Growing anxiety about artificial intelligence development has prompted technology companies to seek an unexpected source of guidance: religious leaders. This represents a dramatic shift from Silicon Valley’s historically secular approach to innovation.
Representatives from major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic gathered with faith leaders last week in New York for the first “Faith-AI Covenant” discussion. The meeting, organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, focused on incorporating moral principles into rapidly advancing AI systems. Additional sessions are planned for cities including Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi.
Baroness Joanna Shields, a former Google and Facebook executive who later entered British politics, emphasized the urgency of direct collaboration between tech leaders and faith communities.
“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. “This dialogue, this direct connection is so important because the people who are building this understand the power and capabilities of what they’re building and they want to do it right — most of them.”
Shields envisions developing a comprehensive framework of ethical guidelines influenced by diverse religious perspectives, spanning Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and other traditions.
The roundtable included delegates from numerous faith organizations: the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha’i International Community, The Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Several religious groups had already established AI guidelines before companies began seeking their input. The Mormon church’s handbook offers cautious endorsement of the technology, stating: “AI cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it. However, AI can be a useful tool to enhance learning and teaching.”
The Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution in 2023 declaring: “We must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they have already affected our churches and communities.”
Rabbi Diana Gerson, who participated in the roundtable as associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, acknowledged the complexity of finding universal principles across different faiths. “Religious communities see priorities differently,” she noted.
This collaboration reflects an emerging partnership between technology and faith sectors, driven by efforts to develop morally responsible AI systems—though what constitutes “moral AI” remains hotly debated.
Anthropic has been particularly active in engaging religious leaders, incorporating their input into the “Claude Constitution” that guides its chatbot’s behavior. The company states it wants “Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude’s position.”
This outreach follows Anthropic’s earlier conflict with the Pentagon over military AI applications, after the company announced restrictions on using its technology for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans.
Brian Boyd, U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, sees mixed motivations behind these efforts. “There’s some aspect of PR to it. The slogan was ‘Move fast and break things.’ And they broke too many things and too many people,” he said. “There’s both a moral obligation on the part of the companies that they’re belatedly recognizing, as well as I think, for some members of the companies, an earnest questioning.”
However, some AI safety advocates question whether these initiatives represent genuine commitment to ethical development.
“At best it’s a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter,” said Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of nonprofit Humane Intelligence and former U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration.
Chowdhury doubts religion provides the best framework for addressing AI ethics but understands the appeal for technology companies.
“I think a very naive take that Silicon Valley has had for a couple of years related to generative AI was that we could arrive at some sort of universal principles of ethics,” she explained. “They have very quickly realized that that’s just not true. That’s not real. So now they’re looking at maybe religion as a way of dealing with the ambiguity of ethically gray situations.”
The extent to which these traditionally secretive companies will implement guidance from faith leaders remains uncertain. Some critics worry that discussions about creating ethical AI systems deflect attention from fundamental questions about AI’s role in society.
Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, expressed concern about the framing of these conversations. “Under the guise of, ‘We’re gonna build all this stuff. That’s a given. And when we do build these things in these ways, how do we make sure that the end result is maybe good,’” he said. “It’s like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. We need to question whether we want to be building these things at all.’”
