A curious thing happened in late March: more than a dozen religious thinkers and representatives were invited to a discussion organised by Anthropic, the makers of the Claude chatbot, which recently revealed plans to set up an office space for 800 people in central London’s Knowledge Quarter. The religious invitees who included Christian scholars from universities and think tanks, then later expanded to other religions, were gathered by the AI firm to try and help them provide the system with moral guidance. Anthropic hoped that organised religion could provide some form of support that could help shape the constitution, a document by which Anthropic’s AI model is meant to abide.
It’s not the only time that religion and cutting-edge technology have combined. In late May, Pope Leo XIV released a 43,000-word treatise on AI saying that the technology ought to be disarmed, equating it with the Tower of Babel, and calling on politicians to better regulate AI systems. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” the Pope said in an address at the Vatican.
