A surprising guest is invited to this year’s G7 Summit — Pope Francis. It’s the first time that a pontiff will partake in a G7 meeting. His presence symbolizes Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s quasi-theological approach to balancing AI’s benefits and risks.
A word of caution: do not expect the right-wing Italian leader to embrace AI. While Ms. Meloni wants Italy to keep abreast of the new technology, she emphasizes concern about its potential threat to destroy jobs. Meloni-style AI regulation carries a “Catholic” ethical backbone. She aims to have the G7, home to the leaders of the world’s most industrialized countries, not autocratic China or Russia, take the lead in exporting its AI philosophy to the Global South.
The Italian leader enters the summit on a political high. While European parliamentary elections shook German and French leaders, they strengthened Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, which won 28.8% of the vote, well ahead of the second-place Democratic Party “I am proud that this nation presents itself at the G7, and in Europe, as the strongest government of all,’’ Meloni told supporters after the vote.
The meeting will be held in Borgo Egnazia in the Southern region of Puglia. Although the luxury hotel houses a Michelin-starred restaurant and is a harbinger of Puglia’s rise as a tourist hotspot, the region is better known for producing Mafia-style organized crime than tech startups. At their meeting, G7 leaders will focus on how to use Russian frozen assets to help Ukraine and bring peace to the Middle East.
The only major tech issue scheduled to be discussed is AI. G7 leaders already have spent significant time dealing with the technology. At last year’s Hiroshima Summit, they unveiled the AI Principles and Code of Conduct. This March, G7 digital ministers expressed their commitment to “expanding support and awareness among key partners and organisations,” and promised to further iterate on the Hiroshima AI Process.
This set of voluntary rules fits with Meloni’s own seemingly conflicted views on technology. On the one side, she terms AI as the “greatest revolution” of our time. On the other, she calls it ‘the main challenge we face, anthropologically, economically, productively and socially.” In particular, she worries that AI could kill jobs, taking over white-collar work like automation did with manual labor.
Enter the Pope. Italy’s proposed course of action emphasizes keeping AI human-centered and human-controlled. Both are core tenets of the Rome Call for AI Ethics, launched in 2020 by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life and co-signed by the likes of IBM and Microsoft.
Meloni’s office intends to start with Italy’s public administration. Its delegates speak of building a Toolkit on the ethical use of AI applications in public services — with the help of the G7. “We would like to arrive at a common denominator of values on AI,” explained Digital Undersecretary Alessio Butti.
Eyebrows could shoot up at the prospect of Italy — a country struggling to keep up with digitalization and where software champions are few and far between — dictating a global AI agenda. Mr. Butti attempts to turn this backwardness into an advantage. He posits that the country could lead by example, leveraging AI innovation to overcome its own digital delay and ensuring that small and medium-sized enterprises, the backbone of Italy’s economy, are not swept away. That is where Meloni could use some divine help.
Rome is working on its own National AI Strategy. It will encourage Italian academic institutions to adopt AI, along with providing investments in early-stage startups. State lender CDP has set aside €1 billion for these efforts, a sum that pales when compared with the kind of money that has been flowing into the industry elsewhere.
Another somewhat surprising plank of Italy’s AI plans is outreach to Africa. Meloni believes targeted Italian investments can boost local development while benefiting Rome by slowing illegal migration and reinforcing energy security. In April, Italy set up an “AI Hub for Sustainable Development” along with the UN, the African Union, and African capitals with the stated goal of leveraging AI to meet UN-mandated development goals.
Political leaders from Egypt, Kenya, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates have been invited to the upcoming G7 summit. The UAE participation is interesting. It is home to a US-China tug-of-war over AI. If Giorgia Meloni has her way, Italy’s G7 will help ensure that global AI frameworks retain a Western, not Chinese, flavor.
Otto Lanzavecchia is an Italian journalist and analyst who focuses on international affairs, energy, tech, and society.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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