The tech drama of the week is between billionaire Marc Andreessen and ... the pope?
Yup, the venture capitalist is going head-to-head with heaven’s vassal on earth. Andreessen this week decided to wage meme-fare (read: war but with sassy memes) against Pope Leo XIV.
It started with a banger of a tweet by the pontiff himself.
“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity,” he wrote on X. (opens in new tab)“The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work — to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
It wasn’t the first time the pope has spoken about AI ethics. Earlier this year, he said (opens in new tab) he fears AI investors who are “totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity.”
But Andreessen — whose firm Andreessen Horowitz ( a16z) backs OpenAI, Cursor, and Mistral AI, among other AI firms — wasn’t having it. He replied (opens in new tab) to the pope’s tweet with a disapproving meme: a screenshot of a GQ interviewer raising her eyebrows as she asks the actress Sydney Sweeney about her controversial American Eagle jeans ad (opens in new tab).
Although the investor didn’t provide any context, he’s been a vocal proponent of advancing AI at all earthly cost. “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” he wrote on a16z’s blog (opens in new tab). “Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
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Andreessen deleted the tweet — but not quickly enough. Many in the tech world were outraged that he picked a fight with the pope. “Hubris,” Isaiah Taylor (opens in new tab), founder of nuclear reactor startup Valar Atomics, commented on Andreessen’s tweet.
Daniel Francis, founder of tech startup Abel Police, was harsher. “Marc primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bot farms,” he wrote (opens in new tab). “He does not want you to build things that are actually good for society.”
Others came to Andreessen’s defense. “He’s a deep thinker who can back up his ideas to any level of depth,” Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, wrote. (opens in new tab)
Pirate Wires founder Mike Solana pointed to the hypocrisy of Andreessen’s critics. “My sense is the number of people who 1) furiously defended the pope last night and then 2) went to Mass this morning is probably close to zero. status games,” he posted (opens in new tab).
The pope seems to be taking it all in stride, tweeting at least eight more times since then. In one post (opens in new tab), he urged entrepreneurs to ask themselves, “Where are we going? For whom and for what are we working? How are we making the world a better place?”
If Andreessen had answers to those questions, he declined to provide them.