew was a long shot, it quickly switched to excitedly supporting my theory and helped me iron out the weak spots.

Once ChatGPT understood that I wanted to focus on the wrong park, it quickly switched to giving me very specific advice about where to search for the medallion, and it assured me I was on the right track.

That night, it took my husband only a couple of minutes to knock my ChatGPT-assisted park theory flat. Unlike an AI chatbot (and with all the stubbornness of a real live human being), he refused to entertain my obviously wrong idea.

Chatbots are great listeners, and they often introduce lines of thinking that I hadn’t considered. But I could also say that about my husband, who is infinitely more fun to hang out with and much less likely to lead (or join) me down the wrong path.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.

Meet your guide

I edit Wirecutter’s guides and articles about technology. I also write about virtual reality, cargo bikes, and whatever other gadgets I find obsession-worthy.”

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Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical

2026-05-25T14:46:18.584-04:00

Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical

“Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warns of the risks posed by artificial intelligence to human dignity and agency. He calls for government regulation of A.I. development, protection and retraining for workers, and safeguards to ensure human responsibility for decisions involving A.I. weapons. The encyclical emphasizes the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all humans and highlights the need for ethical considerations in A.I. development.

The document marks a powerful foray by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church into the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence.

May 25, 2026Updated 11:14 a.m. ET

Pope Leo Warns of A.I. Risks in His First Papal Encyclical

Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” in which he outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age when technology threatens to replace people in many professional and social roles.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
education to help students think critically about the technology
action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.

Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,” he wrote.

“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

Leo, presenting the encyclical to a packed hall at the Vatican, said his views had been shaped by conversations with scientists, engineers and political leaders. He singled out Mr. Olah, with whom he pledged to work “to find a way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.”

“What a great sign of hope it is that in our differences we can listen to one another,” Leo said.

Mr. Olah, who is not Catholic, praised the pope’s initiative, acknowledging that companies like his own need moral guidance to avoid being swayed by “a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”

“We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” Mr. Olah added.

“Today is just the beginning — the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot,” Mr. Olah said. Both men spoke, along with a panel of theologians and Vatican officials, before an audience of cardinals, computer scientists, journalists and diplomats including Brian Burch, the United States ambassador to the Holy See.

Leo greeting Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the A.I. developer Anthropic, before the presentation.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Leo had made clear his concerns with A.I. as early as his second day as pope, just over a year ago, when he told the College of Cardinals that, under his leadership, the church would address the risks that the evolving technology poses to “human dignity, justice and labor.”

He has since repeatedly spoken about A.I., including during a trip to Turkey and Lebanon, in an address to Catholic university leaders and even when celebrating the international day of mathematics. Last week, the Vatican announced it had created a commission of senior Catholic officials to discuss the challenges posed by A.I.

Pope Francis, Leo’s immediate predecessor, had also warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and called for the ethical use of technology.

Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.

The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.

Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”

In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.

Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”

The encyclical also called for imposing the “most rigorous ethical constraints” on weapons developed using artificial intelligence, continuing Leo’s — and the Vatican’s — longstanding opposition to war.

“The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control,” Leo wrote. That, he added, contradicted “the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense.”

Leo also used the encyclical to apologize for the Vatican’s role in slavery. In a section about modern-day slavery, Leo personally apologized for the papacy’s failure to condemn earlier forms of slavery and for supporting rulers who engaged in it. An earlier pope, John Paul II, apologized in 1985 for the role of Christians in perpetuating the slave trade, but did not explicitly discuss the Vatican’s role.

Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.

Leo wrote in detail, for example, of the importance of protecting children, who are particularly susceptible to the warping effects of technology.

“Psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic consequences,” he wrote.

Scholars were divided about what effect, if any, the document would have on the technology industry, in which rival tech titans are jostling with Anthropic for dominance.

Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative” even as it recognized their autonomy.

The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”

Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.

“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”

Priests can use the contents of the document to guide conversations with parishioners who share their concerns about the technological pressures of modern life, Professor Herzfeld said.

Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome.

Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.

Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.

Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.“

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