Andrew here. The water-cooler talk in Silicon Valley is all about the Vatican. DealBook\u2019s Bernhard Warner, who\u2019s based in Rome, takes us inside the debate about Pope Leo XIV\u2019s missive about A.I. and the dignity of work.<\/p>\n
Also, Benjamin Mullin has a scoop for us: California\u2019s attorney general revealed his thinking on Paramount\u2019s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. Finally, the first Enhanced Games \u2014 a steroid-friendly version of the Olympics backed by Peter Thiel \u2014 just finished, with results that don\u2019t look so enhanced. More below. <\/p>\n
Who will listen to Leo? <\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence has taken hits recently from college graduates<\/a> and voters<\/a>. Now the pope is taking a turn.<\/p>\n Politicians, labor officials<\/a> and tech executives are continuing to weigh in on Pope Leo XIV\u2019s \u201cMagnifica Humanitas<\/a>,\u201d a 42,300-word encyclical squarely aimed at A.I.\u2019s risks to humanity and Big Tech\u2019s lock on the technology.<\/p>\n But while Leo\u2019s views may influence wider societal debate, they seem unlikely to slow down Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n Leo warned the A.I. race could lead to a new \u201cTower of Babel,\u201d writing that ambitious undertakings that promote homogeneity and compete with religion end badly.<\/p>\n Leo also wrote about:<\/p>\n the need for robust government regulation of tech companies at the forefront of A.I.<\/p>\n protecting workers from workplace disruption<\/p>\n A.I. deepfakes\u2019 assault on the truth<\/p>\n A.I.-powered autonomous weapons<\/p>\n Anthropic was part of the Vatican\u2019s announcement. One of the A.I. giant\u2019s founders, Chris Olah, was in Rome for the encyclical\u2019s launch; he said in a speech at the event, \u201cWe need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic and its top executives, like Dario Amodei, the company\u2019s C.E.O., have long argued that the technology needs guardrails. That position has put it at odds with the likes of the Pentagon and the former Trump A.I. czar David Sacks.<\/p>\n Not everyone agreed with Leo. Sacks, who has called for unshackling U.S. tech giants so they can better compete against Chinese rivals, argued that giving a government more say over A.I. could backfire in Orwellian fashion<\/a>. \u201cWho will guard the guardians?\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n Other notable tech voices have yet to weigh in, including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman of OpenAI or Elon Musk.<\/p>\n Also quiet so far has been Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic who has scolded Europe for its tighter regulatory grip<\/a> on A.I.<\/p>\n How much sway will Leo have? Encyclicals can be a big deal: After Pope Francis issued a global call to action on the climate crisis in 2015, corporate leaders made pilgrimages to the Vatican<\/a> and pledged to take action on the issue.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s real money on the line with A.I.:<\/p>\n Remember that Jensen Huang, Nvidia\u2019s C.E.O., predicted last week<\/a> that A.I. infrastructure spending would climb as high as $4 trillion in 2030.<\/p>\n And investors are anxiously awaiting several giants of the sector to go public, including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, each of which could be trillion-dollar enterprises.<\/p>\n HERE\u2019S WHAT\u2019S HAPPENING <\/p>\n Oil prices rebound as the U.S. strikes Iran. Traders grew nervous after the U.S. on Monday targeted Iranian missile launch sites and boats trying to lay mines, dimming hopes for potential peace talks<\/a> in Qatar. Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, rose to nearly $99 a barrel. The attack comes as Republicans grow more fearful<\/a> that the Trump administration will cede big concessions to Tehran to end the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n BP removes its chairman. Shares in the energy giant fell more than 5 percent on Tuesday after its board announced<\/a> that it would replace Albert Manifold, who assumed the role in October, citing \u201cunacceptable\u201d issues<\/a> with his governance standards, oversight and conduct. BP\u2019s board announced that Ian Tyler would take over in an interim basis from Manifold, who had pushed for a speedy shift back \u2060to oil and gas.<\/a><\/p>\n Shares in Ferrari sink as it enters the E.V. age. The Italian carmaker unveiled the Luce<\/a>, its first fully electric car, last night in Rome. The \u20ac550,000 ($645,000) five-seater, which was codeveloped by Jony Ive\u2019s LoveFrom, has already sparked impassioned debate online<\/a>. The Luce arrives as many carmakers have scaled back or taken huge write-downs on their E.V. investments.<\/p>\n Scoop: New scrutiny on the Warner Bros. deal <\/p>\n Whether Paramount closes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery without major hurdles may ultimately come down to one man: Rob Bonta, California\u2019s attorney general, who has said publicly that the deal raises \u201cred flags everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Last week, during a meeting with Hollywood heavyweights including the actor Mark Ruffalo and the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, Bonta went into even greater detail, Benjamin Mullin exclusively reports for DealBook.<\/p>\n Bonta said his office has not made a \u201cfinal decision\u201d about whether to sue. But he told the group that he believes \u201cstructural remedies\u201d \u2014 which often means breaking up a company \u2014 are usually more effective than behavioral remedies, which he said companies can get around. He also said other states were considering action.<\/p>\n \u201cBehavioral remedies have historically proven to be hard to enforce,\u201d Bonta said, according to a transcript of the meeting. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to make that same mistake again here. So it could be a block, it could be behavioral remedies backed by structural remedies. Again, we haven\u2019t decided what we\u2019re going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Industry pushback: The meeting with Bonta was organized by Norman Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund. Eisen served as an ambassador in the Obama administration and is part of a coalition opposing the Warner Bros. deal.<\/p>\n The meeting came weeks after thousands of signatories \u2014 including more than 200 prominent actors, producers and documentarians \u2014 released a letter<\/a> arguing that further corporate consolidation would harm the film and TV industry.<\/p>\n Paramount has responded by saying that the deal \u201cis fundamentally pro-competitive,\u201d arguing that the combined company will have the scale necessary to compete with \u201cglobal streaming platforms such as Netflix and large tech companies.\u201d The deal, Paramount says, will strengthen competition for premium content and \u201chelp revitalize and reinforce theatrical exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n The company also has a formidable team set to defend the deal if Bonta sues, with lawyers including David Gelfand; Jeffrey Kessler, who led the antitrust case<\/a> by more than 30 states against Live Nation; and Makan Delrahim, Paramount\u2019s chief legal officer and a former U.S. antitrust chief.<\/p>\n Bonta\u2019s office has been aggressive with antitrust action in recent months, a potentially ominous sign for Paramount. He is trying to unwind Live Nation\u2019s deal for Ticketmaster and challenge Nexstar\u2019s acquisition of Tegna, moves that have caused legal headaches for both companies.<\/p>\n He said in the meeting that state attorneys general are increasingly stepping in as the Trump administration waves through big deals.<\/p>\n Wherever Bonta lands, the clock is ticking. He told the group that his office has been preparing for the possibility that Paramount could close its deal as soon as July, adding that he won\u2019t \u201close the opportunity to move aggressively, if that\u2019s what we decide to do.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have authority here, and we\u2019ve delivered results already in this space,\u201d Bonta said.<\/p>\n A one-stop shop for A.I. models raises $113 million<\/p>\n As artificial intelligence models \u2014 and the costs of running many of them \u2014 multiply, software developers are increasingly looking to choose the right ones for different tasks and price points.<\/p>\n That has led to a growth in services like the start-up OpenRouter, which plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $113 million<\/a> in a round led by CapitalG, an investment arm of the tech giant Alphabet, Michael de la Merced reports<\/p>\n What OpenRouter does: Customers can access more than 400 A.I. models \u2014 including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google \u2014 through a single portal.<\/p>\n Alex Atallah, an OpenRouter founder and its C.E.O., described his company as the A.I. equivalent of Stripe, the payments giant. \u201cA lot of what we do is try to help people find the right vendor for the job,\u201d he told DealBook.<\/p>\n It\u2019s growing fast. OpenRouter says it now processes 25 trillion tokens, the basic unit of A.I. computing, every week, up from five trillion six months ago. <\/p>\n Cost is increasingly a concern for customers, especially as they rely more on agents that consume more tokens and push employees to use A.I. more<\/a>. The chief technology officer of Uber, Praveen Neppalli Naga, recently told The Information that the ride-hailing giant had already spent its entire A.I. budget<\/a> for 2026.<\/p>\n Many companies are using open-source models, which are free to use, to help lower costs. (Of the top three most popular models<\/a> on OpenRouter in the past week, two were open-source ones from the Chinese companies DeepSeek and Tencent; the third was Anthropic\u2019s high-end Claude Opus 4.7.)<\/p>\n Atallah added that if companies aren\u2019t careful, running queries through A.I. models, known as inference, could end up leading to \u201can infinite cost center.\u201d<\/p>\n That is what led to CapitalG\u2019s interest, according to two of the investment firm\u2019s partners, Jane Alexander and Mo Jomaa. <\/p>\n The round values OpenRouter at $1.3 billion, DealBook understands. Other participants include the venture capital arms of Nvidia, ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.<\/p>\n \u201cThe C.F.T.C. has said to bad actors in the crypto space that it is not coming after them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Joe Konizeski, a former attorney in the Chicago office of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on how the Trump administration has curtailed enforcement and oversight<\/a> by the agency after lobbying from cryptocurrency companies and prediction markets \u2014 several of which have ties to the Trump family. Five senior agency officials who oversaw the companies were placed on leave, The Times reports.<\/p>\n Barely enhanced <\/p>\n The inaugural billionaire-backed Enhanced Games, where sports doping wasn\u2019t just accepted but encouraged, is in the books<\/a>. The results weren\u2019t exactly an endorsement for testosterone, human growth hormone and Adderall transforming sports.<\/p>\n Just one drug-using athlete set a world record, though international sports bodies have said that they won\u2019t recognize the achievement.<\/p>\n What went down: Spectators at the games, held Sunday in Las Vegas, had to wait until the final event of the night before they saw a world record fall.<\/p>\n Kristian Gkolomeev, a Greek one-time Olympic swimmer, was the one to enter the doping record book, earning a $1 million payout for doing so.<\/p>\n The big backers: The tech mogul Peter Thiel<\/a>, crypto investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, invested in Enhanced Group<\/a>, the company that sells supplements online and staged the games. (Enhanced went public<\/a> via a SPAC merger earlier this month with a $1.2 billion valuation; its shares have dropped more than 40 percent since its first day.)<\/p>\n Nondoped athletes were the big winners. Four of the 42 athletes participating said they competed clean. Three of them won $250,000 prizes for winning their events.<\/p>\n Incidentally, one of them, the American swimmer Hunter Armstrong, was drug tested by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency right after he won Sunday\u2019s race. He said it was the 11th time he had been tested since he joined the Enhanced Games.<\/p>\n THE SPEED READ <\/p>\n Deals<\/p>\n Technology and artificial intelligence<\/p>\n U.S. court dockets are being flooded by home-brewed lawsuits<\/a> by individuals representing themselves, thanks to A.I. (NYT)<\/p>\n One of Spotify\u2019s C.E.O.s, Alex Norstrom, defended the platform\u2019s \u201ccontrolled\u201d push into A.I.-generated music<\/a> with a tool backed by labels. (FT)<\/p>\n Best of the rest<\/p>\n