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Tech companies are increasingly seeking guidance from faith leaders as concerns rise about artificial intelligence’s rapid integration into society, according to an Associated Press report on a new initiative. Last week in New York, leaders from multiple religious groups met with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for an inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable.
The meeting was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, a group that focuses on issues including extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The organizers said the New York meeting was expected to be the first of similar roundtables in other locations, including Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.
Baroness Joanna Shields, described by the report as a key partner in the initiative, said tech executives need to recognize their “power — and their responsibility” in shaping the technology. She argued that regulation alone “can’t keep up with this,” and said faith leaders have experience with what she described as “shepherding people’s moral safety,” adding that faith leaders ought to have a voice.
Shields also linked the value of the discussion to the fact that people building AI understand its capabilities. She said the “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,” and said the initiative’s goal is an eventual “set of norms or principles” informed by different faith communities that companies would abide by.
The roundtable included representatives from groups such as 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, known as the Mormon church. The report also said some faith traditions had already issued their own guidance on using AI before the companies initiated outreach.
For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued a “qualified approval” in its handbook, stating that “AI cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it,” while also adding that “AI can be a useful tool to enhance learning and teaching.” The report said the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., passed a resolution in 2023 calling for religious groups to “proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies” rather than responding only after technology has affected churches and communities.
Even so, the report said the effort to draft shared principles faces challenges because faiths do not prioritize issues in the same way. Rabbi Diana Gerson, a roundtable participant and associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said “Religious communities see priorities differently.”
The report described the initiative as part of a broader coalition between faith groups and technology companies focused on producing “moral AI,” a concept the report said remains debated. It cited an example from Anthropic’s public “Claude Constitution,” which the report said was written with input from a group of religious and ethics leaders and includes the goal that “Claude” should do what “a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude’s position.”
While some participants framed the effort as overdue accountability, the report also found skepticism from others who work on AI regulation and safety. Brian Boyd, identified as the U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, said there was “some aspect of PR” to such outreach, referencing the “Move fast and break things” slogan and arguing that “they broke too many things and too many people,” adding that he saw both “a moral obligation on the part of the companies” and “earnest questioning” among some company members.
Rumman Chowdhury, the CEO of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration, said he was not inclined to believe religion is the best place to answer questions surrounding AI and ethics, but suggested he understands why companies may be turning to it. He said he thought Silicon Valley had held “a very naive take” that it could arrive at “some sort of universal principles of ethics,” and he said companies quickly realized that “that’s just not true,” turning to religion instead as a way of handling “the ambiguity of ethically gray situations.”
Other critics expressed doubt that private conversations with faith leaders would translate into meaningful changes at companies. The report said it was unclear to what extent opaque AI companies would act on what they hear, but it quoted Dylan Baker, a lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, warning that the conversation might miss a more fundamental question. Baker said, “Wait, wait, wait. We need to question whether we want to be building these things at all.”