Tech companies increasingly seek faith leaders’ guidance on artificial intelligence

In an unprecedented shift from Silicon Valley’s traditional skepticism toward organized religion, major tech companies are now actively seeking guidance from faith leaders on how to develop artificial intelligence with moral and ethical foundations.

Last week in New York, representatives from AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI met with diverse religious leaders for the first “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable. The Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities organized this inaugural session, with plans to hold similar discussions in Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi.

Baroness Joanna Shields, a former Google and Facebook executive who later entered British politics, emphasized the urgency of these discussions. “Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she noted. “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.”

The initiative aims to establish a shared framework of principles informed by various faiths that AI companies would voluntarily adopt. Participants included representatives from 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.

Some religious organizations had already developed their own guidance on AI before being approached by tech companies. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has conditionally endorsed AI in its handbook, 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.”

Similarly, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a 2023 resolution calling for proactive engagement: “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.”

Creating unified ethical principles presents significant challenges, as Rabbi Diana Gerson, a roundtable participant and associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, pointed out. “Religious communities see priorities differently,” she said, highlighting the diverse values and needs across global faiths.

Anthropic has been particularly forward in engaging with religious leaders, incorporating their input into its “Claude Constitution” — the ethical framework guiding its AI chatbot. According to Anthropic, “We want Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude’s position.” This outreach follows Anthropic’s public disagreement with the Pentagon earlier this year regarding military AI applications, when 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 both practical and genuine motivations behind the tech sector’s religious outreach. “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 observed. “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.”

Not all AI safety advocates view these efforts favorably. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of nonprofit Humane Intelligence and U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration, expressed skepticism: “At best it’s a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter.”

Chowdhury suggests tech companies are turning to religion after failing to establish universal ethical principles. “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.”

Critics like Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, worry these conversations sidestep more fundamental questions about AI development itself. Baker characterizes the approach as: “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,” while the more important question might be whether certain AI technologies should be built at all.

The effectiveness of this faith-tech collaboration remains unclear, particularly given the notoriously opaque nature of AI companies. The real question is whether insights from religious leaders will meaningfully influence AI development or simply provide ethical cover for predetermined technological trajectories.