Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the technology stories that matter.
Pope Leo the Fourteenth has released his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, and while artificial intelligence is the headline topic, the document cuts much deeper. The pope frames AI as a lens onto older dangers — concentrated power, weakened democracy, and a technological elite reshaping the world on its own terms. He calls data a common good, rejects the idea that technology is morally neutral, and pointedly presented the document alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. This is less a tech policy paper and more a moral reckoning with who holds power and why.
Shifting to security, GitHub is dealing with another significant attack. A campaign called Megalodon has hit over five thousand repositories with malware-laden commits, planting infostealers in what researchers are calling a copycat of an earlier operation known as TeamPCP. The scale is a reminder that open source infrastructure, trusted by millions of developers daily, remains a high-value target with a very wide surface area.
And on a different kind of infrastructure entirely, a new startup called Chert, backed by Y Combinator, is pitching itself as Twilio for iMessage — an API letting businesses send, receive, and automate conversations through Apple's blue-bubble ecosystem. The bet is that iMessage's familiar interface makes automated conversations feel more natural. Whether Apple lets that bet stand is the real question.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
