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Wednesday, June 03, 2026

2026 -
By: FRANCE 24

File photo of US President Donald Trump taken at the White House on May 6, 2026. © Jacquelyn Martin, AP

Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order creating a voluntary framework under which AI developers will share advanced models with the US government before public release.

The central provision allows companies such as OpenAI, Google or Anthropic to give the government access to their most powerful models for up to 30 days before planned release.

The order was triggered by concerns over Anthropic's Mythos model, which the AI start-up has held back from the public due to its ability to expose vulnerabilities in computer systems, including those of banks, governments and hospitals.

The 30-day window represents a compromise. The original draft called for up to 90 days of pre-release government access, while tech companies had pushed to cut that figure to just 14 days.

For OpenAI chief Sam Altman, the executive order "gets the balance right."

"The US should lead on AI by continuing to develop the very best models, making sure they're safe, and getting cyber tools into the hands of trusted defenders," Altman said.

Kent Walker, Google's head of public affairs, called the order an "important step forward" that will ensure "defenders have the AI tools they need to keep America secure."

And Anthropic, which has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration, called the order "an important step in strengthening America's leadership in AI."

© France 24
01:34

'Unnecessary'

The signing comes after a turbulent few weeks in which the White House appeared close to unveiling the measure, only to pull back abruptly.

According to Politico and other media, David Sacks, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who served as Trump's AI and crypto czar, called the president to warn that the measure would slow innovation and hurt the United States in its AI race with China – blindsiding White House staff who believed Sacks supported the order.

Sacks wrote on X last week that "unnecessary regulation is the biggest threat to innovation in America," adding that winning the AI race required clearing "bureaucratic hurdles" from state legislatures and "woke" Washington politicians.

The order also instructs the Treasury, the National Security Agency and the CISA cybersecurity agency to form an "AI cybersecurity clearinghouse" in voluntary collaboration with industry and critical infrastructure operators to identify software vulnerabilities and find ways to fix them.

Trump scrapped an AI oversight order from his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden on his first day back in the White House.

Biden's 2023 order required AI companies to share safety test results with the government and leaned heavily on voluntary commitments – already a light-touch approach that fell short of what many experts had called for.

By contrast, the European Union's AI Act – which entered into force in 2024 – sets binding rules for high-risk AI systems, including mandatory transparency requirements and, for the most powerful models, obligations around safety testing and incident reporting.

"This is an important step in the right direction," said Anthony Aguirre, CEO of the Future of Life Institute, which advocates for AI safety.

"Voluntary frameworks are not enough, however" and the government must be empowered "to block the release of systems that pose an unacceptable national security risk," he added.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

I wrote that, right? People forget using AI for help, research shows

03.06.2026, 12:53 Uhr
Photo: Philipp von Ditfurth/dpa
People cannot reliably recall whether or not they used artificial intelligence to create a text after as little as one week, according to a new study.
The research, carried out at Germany's University of Bayreuth and Finland's Aalto University in Helsinki, raises the concern that students, employees and authors are likely to unwittingly pass off AI-generated text as their own original writing and ideas.
The study found that asking people to recall AI involvement in content creation after the fact is unlikely to produce accurate results, with the probability of correct recall dropping sharply within seven days.
“Workflows in which human and artificial intelligence were combined were particularly prone to errors — that is, when the idea came from AI but the formulation was done by the human, and vice versa,” said Daniel Buschek, a professor in the field of mobile user interfaces at the University of Bayreuth.
When a person had written up an idea that was originally generated by AI, the probability of correctly remembering how the content came about dropped to 37.7% after seven days.
Conversely, when a person had their own idea written up by an AI, there was a 64% chance of correctly identifying the idea as their own after one week.
Two risks from memory gaps around AI use
Based on these findings, the researchers identified two risks arising from memory gaps in the use of AI:
People may claim AI-generated ideas and writing as their own.
Conversely, people may underestimate their own contribution, incorrectly remembering their own idea as AI-generated.
The researchers say it is therefore unrealistic to rely on a person to recall their use of AI based on memory alone and propose that a more practical approach would be to document the creation of content from the outset.
The study, published in April, involved 184 participants who took part in an experiment in which they were asked to produce texts with or without AI assistance. One week later, they were questioned about the origin of the ideas and the writing of the texts.
Study
Press release
(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

GoPro's future at stake after AI boom drives up price of memory chips

03.06.2026, dpa
Photo: Patrick Seeger/dpa
GoPro has warned investors that its survival is in doubt, citing a sharp rise in memory chip prices that has pushed the action camera pioneer to the brink of insolvency.
The California-based firm said at the start of June that it may seek additional financing and agreements with creditors to avoid insolvency. Such a precautionary notice is a mandatory warning to investors in cases of financial difficulty.
Consumers have also felt the cost of AI's rapid expansion, as various countries race to build massive data centres which require RAM and other hardware. The supply shortages have been acutely felt by consumers, with some RAM products doubling in price, while some have even hit four or five times their previous cost.
GoPro had already announced after the first quarter that memory chip prices had more than doubled for the company in some cases.
The rapid build-out of vast data centres for artificial intelligence is driving up prices for semiconductor products such as memory chips sharply across the industry. Other electronics companies are also feeling the pressure.
For GoPro, however, the additional burden comes on top of an already weakening business. In the last quarter, revenue fell by just over a quarter year on year, and the company recorded a net loss of just under $81 million.
GoPro is a pioneer in the action camera market, making devices popular with athletes and adventurers — including snowboarders, surfers and cyclists. In recent years, however, the company has faced increasing competition from brands like DJI and Insta360.
Announcement from GoPro
(c) 2026 dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur GmbH

Microsoft launches its own AI models to take on OpenAI and Anthropic

By Una Hajdari

Published on 03/06/2026 - EURONEWS

Seven in-house models unveiled at Build 2026 signal Microsoft's push to cut costs and compete directly on the AI frontier as its biggest investees plan to launch record-breaking IPOs.

Microsoft has unveiled a family of seven in-house AI models at its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco, in the clearest sign yet that the tech giant is moving to reduce its dependence on the AI companies it has poured billions into.

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI chief executive, said that after tuning its models for consulting firm McKinsey, the company outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on quality — with what it projects as ten times better cost efficiency, based on public pricing data scaled across model sizes.

"We believe the time has come for every company to move from consuming a frontier model to fully participating at the frontier," said chief executive Satya Nadella at the conference.

The headline release is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first reasoning model, trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data without distillation from third-party systems.

A mid-sized model with 35 billion active parameters and a 256,000-token context window, it is designed for complex multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning and code generation.

Alongside it, the company launched MAI-Code-1-Flash, a coding model that converts text descriptions into source code for applications and websites, now rolling out across GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code.

By running its own models on Azure infrastructure, Microsoft can sidestep the fees it currently pays to third-party providers — and pass the savings to developers.

According to Microsoft, in blind evaluations run by Surge, its independent human rating partner, MAI-Thinking-1 was preferred over Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6, and the company says it matches Claude Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks.

Quantum leap

Also at Build, Microsoft announced that its Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor — a milestone the company said brings it within striking distance of a commercially useful quantum computer.

Qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computing, are notoriously fragile: even minor temperature shifts or vibrations can knock them off course. The Majorana 2 chip addresses this directly.

Qubits on the new chip survive for an average of 20 seconds, compared to milliseconds on the original, an improvement the company likened to upgrading from a phone that needs daily charging to one that lasts several years.

"We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum. The chip currently has just 12 qubits, while a useful machine would require millions.

Microsoft's approach centres on so-called topological qubits, based on the properties of a quasi-particle first theorised in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana.

The path has not been smooth — the company was forced to retract a 2018 paper in the journal Nature claiming evidence for the particle — but it has pressed on, and the second-generation chip improves on the first partly by replacing aluminium with lead as a superconductor.

The chip and its supporting research have not yet been peer reviewed, and some physicists have called for more information.

IPO race heats up

Microsoft's push for model independence comes as the companies it has committed billions to prepare for blockbuster stock market debuts.

Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, filed confidentially for an initial public offering on 1 June, just days after raising $65 billion (€59bn) in a Series H funding round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion (€877bn). OpenAI is also readying its own confidential filing.

Microsoft has committed $13 billion (€11.8bn) to OpenAI and invested up to $5 billion (€4.5bn) in Anthropic, while making both companies' models available through Azure.

How Stone Tools, Fire, And Language Paved The Highway To Artificial Intelligence – Analysis

June 3, 2026

By Deborah Barsky

Each leap in human communication—from vocal anatomy to writing to digital networks—followed the same pattern: faster, more complex, less individual.

Many people are overwhelmed by the fast-paced evolution of mass communication in a world increasingly shaped by the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet ideas have not always circulated across the globe at lightning speed.

Looking into deep time allows us to view our current mode of existence from a broader perspective and to discern patterns of change that may offer insights into our species’ possible trajectories in the future. We can begin by trying to identify the conditions under which humans developed complex symbolic communication, which is considered unique in the animal kingdom. Today, we have succeeded in transposing incredibly complex digital languages, beyond the grasp of the human mind, into computerized systems capable of processing, storing, and sharing all kinds of information with the push of a button or a click of a mouse.

Human language is at the root of this system. While hardly perceptible in the archeological record, hominin physiognomy assessed from the fossil record allows us to observe that the capacity to vocalize across a significant range dates back to a very early time period. Physical features linked to resonance complexity and articular precision, like the low positioning of the larynx, an enlarged pharyngeal cavity, and a flexible tongue housed in an ample palate, were already part of the human anatomy by the time Homo erectus emerged in Africa nearly 2 million years ago.

Somatic harmonization, necessary for speech production, is ensured by the tiny and crucial hyoid bone, a floating anchor for the muscles controlling the tongue, throat, and voice box as they work together to regulate sounds emitted during speech. Paleoanthropologists studying the position, geometry, and internal structure of Neanderthal hyoids discovered in archeological sites found them to be nearly identical to those of anatomically modern humans, suggesting that they were already capable of emitting a similarly sophisticated range of sounds. Evidence from Spain also reveals that modern hyoid morphology was present by at least 530,000 years ago, indicating that it could be a derived characteristic shared by modern humans and pre-Neandertals, which they inherited from their last common ancestor.

The ability to emit a wide range of vocalizations characteristic of modern human language did not appear abruptly, but rather, was favored over millennia by interrelated adaptive elections taking place under the evolutionary orchestration of both natural selection and techno selection. As early as around 7 million years ago, some early primates displayed several craniofacial modifications believed to have evolved, at least in part, to accommodate bipedal locomotion. These included features such as reduced prognathism, more gracile jawbones with smaller teeth, and a restructured skull base, all of which subsequently facilitated the anatomical tweaks necessary to increase the human capacity to pronounce a wide range of sounds.

By the time hominins began systematically making stone tools some 2.6 million years ago, a series of changes in the archeological record reflected the significance of this adaptive strategy. Around 1.75 million years ago in Africa, these (Oldowan) assemblages were progressively replaced by Acheulian industries comprising tools with wider technological and morphological variability, including skillfully manufactured and (esthetically pleasing) premeditated forms, like spheres and symmetrical pointed tools called handaxes, which required high degrees of dexterity to make.

Observing synapses activated during experimental tool replication has shown that the cognitive processes involved in passing on the skills necessary to make such tools are linked to those activated by language. Furthermore, evidence from ancient DNA analysis suggests that regulatory genetic variants favoring language-producing abilities underwent long-term evolutionary selection in hominin populations, with some of these features predating the divergence of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Fully embracing the advantages offered by their newfound technological proficiency, Acheulian hominins benefited from access to the choicest morsels of meat and viscera to feed their developing brains. They experienced unprecedented demographic expansion and assembled into more complex group settings sheltering numerous individuals. Eventually wielding fire, Acheulian populations spread into new lands within and beyond Africa, utilizing their rapidly developing technologies to confront diverse environmental and social challenges.

Some archeologists have described this process as a biocultural feedback loop, in which unprecedented cerebral growth (supported by higher protein intake) was linked to toolmaking. This process was catalyzed by increasing social complexity, reinforced by the development of culture, and favored the selection of symbolic communication. Language—the preponderant expression of symbolic transmission—initially developed as a survival-related response to effectively transmit technological competence, and ultimately became a means to express multifaceted cultural norms developed to promote social proficiency.

There is no doubt that culture evolves; that it was/is transmitted socially through learning processes that have been intricately developed over time and now extend well past adolescence and, in some cases, beyond the optimal reproductive age for women. Culture is inherently cumulative: it is an aggregate of past human experiences, errors, discoveries, adaptations, and rectifications to deduce scientific and philosophical insights about the universe—and our place in it. Symbolic communication, expressed as language and writing, and later also as art and music, reinforces cumulative culture by allowing us to express, preserve, and share knowledge beyond time constraints.

The story of technological evolution following the emergence of the Acheulian reveals two major forces that still operate today: acceleration and complexification. By the end of the Acheulian and into the Middle Paleolithic period and beyond, technological and (linked) social achievements accumulated exponentially, widening the baseline upon which hugely transformative accomplishments emerged. At the same time, populations multiplied, creating interrelational networks that favored reproductive, material, and cultural exchanges.

I have proposed defining this phenomenon as a fractalization process, insofar as each branch replicates the underlying evolutionary patterns, overcoming the constraints of its ancestral source while retaining the full spectrum of human cognitive expression. In this model (that is comparable to biological natural selection), small variations or adjustments can lead to exponentially magnified outcomes through recursive and effectively infinite cycles of reproduction.

By the time our own species came on the scene more than 200,000 years ago, culture had flourished into symbolic material expressions, inexorably linked to the technological and social realities of past human lives. Fire, for example, provided ample fodder for experimenting with the power of transforming existing materials, enabling new capacities during the Neolithic and Metal Ages, with successive discoveries, such as pottery and, eventually, glass and metallurgy, transmuting and enabling new societal paradigms.

Following the shift from hunter-gatherer to production-based lifeways, technological complexity split individual role-playing into distinct occupations, sharpening perceptions about (imagined) interpersonal “value” within social settings. As populations swelled and collective living arrangements expanded, these systems became structured around complex symbolic interactions, material cultures, territorial identities, and hierarchies constructed to sustain group cohesion. Importantly, social organization came to rely upon artificially constructed (symbolic) notions that led regionally assembled groups to contrast their ideas of communal belonging (identity) with those existing in neighboring territories. As competition for land and resources increased, these contrasting symbolic realities became a justification for (sometimes violent) interpopulation conflicts.

Communication networks grew increasingly complex alongside expanding production and territorial markets, accelerating the spread of cultural and material exchanges. Protohistoric societies developed early writing systems based on symbolic signs used as mnemonic strategies to represent ideas and objects. Emerging independently in regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Central America, and China, these systems gradually evolved from pictorial symbols into stylized phonetic and logographic writing largely detached from their original visual meanings.

Throughout human experience, learning has been central to survival, with scientific and behavioral complexification acting as a driving force to develop sophisticated new ways to educate, demonstrate, and train each successive generation to become effective agents of our seemingly unstoppable technological proficiency. Presently, ideas move instantaneously across space and time through global communication networks. Digital platforms make information accessible worldwide, shrinking distances and connecting populations, while promoting mass media and consumer culture. Often shaped by corporate interests that influence production, consumption, and resource distribution in a world driven by digital images and symbolic messaging, global connectivity has become the force shaping human thought and social organization.

Uniformity is increasingly becoming a defining characteristic of human life shaped by digital communication. Despite the technological sophistication of the systems that mediate and transmit human thought, we are adopting simpler forms of communication, homogenizing language, and gradually adapting our patterns of thinking to fit the digital platforms used to express them. The next stage of human evolution involving the merging of human intelligence with AI may already be here. As we become increasingly dependent on computerized tools to function within contemporary social environments, the ability to communicate effectively through digital means is emerging as a fundamental requirement.

At the end of the 1980s, screenwriter Maurice Hurley and the creators of Star Trek showed remarkable foresight in creating the Borg: fictional cybernetic organisms linked through a single collective consciousness in which thoughts and actions are shared and controlled by a powerful centralized computer system. In this dystopian vision of the future, the Borg’s main purpose is to assimilate other species in pursuit of greater knowledge, efficiency, and power. Once assimilated, subjects lose their individuality and become linked to the Collective (or hive mind).

As humanity moves toward a predicted state of post-humanism (human-machine hybridization) and the boundaries between human cognition and machine intelligence become increasingly blurred, it is worth asking whether this vision already mirrors some aspects of our own interconnected and technology-mediated world.

Author Bio:

Deborah Barsky is a writing fellow for the Human Bridges, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and an associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future(Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Disarm Artificial Intelligence

Evaggelos Vallianatos

June 3, 2026

Prometheus was the Titan god who gave the fire of knowledge, intelligence, technology and civilization to the Greeks. Painting courtesy of Evi Sarantea. The painting is depicting the head of Prometheus, shining fire and light. Zeus sent an eagle to eat the liver of the deathless god to punish him for helping his Greek grandchildren. Right eye from statue and left representing the eye of a living man, thus showing the intimate connection of Prometheus with the Greeks. The falling drops represent the ceaseless influence of Prometheus, including perhaps the invention of Artificial Intelligence among the ancient Greeks.

Prologue

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an extremely interesting, if dangerous, technological, economic and political issue. The Greeks of Homer’s age, some 3,500 years ago, had imagined and probably employed some form of very advanced AI. Homer reports that Zeus informed Hermes that Odysseus would return home to Ithaca. And indeed he did. The Phaiakians of the island of Phaiakia / Kerkyra, Homer says, were like gods. They had extremely advanced technologies. Their ships, for example, sailed without pilots or necessarily the energy of the wind. Yet the ship that ferried Odysseus had crew and oars, too. Such a dream boat carried Odysseus and the bronze and gold gifts, including bread and red wine, the Phaiakians gave him and sent him to his beloved home, the island of Ithaca. Once on board, “Odysseus, who had a mind like the gods and, besides, had endured wars and the bitter sea, fell into deep sleep…. The swift ship run fast through the waves that even a falcon, lord of the skies, could have matched its speed” (Odyssey 5.37-44; 13.57-92).

Stephanos Paipetis, who was professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, examined the technology in Homer and concluded that the god of metallurgy, Hephaistos, was a perfect scientist and engineer and metallurgist. He built the Shield of Achilles with advanced knowledge and technology of metals and materials. In other words, Hephaistos “possessed deep knowledge of the dynamic mechanical properties of laminated composite structures.” The ship of the Phaiakians that carried Odysseus from Phaiakia (Kerkyra) to Ithaca, Paipetis says, was powered by artificial intelligence.

As I said, the technology of AI is about 3,500 years old. Most of that time, AI has been dormant, only to resurface during the 20th century.

AI in Greece

A Greek scientist and engineer, Ioannes Kontos, retired professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Athens, published (in English, in 2015, and in Greek, in 2017) a comprehensive guide of the scientific and logical thought that helped humans invent and create AI, especially in Greece. His book, Artificial Intelligence and its Applications in Greece, is outstanding. It reads well and narrates how trained engineers bring AI systems into being. It’s a step-by-step construction of AI systems. The book mirrors deep knowledge of advanced technology, moderation (σωφροσύνη) and practical wisdom (φρόνησης). It is a global overview of the rise of this polemical technology funded by militaries and plutocrats that privatize it for profit and protection. But the AI vision of the Greek professor Kontos is far from the hegemonic ambition and policies of the US plutocrats. He would like to see Greece start inventing, producing and employing advanced technologies, some of which materialize AI products that potentially and in fact benefit the public good. He admits, however, only modest success for AI products manufactured by Greek companies in the last 50 years. But he explains an AI system of questions and answers he and his colleagues invented. He calls it AMYNTAS (Automatic Meta gnostic Ypologistikon [calculating[ Trainable Answering System).

Kontos, with little doubt, the preeminent Greek expert on AI, taught AI for about 40 years. He is both an engineer, an inventor, and a scholar. He investigated Greek history from the beginnings of this technology. He studied the science of vision and its application on the Parthenon. Then he turned to Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of all time, who invented the sciences of zoology, meteorology, and logic. There would have been no AI without understanding the science of logic. Next, Kontos examined the toothed-geared technology of the genius of the Antikythera Mechanism. That astronomical computer or Meteoroskopeion was designed and built in the island of Rhodes in the second century BCE. It was about 2,000 years ahead of its time. The Antikythera astronomical computer led him to Hero of Alexandria, a polymath philosopher and engineer who flourished in the late first century BCE and the beginning of the first century of our era. Hero built automated machines, including a model of the first steam engine. Kontos hopes his book will inspire Greeks that a better future is possible. He wants his book to be read widely by students, executives of Greek companies, and Greek citizens. His message is that it is possible to build advanced technologies in Greece, where scientists and engineers will be paid high salaries. He does not want Greece to become a low-salaried workforce for rich investors. He is definitely against data centers in Greece. He is right. The country cannot afford the vast amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water to keep data centers operating.

Kontos is also correct on Greek students. Greek university students receive a remarkably excellent education, especially in math and engineering. In addition, Greek students have grasped the idea of the good and the beautiful, ethical virtues ingrained in their knowledge and behavior. This prepares them to face and resolve difficult technological and moral problems. It is this asset of skills and virtues that gives substance to the hopes of Kontos, that, in fact, Greeks can disarm AI: making new and useful AI products rather than products of war and technologies of unemployment, hazardous farming practices, deception, propaganda and danger. This challenge is immense.

Kontos is right saying that nothing can be done if the emigration of well-educated Greek students continues. Not only that practice must cease by offering those students a satisfying alternative in their country. But the Greek government must soon discover it should serve Greece rather than foreign powers. It should fund/create opportunities for the development and growth of AI industries for the public good in Greece. The need for “moral” AI serving the good and the beautiful is exponential.

The hazardous nature of AI

Yet I find it difficult to point to an AI product which serves the public good. Certainly this may reflect simply my limited knowledge of AI. But my hopes are merely hopes that perhaps a moral engineer might design one or more AI applications that serve the public good. The project of Kontos, AMYNTAS, question and answering system, may just do that. He is also proposing to use AI for checking the credibility of election results.

Kontos doubts that engineers can give machines consciousness. He said that computer programmers often underestimate the gigantic complexity of AI, thus writing programs that threaten energy grids, air traffic control, satellites, nuclear power plants and automobile and train safety.

I live in the US, which, along with the European Union and possibly China, Russia, India, and several other countries, is flooded with problematic, hazardous, and unnecessary AI products. For example, robots are becoming fashionable for making coffee to doing housework. If coffee shops and restaurants buy coffee robots, what happens to the waiters/workers who make coffee? AI companies are now employing human trainers / AI pilots of “an army of humanoid robots.” Meanwhile, AI companies are planning to produce “a swarm of American-built robots” for the local and international market.

Coffee-serving humanoid robots would repel me. I prefer seeing and possibly talking to beautiful waitresses. I definitely would not visit coffee shops with robots. But these coffee humanoid robots highlight the vision of their makers. They don’t like our world, especially workers who they keep firing; they want to dominate our beautiful Earth, the only star in the universe, which is alive with millions of forms of life, circling the Sun god Helios, which the Greeks worshipped for the light and life the Sun made possible. The AI plutocrats want to eliminate most of the human nature of the world we know. They want to replace it with machines and humanoid robots – hence the AI danger. I don’t want to be forced into their iron dark age.

The AI danger is so widespread that Pope Leo XIV intervened to remind Christian Americans, and “men and women of good will” the world over, they ought to rethink and resist AI. On May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas / Magnificent Humanity. This was a warning on the existential threats of Artificial Intelligence.

Pope Leo said we don’t want AI to recreate the “Babel syndrome, namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise”

“Today,” the Pope continues, “the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology [AI] that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations…. In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human…. I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty…. [However, efficiency] has spread rapidly in recent years, fueled in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology.”

Then the Platonic prose of the Pope turned to the plutocrats in charge of AI. “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few,” he warned, “it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”

Pope Leo is right. These inequalities are extremely unsettling. They undermine and almost erase democracy.

Philanthropy or misanthropy?

The plutocrats understand they are adding French Revolutionary fervor in America, especially among the thousands upon thousands of workers they have been firing. But instead of spreading their immense wealth to ameliorate poverty, they are repeating the gimmicks of the plutocrats of the past. They embrace “foundations” in order to bribe professors and journalists to sing their AI song. Foundations dish out small or large amounts of cash, buying tenuous legitimacy for hazardous AI. In 2026, the AI plutocrats are suggesting they are ready to distribute large sums.

“Philanthropy,” says David Walacce-Wells, opinion writer for the New York Times, “used to be one way that plutocrats persuaded the public of the virtue of wealth and the value of business. These days [in 2026], it seems just as likely to inspire backlash — seen by an increasingly skeptical public as an end run around not just taxation but civil society and public oversight, too.”

True, seeing members of the “overclass of philanthropists… parachuting” in the midst of hard-working and increasingly unemployed Americans and Europeans may be more than problematic, nay, unacceptable. People will have trouble identifying the new philanthropists holding the flag “of the A.I. boom, about which Americans are already — and increasingly — anxious and resentful.” No doubt about that. Most Americans understand AI is harming their children, including college students. They resent all those mega “data centers” sucking their precious fresh water, while raising the prices they pay for electricity. They also hear about the militarization of the technology killing people faster and more “efficiently.” With these thoughts in mind, why should they take seriously AI “non-profits” dolling out money? Certainly, that money could not be destined for the public good. Would you trust mafia funding a school, public library, philanthropy? Who would believe that AI funding was possibly designed to thank society for licensing it to harm society?

Human intelligence

No wonder Pope Leo XIV promised himself to remember a few virtues that safeguard “the primacy of the human person, in order to ensure that it will always be human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits.”

The Pope’s Platonic moral vision helped him to define AI technologies as mechanical: immune to human intelligence shaped by the virtues of feelings, love, anger, beauty, justice and the idea of the good, Plato’s highest virtue, which brings to life moderation (σωφροσύνη) and practical wisdom (φρόνησης). No wonder the Pope defined AI the way it really is: a soulless mechanical monster bereft of morality and intelligence, constantly fed data. Its “speech” and computing may sound logical, but they are not. They are thoughtless if often coherent and statistical machine speech and calculations that may or may not follow the human information, stories, math and human programming. The automatic voice you hear reading an article on the computer resembles human voice, but it is not. It’s a metallic voice without feelings.

Pope Leo wrote:

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”

Existential threats

On June 2, 2026, I listened to a CNN report that confirmed and summarized the Pope’s AI message. The messenger of bad news was Tristan Harris, a former Google AI executive who quit his job because he discovered that the Google executives did not have the public good in mind. In 2019, he warned that AI systems were harmful. “No one wants to contribute to a system,” he said, “in which children have poor mental health. No one wants to contribute to a system where you destabilize democracies or cause genocides across the world.” On June 2, 2026, Harris was equally certain that AI posed existential threats and dangers. In his CNN interview, he warned that AI was against democracy and humanity. Tech executives compare human lives and the energy costs required to keep those humans alive. He castigated the undemocratic politics of less than a dozen unelected businessmen gambling with the Earth and civilization, funding an arms race that affects more than eight billion humans. They feed social media, which use algorithms that disturb the mental health of millions. AI, Harris warned, speeds up these serious harmful effects. The dream or nightmare of having AI cure diseases blinds both tech executives and politicians.

Epilogue

A Greek professor, Ioannes Kontos, described the Greek origins of AI, especially from the foundation of science and logic by the fourth century BCE philosopher Aristotle. Kontos is Aristotelean. That’s why he feels so comfortable with the awesome complexities of AI. He mastered the science, logic and organization of that system. He knows it backwards and forwards. Reading his book is entering logic and advanced technology: doing things carefully, logically and methodically. The machine obeys straightforward instructions.

Kontos also investigated AI in modern Greece. The results were disappointing primarily because the Greek government serves American and other foreign interests. It did not invest in the technology, and neither did it have a prominent vision of Greece in advanced technologies. Kontos expressed concern for the misuse of AI, but he, too, advocates its war applications. The explanation is Turkey, a genocidal neighbor of Greece that still threatens it.

By 2026, AI has become a global, though extremely controversial and dangerous technology. It has become a weapon of war primarily. It guides drones, missiles and other weapons of war in their lethal trajectories. Moreover, AI may be used in the management of nuclear weapons, an extremely dangerous and existential operation. But AI also claims human skills and knowledge (talking, translation, medical diagnosis, text reading and extraction of facts from the text, and doing rapid research) that may or may not be accurate. There are other uses of AI in face recognition and recreation of human voice and behavior that are employed not for the public good but for spying and the psychological exploitation of human beings. AI in iPhones and computers may also have deceptive, delusional, sycophantic and other adverse effects on the users of those devices. The plutocrat owners of AI are trying to create a mechanical human being, which would largely replace more than workers. This has existential, political, moral and other monstrous effects on civilization and the planet. This is why Pope Leo XIV rightly denounced AI and its billionaire owners.

In contrast to this corrupt factory of AI, Greece has a history, ancient virtues, and civilization to reawaken the very advanced version of AI, which was entirely devoted to public good. To bring the Phaiakian and Homeric version of AI to life, Greece has to also return to the virtues of the Homeric Age: freedom, intelligence, moderation, practical wisdom, justice and the Platonic idea of the good and the beautiful.

Both Alexander the Great and the first president of modern Greece, Ioannes Kapodistrias, dreamed of a Sacred Hellas, an independent, neutral Greece devoted entirely to the virtues of justice, freedom, science and the good and the beautiful, a school of civilization for America, Europe and all humanity. Today’s great powers, US, the European Union, Russia, China and India, should guarantee a Sacred Hellas. For their own benefit, that of civilization and that of our Mother Earth. Sacred Hellas can come into being. It should.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological-political theorist. He studied zoology and history, Greek and European, at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency; taught at several universities, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Poison Spring (2014), The Antikythera Mechanism (2021), Freedom (2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).

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