The University of Notre Dame has received the largest private grant in its history—$50.8 million—to help shape a faith-based ethical framework for artificial intelligence at a moment when the technology is rapidly outpacing regulation.
The grant, awarded by Lilly Endowment Inc., will fund the university’s DELTA Network, an initiative launched earlier this fall to explore how religious and moral traditions can guide the development and use of AI.
University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd described the project as a bridge-building effort. “Notre Dame is well-positioned to bring together religious leaders, educators, and those creating and using new technologies,” he said, “so that they might together explore the moral and ethical questions associated with AI.”
The timing is significant. Artificial intelligence remains largely unregulated in the United States. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations, even as Congress has debated freezing existing rules governing deepfakes and other emerging uses. In this environment, universities and civil society groups are increasingly stepping into the ethical vacuum.
Notre Dame’s response is the DELTA Network, an acronym for the values it hopes to foreground in the AI conversation: Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency. Rather than issuing abstract statements, the initiative aims to produce practical resources for educators, ministers, technology leaders, and the broader public.
Plans include programs for young adults, regional hubs in technology centers such as Silicon Valley and the northeastern United States, and retreats and convenings where engineers, executives, and ethicists can engage questions that algorithms alone cannot answer.
Those questions have also reached the Vatican. Pope Leo XIV has publicly warned that artificial intelligence raises concerns extending well beyond efficiency or profit. Speaking at a December conference on AI, he called for “coordinated and concerted action involving politics, institutions, businesses, finance, education, communication, citizens, and religious communities”.
At Notre Dame, the theological grounding is explicit but intentionally open. Meghan Sullivan, founding director of the university’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, said the work draws deeply from Catholic and Christian traditions while remaining accessible to people of all faiths—and none.
In an era when technological power often advances faster than moral consensus, Notre Dame’s investment signals a conviction that questions of dignity, agency, and transcendence still belong at the center of public life—even, and perhaps especially, in the age of artificial intelligence.
