Slowing Things Down.
Safeguarding humanity.
1. 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. (Source: nytimes.com, vatican.va, anthropic.com)
2. From the Encyclical Letter:
We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions. (Source: vatican.va)
3. (T)he A.I. Security Institute is one of the world’s largest and best-funded government efforts dedicated to probing the technology’s potentially catastrophic risks. The institute’s roughly 100 employees — drawn from British intelligence agencies, academia and tech companies — have found major safety gaps in every leading A.I. model they have tested, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Created nearly three years ago, the organization said it had co-opted A.I. systems into sharing instructions for making chemical and biological weapons, and planning and executing cyberattacks. It publishes its research and also works with Britain’s national security agencies to identify and prepare for emerging threats. (Source: nytimes.com)
4. Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has permanently cut the application programming interface (API) price of its flagship DeepSeek-V4-Pro model by 75%, escalating competition with both domestic and overseas rivals. The company said on May 22 that a temporary promotional discount for developers would become its standard pricing tier. The move lowers the cache-miss input cost for the V4-Pro model to 3 yuan ($0.44) per million tokens, less than one-tenth of the roughly $5 charged for OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and well below the $0.95 charged by Chinese rival Kimi. The aggressive pricing move comes as DeepSeek pursues its first external funding round at a reported valuation of 300 billion yuan ($44 billion), highlighting the growing capital demands of the global AI race as companies compete for computing power, engineering talent and developer adoption. (Source: caixinglobal.com)
Scott Galloway argues that China could use cheap open weight AI models to pressure the economics behind the U.S. AI boom, comparing the strategy to steel dumping in the 1980s.
Models like DeepSeek and Qwen already offer strong performance at far lower cost than many frontier APIs, making them increasingly attractive for enterprise adoption.
If companies begin shifting toward lower cost Chinese models at scale, pricing power across the U.S. AI sector could weaken quickly.
A large share of recent market growth and S&P valuations is tied directly or indirectly to AI spending, meaning competitive pressure on frontier model companies could ripple through the broader economy. (Sources: instagram.com, profgmedia.com)
 | A guest post by
|