Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics; National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 2026

 COURTNEY MARES, National Catholic Reporter; Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics

"Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he's hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry.

Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, to advise on the creation of an ethical framework to govern how the AI system handles complex moral questions.

McGuire, 60, holds engineering and computer science degrees from Trinity College Dublin and completed Stanford University's executive business program. He spent years in Silicon Valley as a technology executive before leaving it all behind to be ordained a priest of the Diocese of San José 26 years ago...

"I came from the industry," McGuire told OSV News. "My heart's never left it, but my heart is really with the Lord."

"I've always felt my role was to bridge those two worlds together," he said...

"Capitalism needs human guidance. And this is the human guidance the pope is asking for," he told a group of journalists after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican press conference with Leo to present the encyclical.

The priest is also skeptical of industry self-regulation. Transparency, he argued, is the necessary first step toward accountability.

"Transparency leads to accountability, and accountability leads to trust. And with trust we'll have responsible AI. But we can't get there without transparency," he said. "If we don't know how these things are being developed and what they're doing, then how could we regulate them? We can't."

Still, McGuire resists both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism.

"There are those who … think it's going to destroy humanity. And then there are those on the other end who think it's going to be the great savior of humanity," he said.

McGuire said that he sits in between these two extremes."

Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI; AP, May 7, 2026

 KRYSTA FAURIA, AP; Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI

"As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion.

Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

Tech executives need to recognize their power — and their responsibility — to make the right decisions, said Baroness Joanna Shields, a key partner in the initiative. She worked as a tech executive with stints at Google and Facebook before pivoting to British politics.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. But the leaders of the world’s religions, with billions of followers globally, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety,” she reasoned. Faith leaders ought to have a voice, Shields said.

“This 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,” she said of AI tech executives.

The goal of this initiative, according to Shields, is an eventual “set of norms or principles” informed by different groups and faiths, from Christians to Sikhs to Buddhists, that companies will abide by...

Present at the meeting were a variety of faith groups, including representatives from 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, widely known as the Mormon church...

The partnership highlights a growing coalition between faith and tech, born out of an effort to create moral AI — a contested concept which begs questions about whether that is possible and what it means...

“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,” said Brian Boyd, the U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute...

But other advocates for AI regulation and safety aren’t so sure these efforts are genuine.

“At best it’s a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter,” said Rumman Chowdhury, the CEO of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration.

Chowdhury says she’s not inclined to believe religion is the best place to help answer questions surrounding AI and ethics, but thinks she understands why companies are increasingly turning to it.

“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,” she said. “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.”"

Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?; The New York Times, April 20, 2026

 David DeSteno, The New York Times; Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?

"In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announced that its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with a Catholic priest and consulting with other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body."

The philosopher trying to teach ethics to AI developers; NPR, April 17, 2026

 Manoush Zomorodi, Fiona Geiran, Katie Monteleone, James Delahoussaye, Sanaz Meshkinpour, NPR ; The philosopher trying to teach ethics to AI developers

"Sullivan is a philosophy professor at Notre Dame and the author of The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Through Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, she is meeting with AI leaders and developers to apply an ethical framework for AI — basically give AI a moral compass. Her mission is as ambitious as it sounds, but she is backed by Notre Dame's $50.8 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to champion philosophy and theology in the national conversation around AI.

Her reception in Silicon Valley has been mixed. She describes occasionally hearing comments akin to: "That's cute that you think that topics like virtue and justice could still be relevant in our world." But she finds that most developers are open and genuinely curious about philosophy. "I come out here, and I think, my gosh, I've been training for this for 25 years to have this conversation with you, says Sullivan. "And I'm so glad that now you're ready to do it."

In March, she attended Anthropic's 2-day summit, where Christian leaders discussed how Claude should approach the messy moral questions humans are bringing to chatbots. For instance, how should Claude react to a user who's grieving? What should it do when someone is at risk for self-harm?"

The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code; Observer, March 31, 2026

Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly , Observer; The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code

"Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he and a group of faith leaders helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.

He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more complicated: a true believer in both God and technology, trying to hold them in the same hand. “I left the tech industry, but it never really left me,” McGuire told Observer...

McGuire wasn’t Anthropic’s only religious collaborator. Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Brian Patrick Green, a technology ethics director at Santa Clara University, also reviewed the Claude Constitution. Green and other Catholic scholars recently filed a federal court brief supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. government, which challenges the company’s effective blacklisting by the Pentagon after it refused to allow its A.I. systems to be used for autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. The brief praised those ethical limits as “minimal standards of ethical conduct for technical progress.”...

Anthropic says its engagement with religious voices—part of a broader effort to engage a wide variety of communities to keep pace with technological acceleration—is only a beginning. The company plans to expand outreach beyond Catholic institutions to other religious leaders going forward."

Preparing faith leaders to prepare others to use artificial intelligence in a faithful way; Presbyterian News Service, September 4, 2025

 Mike Ferguson , Presbyterian News Service; Preparing faith leaders to prepare others to use artificial intelligence in a faithful way

"It turns out an engineer whose career included stops at Boeing and Amazon — and who happens to be a person of deep faith — has plenty to say about how faith leaders can use artificial intelligence in places of worship.

Jovonia Taylor-Hayes took to the lectern Wednesday during Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness, which is being offered online and at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. The PC(USA)’s Office of Innovation is among the organizers and sponsors, which also includes The Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Think of all the varied ways everyday people use AI, Taylor-Hayes said, including as an aid to streamline grocery shopping and resume building; by medical teams for note-taking; for virtual meetings and closed-captioning, which is getting better, she said; and in customer service.

“The question is, what does it look like when we stop and think about what AI means to me personally? Where does your head and heart go?” she asked. One place where hers goes to is scripture, including Ephesians 2:10 and Psalm 139:14. “God has prepared us,” she said, “to do what we need to do.”

During the first of two breakout sessions, she asked small groups both in person and online to discuss questions including where AI shows up in their daily work and life and why they use AI as a tool."

Faith leaders bring ethical concerns, curiosity to AI debate at multi-denominational conference; Episcopal News Service (ENS), September 5, 2025

 David Paulsen, Episcopal News Service (ENS) ; Faith leaders bring ethical concerns, curiosity to AI debate at multi-denominational conference

"Some of the most tech-forward minds in the Protestant church gathered here this week at the Faithful Futures conference, where participants wrestled with the ethical, practical and spiritual implications of artificial intelligence. The Episcopal Church is one of four Protestant denominations that hosted the Sept. 2-5 conference. About halfway through, one of the moderators acknowledged that AI has advanced so far and so rapidly that most conferences on AI are no longer focused just on AI...

AI raises spiritual questions over what it means to be human

Much of the conference seemed to pivot on questions that defied easy answers. In an afternoon session Sept. 3, several church leaders who attended last year’s Faithful Futures conference in Seattle, Washington, were invited to give 10-minute presentations on their preferred topics.

“What happens to theology when the appearance of intelligence is no longer uniquely human?” said the Rev. Michael DeLashmutt, a theology professor at General Theological Seminary in New York, New York, who also serves as the Episcopal seminary’s senior vice president.

DeLashmutt argued that people of faith, in an era of AI, must not forget what it means to be Christian and to be human. “Being human means being relational, embodied, justice-oriented and open to God’s spirit,” he said. “So, I think the real risk is not that machines will become human, but that we will forget the fullness of what humanity actually is.”

Kip Currier, a computing and information professor at the University of Pittsburgh, warned that AI is being used by sports betting platforms to appeal to gamblers, including those suffering from addiction. Mark Douglas, an ethics professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, outlined the ecological impact of AI data centers, which need to consume massive amounts of energy and water.

The Rev. Andy Morgan, a Presbyterian pastor based in Knoxville, Tennessee, described himself as his denomination’s “unofficial AI person” and suggested that preachers should not be afraid of using AI to improve their sermons – as long as they establish boundaries to prevent delegating too much to the technology."

At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality; The New York Times, January 3, 2025

 Eli Tan, The New York Times; At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality

"For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.

But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far."