{"id":913502,"date":"2026-06-17T18:12:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T23:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/anthropic-asks-religious-thinkers-to-help-shape-claude-as-pope-warns-about-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T18:12:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T23:12:50","slug":"anthropic-asks-religious-thinkers-to-help-shape-claude-as-pope-warns-about-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/anthropic-asks-religious-thinkers-to-help-shape-claude-as-pope-warns-about-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic asks religious thinkers to help shape Claude as pope warns about AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In late March around 15 religious thinkers<\/a> met with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic to discuss one of the strangest and most consequential questions now facing the AI industry: How do you teach a chatbot to be good?<\/p>\n

The invitations to these meetings had arrived in different ways. Greg Cootsona\u2019s came via e-mail. Brian Patrick Green\u2019s came via a friend of a friend after Anthropic asked for suggested names. Both ended up in a series of conversations with the company about Claude, Anthropic\u2019s chatbot, and the moral framework meant to guide how it behaves.<\/p>\n

The aim wasn\u2019t to make the chatbot Bible-thumping or pious. But it was an acknowledgment that centuries-old traditions of moral reasoning might offer insights to a five-year-old frontier AI lab whose systems are becoming more capable, more persuasive and harder to govern by simple rules.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI think they have reached a point where they realize that the power is kind of outstripping their in-house wisdom,\u201d says Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and one of the leading scholars working at the intersection of technology and theology. \u201cThey realized that they needed help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cootsona, executive director of AI and Faith, an organization that advises tech companies on the ethics of AI, remembers the conversations similarly. \u201cThese questions have become too big for us,\u201d he recalls Anthropic staff saying. \u201cWe can\u2019t answer them on our own.\u201d (Anthropic did not respond to an interview request for this story.)<\/p>\n

The conversations took place amid a broader religious reckoning with AI. On May 25 Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas<\/i>: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,<\/i> an about 40,000-word treatise<\/a> calling for AI to be \u201cdisarmed\u201d\u2014not rejected but freed from the assumption that \u201ctechnical power automatically confers the right to govern.\u201d Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah was among those who attended the Vatican presentation that announced the treatise\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

The stakes extend far beyond Claude. Hundreds of millions of people now talk to AI chatbots every week, and the values their developers bake in via guardrails and corrective tuning shape what those models say about everything from end-of-life care to abortion to managing grief. There are few regulations, no agreed-upon method for doing this work and, until recently, little outside input. The fact that a leading company is now consulting theologians is either a rare sign of humility or of an industry improvising its ethics in real time\u2014possibly both.<\/p>\n

But what can religion offer AI\u2014and what happens when religious values start shaping how a chatbot answers?<\/p>\n

Religious traditions, for all their contradictions, have spent millennia considering the same underlying problem: how to form moral agents and instill those lessons in society. \u201cMoral formation has been a topic that religions have been talking about for thousands of years,\u201d Green says. \u201cWhat insights can they give us that we can use to hopefully produce a model which will be better at doing what we want it to do, which is to be good and not do bad things?\u201d<\/p>\n

The goal of the meetings in late March, according to those who attended, was to help refine what Anthropic calls Claude\u2019s constitution, a written set of principles the company uses to shape how the model responds, including by training Claude to critique and revise its own answers against those principles.<\/p>\n

Anthropic is \u201clooking for what works\u201d and may try religiously informed ideas or techniques to see whether they improve model behavior, Green says. His understanding is that the company has recognized it \u201ccan\u2019t make a regulation about every single case that the AI is going to come into contact with.\u201d So instead of writing rules for every scenario, the aim is to shape something more like a model \u201cpersona\u201d with a disposition toward good behavior rather than a checklist of prohibitions.<\/p>\n

Not everyone is convinced that religious consultation solves the accountability problem. \u201cI wonder, with these companies and types of executives, whether it makes sense to try to figure out whether they mean what they say,\u201d says Carissa V\u00e9liz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford, \u201cor whether it makes more sense to think about whether what they do is ethical or unethical, whatever their true intentions, while noting the incentives that their business model pushes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The easy criticism is that what Anthropic did was \u201cethics washing\u201d\u2014borrowing the moral seriousness of religion to burnish its reputation. But those who were in the room saw something different. \u201cIt\u2019s not ethics washing,\u201d Green says. \u201cIt\u2019s sincere, from what I can tell.\u201d He points out that inauthenticity with religious thinkers would be quickly spotted and that the resulting backlash would be hard to recover from.<\/p>\n

Sincerity is no guarantee the company will act on what it heard. By multiple accounts, the late March meetings were not always polished. Green says the tone varied between sessions\u2014some had stronger camaraderie, while others were \u201ca little bit more awkward\u201d\u2014and that even the participants weren\u2019t always clear on what was supposed to happen next. In the meeting he attended, he says, \u201ceverybody there was very interested in listening,\u201d but there was also \u201ca question of what do we do with this information now that we have it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over time, Anthropic appeared to sharpen the format, learning how better to facilitate the discussions and produce more cohesive results. It has also widened the circle beyond Christian thinkers: a late April meeting<\/a> brought together participants from several religious traditions, including Judaism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Sikhism and the Greek Orthodox Church.<\/p>\n

Even if the earnestness is genuine, V\u00e9liz worries that the use of religious terminology and imagery around AI\u2014deliberately or not\u2014can make honest conversation harder to have.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe increasingly religious notes of Silicon Valley do worry me, because they can inspire a kind of tribal mentality that can be harder to pierce through reason,\u201d she says. \u201cReligious feelings tend to be emotionally charged in ways that decisions purely based on business reasons are not,\u201d V\u00e9liz says. They also \u201cgive leaders more leverage to inspire obedience in followers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his encyclical, Pope Leo XIV argues that algorithmic power should not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral way. Anthropic\u2019s experiment suggests how hard that principle may be to put into practice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tama Culton
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In late March around 15 religious thinkers met with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic to discuss one of the strangest and most consequential questions now facing the AI industry: How do you teach a chatbot to be good? The invitations to these meetings had arrived in different ways. Greg Cootsona\u2019s came via e-mail. Brian Patrick<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":913503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118839,26930],"tags":[134532,7936],"class_list":["post-913502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","category-religious","tag-anthropic","tag-religious"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}