Some of the world's largest AI companies have begun consulting clergy, philosophers and religious scholars in an effort to build chatbots that behave ethically , a shift that exposes deep uncertainty about where the values embedded in AI actually come from.
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, said it had met with scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups , a pool it hopes to broaden. Representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, while Microsoft is described as active in religious outreach.
The push became visible in May when Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to speak at the Vatican's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, "Magnifica Humanitas." Olah told the gathering that the world of technology needs " informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing" and "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."
The companies working theory is that religious traditions can supply the moral raw material that engineers alone cannot produce. The question of whose moral views a chatbot should reflect has come up across the industry; in a 2025 interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT should reflect a weighted average of humanity's moral views.
Scholars are sceptical. Anthropologist Webb Keane argues that if you assume religion can offer a distinct set of extractable moral principles, using it to train AI risks prioritising certain traditions and distorting others, particularly faiths that do not see themselves primarily as systems of ethics. Religious studies scholar Tomoko Masuzawa cautions that Silicon Valley's categories for comparing religions trace back to the 19th century, and may homogenise traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism into an artificial uniformity.
Oxford AI ethicist Carissa Véliz put the accountability question more bluntly: the more useful question is not whether these companies mean what they say, but whether what they actually do is ethical "whatever their true intentions, while noting the incentives that their business model pushes."
Anthropic has pushed back on the concern that it is simply mining faith for rules, saying: "This work isn't about aligning our models with any one tradition's worldview. We want Claude to draw from a full range of viewpoints religious, secular, political with equal depth and rigor."
The debate matters beyond theology. As AI assistants are deployed in workplaces to guide decisions, draft communications and advise on sensitive situations, the moral framework encoded inside them increasingly shapes professional life often invisibly.
Source: Associated Press
