A team of believers want the Vatican to take AI doomsday scenarios seriously.

Pope Leo XIV probably isn’t the first person you picture when conversation turns to Artificial General Intelligence doomsday scenarios. But last month, AGI researcher John-Clark Levin found himself inside the Vatican on a mission to put those concerns in front of the pope.

Levin hasn’t been acting alone. In the past year, he has been quietly assembling a loose network of roughly three dozen academics, scientists, policy researchers, and priests — a group he half-jokingly calls the “AI Avengers” — who meet virtually to strategize how to get the Vatican thinking more seriously about AI’s more extreme possibilities.

His main worry is that the pope will take too long to realize the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a goal pursued by some of the world’s biggest tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. “If you wait for perfect certainty, it’s going to be too late to act to stave off the very severe danger that appears to be just several years away,” he tells The Verge.

• The Vatican’s AI moment
• Putting AGI on the agenda
• Cracking the Vatican
• Finally, an opening

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