By India McCarty
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently spoke to 15 Christian leaders in an effort to establish guidelines for the moral and spiritual development of its technology.
“I found the folks at Anthropic to be very sincere and interested in learning from us,” attendee Brian Patrick Green, a practicing Catholic who teaches AI and technology ethics at Santa Clara University, told The Wall Street Journal. “Do they have blind spots? Yes. That’s exactly why they want us there.”
At the two-day summit, discussions centered around how Claude should respond to queries about sensitive topics such as self-harm or grief, as well as what attitude the chatbot should have towards the possibility of it being shut off.
Related: Here’s What ChatGPT Has to Say About Christianity
“They’re growing something that they don’t fully know what it’s going to turn out as,” said Brendan McGuire, a Catholic priest based in Silicon Valley who also took part in the Anthropic discussions. “We’ve got to build in ethical thinking into the machine so it’s able to adapt dynamically.”
Many have taken this recent summit as a sign of Anthropic’s willingness to think outside of the box and explore different ideas that might be rejected by other Silicon Valley companies.
“A year ago, I would not have told you that Anthropic is a company that cares about religious ethics,” Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who attended the event, said. “That’s changed.”
In an op-ed for Deseret News, Mariya Manzhos praised Anthropic, writing, “Anthropic sets itself apart from other labs by a more philosophical approach to the moral composition of its chatbot Claude, which it hopes can ‘be a genuinely good, wise, and virtuous agent,’ the Anthropic constitution says.”
As AI technology becomes more commonplace, many are thinking about its relationship to religion. Notre Dame recently received a $50 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to support the DELTA Network: Faith-Based Ethical Formation for a World of Powerful AI.
“We are deeply grateful to Lilly Endowment for its generous support of this critically important initiative,” University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd said in a statement. “Pope Leo XIV calls for us all to work to ensure that AI is ‘intelligent, relational and guided by love,’ reflecting the design of God the Creator. As a Catholic university that seeks to promote human flourishing, Notre Dame is well-positioned to build bridges between religious leaders and educators, and those creating and using new technologies, so that they might together explore the moral and ethical questions associated with AI.”
Anthropic’s recent efforts to connect with faith leaders are an encouraging sign that some tech companies are thinking about the bigger picture when it comes to the long-term effects of their technology.
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