Navigating a Crisis of Conscience, Capital, and the Techno-Industrial Complex: Faith- and Values-Based Responses to Investment in Defense and Surveillance Technologies

As geopolitical turmoil escalates, investors are struggling to assess and address the risks posed by portfolio tech companies’ increasing involvement in military, immigration enforcement, and policing operations.  Alarm bells are sounding - from Silicon Valley to the Vatican - regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to support targeted and mass surveillance, military decision support systems, and autonomous weapons. The race towards “warification” and its domestic security incarnations, creates unprecedented risk for humanitarian law protections for civilians in conflict and to human rights, civil liberties, and privacy and data rights, threatening the social contract itself and demanding an urgent response by faith-based and values-based investors.  

This session will begin by exploring AI in the military kill chain – how it works and the inherent dangers, especially for humanitarian law protections. The audience will be led through a hypothetical combat scenario that illustrates the shortcomings of each step of the AI-driven targeting process and its lethal outcomes in places like Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, and Russia. We will then examine how Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas responded to these growing threats and can amplify the role of faith-based investors in shaping and constraining the surveillance and defense tech industries.  

Finally, participants will hear from their peers regarding new resources and concrete actions investors can take to address the salient risks posed by military AI, autonomous weapons systems, and high-risk surveillance technologies. Specifically, we will discuss a red flag terminology guide to alert portfolio managers when a potential or current investee may be involved in high-risk military or security operations and an abbreviated due diligence guidance with which to engage those companies. Finally, panelists will discuss efforts underway by investors to exclude commercial spyware - battlefield tools increasingly turned on journalists, activists, and dissidents, and repurposed for policing and immigration enforcement - from their portfolios.