Lauge Risom Koch 
Technology companies are consulting religious leaders to develop AI ethics, but experts warn this approach fundamentally misunderstands how global faiths operate.
Major technology companies are increasingly consulting religious traditions to help establish moral frameworks for artificial intelligence. According to Fortune, industry executives believe these ancient belief systems can guide the ethical development of powerful language models. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah recently addressed the Vatican, stating, “These are not questions a lab can answer.”
The overarching corporate goal involves aggregating diverse moral ideas rather than binding the technology to one specific faith. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously suggested that chatbot responses should reflect a weighted average of global moral viewpoints. However, academic experts warn that this broad approach fails to address how different religious traditions often fundamentally contradict one another.
Several prominent corporations have already initiated formal meetings with various theologians, philosophers, and faith leaders. Representatives from Meta, Google, and Amazon have recently engaged with the Vatican regarding ethical technology development. Academic participants report that these corporate discussions attempt to address profound moral questions raised by emerging artificial intelligence capabilities.
Academic criticism and Western bias
Anthropologists argue that Silicon Valley misinterprets religion by treating it simply as an extractable set of moral principles. University of Michigan anthropologist Webb Keane noted that extracting ethical rules divorces religion from how adherents actually live. He warned that this approach primarily benefits scriptural traditions, noting, “There’s a very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book.”
Religious studies scholars emphasize that the concept of distinct, comparable religious systems is a relatively modern academic invention. Tomoko Masuzawa explained that categories like Buddhism and Hinduism were not recognized as clearly bounded traditions before European influence. Consequently, attempting to extract universal moral data risks imposing a distinctly Western academic framework onto global belief systems.
Experts fear that technology companies might perpetuate a distorted theory of religion that ignores doctrine, ritual, and community relationships. If developers assume all faiths function primarily as ethical systems, they risk fundamentally misrepresenting traditions with different structural priorities. This methodology could inadvertently prioritize Abrahamic religions while minimizing the complex cultural contexts of other global belief systems.
Homogenization and future implications
Some technology firms defend their outreach efforts by emphasizing their commitment to diverse and rigorous intellectual representation. Anthropic claims their objective is not alignment with a single worldview but rather gathering accumulated thinking on character formation. The company reported consulting scholars and clergy from more than fifteen different religious and cross-cultural groups.
Large language models inherently generate responses by predicting subsequent words based on vast amounts of scraped human text. This technical architecture naturally blends distinct religious texts and philosophies into a single mathematical output. Critics argue this mechanical process strips away the defining characteristics that make individual religious traditions unique.
Legal expert Paolo Carozza worries that this technological accumulation homogenizes complex theological thought into an overly generalized middle ground. He argues that living traditions absorb new knowledge organically over time rather than through mechanical aggregation. Carozza concluded that artificial intelligence simply mixes everything together in a way that ultimately makes sense of nothing.
