Silicon Valley is making an unexpected turn toward religion as it wrestles with how to build artificial intelligence that aligns with human values. Last week, executives from AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI sat down with a diverse group of faith leaders at the first “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York, organized by the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities. The gathering, intended as the first in a global series that will extend to Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi, is an open acknowledgment by the tech industry that it needs outside moral guidance to navigate the risks of its own creations.
“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” said Baroness Joanna Shields, a former Google and Facebook executive who is a key partner in the initiative. Shields argued that religious institutions, with their billions of adherents and long experience in moral formation, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety.” She said tech leaders “understand the power and capabilities of what they’re building and they want to do it right — most of them.”
The roundtable drew participants from the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha’i International Community, The Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the New York Board of Rabbis, among others. The goal, according to Shields, is to produce a “set of norms or principles” reflecting input from diverse faiths that companies will agree to follow.
Several religious traditions had already articulated their own positions on AI before the companies reached out. The Mormon church’s official handbook gives qualified approval, stating that “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, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., passed a resolution in 2023 declaring that “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.”
Forging common principles across traditions will be difficult, said Rabbi Diana Gerson, a roundtable participant and associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. “Religious communities see priorities differently,” she noted. The tension is inherent in the effort to create what proponents call “moral AI” — a contested concept that, critics say, may distract from more fundamental questions about the technology’s role.
Anthropic has been the most publicly assertive among the tech companies in courting faith leaders. The company already drew on religious and ethics advisors to write the “Claude Constitution” for its chatbot, which states that the AI should “do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do.” The outreach comes after a public dispute earlier this year with the Pentagon over military use of AI, in which Anthropic said it would restrict its technology from being used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans.
Brian Boyd, the U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, said the tech industry’s move is partly about reputation. “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. But he added that “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.”
Some AI safety advocates are not convinced the effort is genuine. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and former U.S. science envoy for AI, called the faith outreach “at best a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter.” Chowdhury said she understands why companies are looking to religion after realizing that universal ethical principles are elusive. “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. 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.”
Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, raised a more fundamental objection. He suggested that the conversation about building ethical AI may be premised on accepting that the technology will be built no matter what. “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,’” Baker said. “It’s like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. We need to question whether we want to be building these things at all.’”
The roundtable organizers plan additional meetings in Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi, aiming to craft a global set of norms that can accommodate the differing priorities of the world’s religious traditions while giving tech companies a concrete ethical framework to adopt.