Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.

Burgum bashes the pope

The Trump administration’s pattern of targeting Catholics who opine on world happenings continued after Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical (basically, a teaching document) railing against the corrosive impacts of artificial intelligence.

“I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday after Bartiromo mentioned the Pope’s AI criticism. 

Burgum is just the latest Trump administration official to tee off on the pope for expressing humanitarian concerns — in this case, about the potential downsides of the robot revolution. Polling data suggests Leo is in line with the majority of Americans who are skeptical of AI tools. Nonetheless, we’ve now seen President Donald Trump attack the pope for opposing war, Trump’s so-called deportation czar attack Catholic bishops for opposing mass deportations and now Trump’s interior secretary jab the pope for daring to question the unfettered rise of AI.

AI is arguably one of the most pressing matters in our time, and the Trump administration would have us believe religious figures have no business weighing in on them — at least, if the views these figures are offering contradict Trump’s wishes. 

Read more on Burgum’s comments at Mediaite here. 

SpaceX IPO goes after Grok

A public filing from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX warns that a controversial “spicy” feature of its chatbot, Grok, that some users deployed to essentially create AI-generated child pornography risks “reputational harm” for the company. As Forbes reported, the initial public offering filing submitted last week warns about “the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs” as well as “potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery.” 

Read more in Forbes here. 

Data surveillance denial

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “no relationship” with Paragon Solutions, the controversial spyware company that has developed technologies used by some repressive regimes to spy on journalists and dissidents. The statement comes after the Trump administration lifted a previous hold the Biden administration placed on its contract with Paragon Solutions. 

Read more at NPR here. 

DOJ’s extremist erasure

My colleague Steve Benen wrote about the Justice Department’s erasure of government websites acknowledging the pro-Trump insurrection that MAGA loyalists attempted on Jan. 6, 2021. The erasure continues Trump officials’ desperate efforts to hide the truth about what happened that day and MAGA figures’ role in fomenting it. 

Read more on MS NOW here. 

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Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.