Océane Herrero, reporting for POLITICO: Silicon Valley is doing what Silicon Valley always does when it smells a regulator — show up early, talk ethics, and call it partnership.

The April 29 gathering was the latest in a series of meetings that, taken together, amount to a quiet lobbying push by the tech industry ahead of Leo’s first encyclical, according to interviews with seven people for this article.

The funny part isn’t that Meta and Amazon are lobbying. Of course they are. The funny part is that they’re lobbying the Vatican because the Vatican still does something almost nobody else in public life can do anymore: write a moral argument meant to outlast the news cycle.

If Leo XIV publishes an encyclical that takes AI seriously and treats “responsible development” as something other than a press release, it will annoy the right people. Which is a decent early signal that it might be worth reading.