Tech Billionaire Mocks Pope Leo’s AI Warning — and Reveals Silicon Valley’s Original Sin

A billionaire tech guru openly mocked Leo's call for moral AI — and quickly backtracked after backlash. It’s a telling collision of Silicon Valley hubris with a pope they cannot buy, bully, or ignore.

Dear friends —

Happy Monday! Today we begin a new multi-part series here at Letters from Leo — one that goes to the heart of a defining clash in our era: Pope Leo XIV vs. Silicon Valley’s reckless rush into artificial intelligence.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring how this pope — steeped in Augustinian theology and animated by the social teaching of Leo XIII — is preparing to confront the tech industry’s most dangerous presumptions: that progress is inevitable, that power is neutral, and that moral constraints are optional.

This is not simply a fight over algorithms and regulation. It’s a spiritual confrontation with an elite that increasingly imagines itself to be god.

In today’s installment, we begin with the spark that lit the fuse: Marc Andreessen’s now-deleted tweet over the weekend mocking Pope Leo XIV’s call for ethical AI.

The attack — brief, sarcastic, and swiftly scrubbed — did more than reveal Silicon Valley’s disdain for moral guardrails. It exposed what I believe is the original sin of the entire tech industry: the refusal to recognize any authority greater than itself.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be diving into:

• How Leo XIV’s AI warnings build directly off Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s indictment of unrestrained capitalism;

• Why Peter Thiel’s version of Christian salvation is closer to Gnosticism than the Gospel;

• How Katherine Boyle’s 2020 warning that Silicon Valley “doesn’t understand religion (yet)” has aged — and what it means now that the Church is pushing back;

• And what we can expect from Pope Leo’s forthcoming encyclical on artificial intelligence — a document already being quietly described inside the Vatican as a “moral earthquake.”

This series is only available to paid subscribers, not because I want to gatekeep these ideas, but because of the time, research, and care that go into every word. These essays aren’t clickbait. They’re built to last — and your support helps make that possible.

If you haven’t yet joined us, I hope you will. A subscription starts at just $8/month and gives you full access to this entire series, our growing archive of the Pope Leo life and formation coverage, and all future premium content.

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Let’s begin.

Part I: Silicon Valley’s Original Sin — and the Pope Who Refuses to Bow to It

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

In a late-night flurry on X (formerly Twitter), Silicon Valley mogul Marc Andreessen did something extraordinary: he derided Pope Leo XIV.

Andreessen quote-posted a message from Pope Leo XIV — a message urging tech leaders to cultivate moral discernment in building artificial intelligence, developing systems marked by justice, solidarity, and reverence for life.

The pope had framed technological innovation as “participation in the divine act of creation,” carrying real ethical weight.

To Andreessen, however, these words smacked of “woke” moralizing. He responded with a mocking meme (invoking a trope of a hectoring left-wing interviewer) and a sarcastic swipe at Leo’s ethical and spiritual tone.

It didn’t go well for Andreessen: after a wave of criticism — including from tech folks of faith — he deleted his post in retreat. Yet the damage was done. In one impulsive tweet, Andreessen revealed Silicon Valley’s deep disdain for Pope Leo’s gospel of tech responsibility.

The One Leader Silicon Valley Can’t Control

Why would a prominent venture capitalist bristle at a pope calling for basic ethics? Because Pope Leo XIV may be the one authority on earth that Big Tech cannot control.

As one commentator noted in the wake of this spat, “You can’t control the pope, but you can control American Christianity with money.”

In other words, billionaires like Andreessen or Peter Thiel can bankroll sympathetic pastors, media outlets, even lobby bishops, but Pope Leo answers only to God.

He’s perhaps the only figure these tech titans cannot buy off, bully, or co-opt.

No wonder they seethe.

Leo XIV’s very independence is an affront to Silicon Valley hubris. He has no venture capital to chase, no IPO to prep, no incentive to flatter their worldview.

So when this pope challenges the tech status quo — as he did by insisting AI development include moral constraints — it hit a nerve.

Andreessen’s instinctive mockery betrays a frustration: the Church is speaking a language of right and wrong that Silicon Valley isn’t used to hearing, at least not from a voice it can’t ignore.

Indeed, Andreessen’s own writings show how allergic he is to moral limits on technology. He recently argued that any attempt to slow AI’s breakneck progress is “tantamount to murder,” dismissing calls for “social responsibility” or “tech ethics” as part of a decades-long “demoralization campaign” against innovation.

In his eyes, unfettered growth is an unquestionable good — and anyone preaching caution (even the pope) must be stuck in the Stone Age.

But Pope Leo’s challenge is that there are some higher goods beyond profit and speed: human dignity, the protection of the vulnerable, the common good. That idea clashes with a Silicon Valley culture accustomed to seeing itself as the ultimate authority.

Original Sin 2.0 — Playing God with AI

This conflict runs deeper than a Twitter tiff; it exposes an ancient moral fault line. The tech elite’s aversion to limits hints at a familiar temptation: to “be like God.”

In the Book of Genesis, the serpent lured Adam and Eve with the promise that eating the forbidden fruit would make them equals to the divine.

The Church teaches that this prideful grasping — wanting to transcend our creaturely limits — was the original sin.

Today’s tech titans often fall for the very same lie. They speak of “immortal” cloud consciousness and “transcending” human limits through code.

They create AI in their own image and assume it places them beyond accountability. As one Catholic writer observed, all the elements of that first sin resurface whenever man tries to “surpass the God-given limits of human beings.”

Silicon Valley’s drive to “play God” with AI is just the latest chapter in this old story of hubris.

Consider how Peter Thiel — one of Andreessen’s billionaire peers — openly recasts salvation in technological terms. Thiel, who peppers his talks with religious imagery, has crafted a kind of techno-theology in which the traditional Christian path of humility and grace is replaced by a creed of human achievement.

In his worldview, “salvation comes through founding” bold new companies and colonies, not through submitting to God’s will.

The meek need not apply; only the innovators are saved.

Thiel’s gospel of disruption promises a kind of secular immortality (upload your mind, conquer death) and celebrates the founder as a messiah, unconstrained by old ethics.

It’s a dramatic misinterpretation of salvation history — essentially a high-tech repeat of Eden’s error. Man reaches for godhood via algorithms and IPOs, convinced he can code his way out of human frailty. But as every student of scripture knows, such pride comes before the fall.

Leo XIII Redux: A Pope for a Tech Reckoning

Pope Leo XIV seems acutely aware that the Church has seen this pattern before.

Tellingly, upon his election he chose the name Leo precisely to hark back to Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 confronted the no-holds-barred capitalism of the industrial age.

Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum was a sharp rebuke to the extremes of unbridled capitalism that dehumanized workers.

It proved that the Church could stand up to the robber barons and social Darwinists of a previous era.

Now, Leo XIV is picking up that mantle in the age of AI. Just as his namesake challenged the Gilded Age sins of exploiting labor and pursuing profit at all costs, Leo XIV is poised to challenge today’s algorithmic anarchy — the wild west of AI development that too often shrugs off moral consequences.

Here’s his game plan.