Why Every Major Tech CEO Has Gone to Rome

In January 2016, Eric Schmidt — then executive chairman of Google — spent fifteen minutes in a private meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican. The following week, Apple CEO Tim Cook did the same. Neither meeting had a public agenda. Neither produced a meaningful press release. Both were widely reported as curious, slightly baffling footnotes to normal tech industry news.

Then it kept happening.

This is not a coincidence. Something deliberate is happening in Rome, and it matters more than the tech press has generally noticed.

The Architecture of Vatican Tech Diplomacy

To understand why Silicon Valley keeps showing up at the Vatican, you need to understand how the Vatican actually operates as a diplomatic actor.

The Holy See is one of the most unusual institutions in international relations. It is simultaneously a sovereign state, a religious body with over a billion adherents, and a diplomatic actor recognized by nearly every government on earth. It maintains formal diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries. It has a permanent observer seat at the United Nations. It has been doing international diplomacy, continuously, for roughly fifteen hundred years.

What this means in practice is extraordinary convening power. It can bring together people who wouldn't otherwise sit in the same room, under conditions of privacy and mutual trust, to discuss things that aren't ready for official channels. It has no commercial interests. No shareholders. It is not competing for market share. In a world where almost every institution that engages with Big Tech either wants something from it or is trying to regulate it, the Vatican occupies a genuinely unusual position: it wants to have a conversation about what it means to be human. That turns out to be surprisingly attractive to people building tools that are reshaping what it means to be human.

The Minerva Dialogues: Rome's Secret AI Salon

The most important venue for Vatican-Silicon Valley engagement is one you've almost certainly never heard of.

The Minerva Dialogues are an annual gathering held at the Monastery of St. Mary Sopra Minerva in Rome — a Dominican church a short walk from the Pantheon. Founded by Father Eric Salobir, a Dominican priest, the gatherings bring together tech leaders and Catholic prelates for closed-door conversations under Chatham House rules. No attribution. No public statements. No company logos.

The topics have evolved over the years, tracking the arc of the tech industry's own anxieties. Early meetings focused on connectivity and digital access. More recently, the conversations have centered on AI — on consciousness, on what distinguishes human beings from machines, on the ethics of systems that can generate language and make decisions affecting millions of people.

The Chatham House rule is key. Tech leaders can come to Rome and ask questions they can't ask in a Senate hearing, a shareholder meeting, or a press interview. Questions like: what is a soul? What makes a human being valuable? What do we owe each other, and why? These are not questions Silicon Valley has a good institutional vocabulary for. The Church has been developing that vocabulary for two thousand years.

Father Philip Larrey and the Silicon Valley Connection

If there is a single person who has done the most to build the informal relationship between the Vatican and Silicon Valley, it is Father Philip Larrey — a California-born philosopher who has spent more than two decades in Rome.

Larrey's approach is deliberate and somewhat counterintuitive for a Catholic priest. He refuses to demonize. He builds relationships. He creates conditions for genuine conversation rather than confrontation.

The people Larrey has facilitated meetings with include Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Elon Musk of xAI, Brad Smith of Microsoft, and many others. These are not photo opportunities. They are, according to Larrey, genuine attempts by tech leaders to engage with questions their own institutions can't answer.

Father Paolo Benanti — the Franciscan friar and ethics professor who serves as the Vatican's primary technical AI advisor — frames the central question simply: "What is the difference between a man who exists and a machine that functions?" It is, he says, "perhaps the greatest question of these times." The people building AI systems know it too. And they keep coming to Rome because that's where someone is actually thinking carefully about it.

The Strategic Logic of Papal Engagement

Pope Francis's decision to engage directly with tech leaders — rather than issuing pronouncements from a distance — was strategic. And it has produced results that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore.

Consider the sequence. In 2020, the Vatican produces the Rome Call for AI Ethics; Microsoft and IBM sign it. In 2021, the Vatican establishes the RenAIssance Foundation to steward it. Father Benanti begins advising the Italian government, then the G7, then the United Nations — appointed to the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence in 2023. In 2024, Pope Francis speaks at the G7 summit — the first pope ever to address the group — calling for a legally binding international treaty on AI governance and a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

This is not an institution talking to itself. This is an institution that started with a voluntary ethics framework and used personal relationships, convening events, and strategic positioning to become a genuine actor in global AI governance within four years. Cisco's Chuck Robbins didn't just sign the Rome Call in 2024 — he signed it the morning after a private audience with Pope Francis. The sequence is not accidental.

What the Tech Leaders Are Actually Looking For

The Vatican's success with Silicon Valley is partly a function of what the tech leaders themselves are experiencing.

The people who build AI are not indifferent to the ethical implications of their work. They are often deeply anxious about them. Sam Altman has publicly described some AI scenarios as "potentially scary." The founders of DeepMind wrote papers warning about superintelligence risks. These are not people who think everything is fine.

What they lack is a framework for the questions that keep them up at night. Engineering frameworks are good at optimizing for measurable outcomes. They are not good at asking which outcomes are worth optimizing for, or what we owe to people affected by systems they can't fully control.

The Catholic philosophical tradition — with its sustained attention to human dignity, its careful distinctions between persons and things, its insistence that accountability cannot dissolve into systems — offers something secular frameworks don't. The tech leaders aren't converting to Catholicism. It's that the Church has been thinking carefully about the nature of human beings for much longer than anyone else in the conversation, and that thinking is useful when you're trying to figure out what you're actually building.

The Limits: Google and OpenAI Haven't Signed

It would be dishonest to paint this as a complete success story.

For all the Vatican's diplomatic activity, neither Google nor OpenAI — the two most consequential players in the current AI moment — has signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics. Microsoft and IBM signed in 2020. Cisco in 2024. Qualcomm in 2025. But the companies arguably most responsible for the current state of AI development remain on the sidelines of the Vatican's voluntary framework.

This matters. The Rome Call has no enforcement mechanisms. Its power depends entirely on the willingness of signatories to take its principles seriously. A framework that hasn't captured the companies building the most powerful systems is, at best, incomplete.

The Vatican is aware of this. Pope Francis's call for a legally binding international treaty on AI governance reflects a recognition that persuasion alone isn't enough. The meetings with tech leaders are valuable. The Minerva Dialogues are valuable. The Rome Call is valuable. But the moral authority of a two-thousand-year-old institution has limits when the other side of the table has a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

Why It Still Matters

None of which means the Vatican's engagement is pointless. Quite the opposite.

The Vatican is doing something almost no other institution is doing: engaging with the people who build AI as people — with genuine moral questions, genuine anxieties, and genuine needs — rather than as adversaries to be regulated or suppliers to be managed.

That engagement has produced real results: a growing coalition of signatories, a priest on the UN's AI advisory body, a pope at the G7, and a steady stream of the most powerful people in technology making private pilgrimages to a small state in the middle of Rome to ask an old institution what it means to be human.

The answers they're getting there aren't simple. But they're probably better than what the algorithms are generating.