House lawmakers visit Vatican to discuss AI - and meet the pope

By Owen Dahlkamp, 08/13/2026 07:51 PM EDT. The visit comes as the Catholic Church, including Pope Leo XIV, has increasingly focused on the rapidly developing technology. A bipartisan House delegation met with top Vatican officials on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence during a visit that briefly included Pope Leo XIV, according to two people with knowledge of the trip granted anonymity to disclose details of the private meetings. The delegation's visit, which has not been previously reported, included eight lawmakers and was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the person said. Committee member Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and California Rep. Ro Khanna, the panel's top Democrat, led the trip. A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment. In an interview confirming the visit, Khanna said the topics of discussion included religious freedom, AI's economic and geopolitical risks, as well as broader ethical and existential implications. It centered on two key principles: human dignity and equality. Khanna said it also means guarding against a concentration of power in which "a few billionaires can make decisions about data and algorithms." The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting. But Pope Leo has taken a special interest in the technology and used a May encyclical to call on countries to "safeguard humanity" as AI develops, warning that the technology could deepen inequality, fray the social fabric and erode moral responsibility if it doesn't have ethical guardrails. The pope previously cast the global race to develop cutting-edge AI technology in stark terms. Khanna told POLITICO he plans to introduce legislation that would tax the use of autonomous AI agents to incentivize companies to hire human workers. The group also discussed AI's implications for human mortality and the limits of human knowledge - boundaries some developers have long imagined technology might overcome by uploading human consciousness and accumulated wisdom to the cloud. Alongside Khanna and Newhouse, Reps. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) took part in the discussions, according to the person familiar with the trip. Spokespeople for the members did not respond to requests for comment. CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated Rep. Diana DeGette's (D-Colo.) participation in the congressional delegation.