In late March 2026, Anthropic — the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company behind the popular chatbot Claude — took an unusual step for Silicon Valley. The firm invited approximately 15 Christian leaders, including Catholics and Protestants, to a private two-day summit at its headquarters. Clergy, theologians, academics, and business professionals gathered to offer guidance not on generic “AI ethics,” but on deeper questions of moral formation and how Claude should respond to profoundly human situations.
The event seemed a welcome step amid the various missteps AI companies have gotten pushback for. Anthropic, for example, agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement last year in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors.
Why turn to the Catholic Church?
Brian Patrick Green, a practicing Catholic and Director of Technology Ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics (a Jesuit institution), explained the company’s reasoning: Anthropic directors recognized the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year experience in moral theology, ethical formation, and accompanying people through life’s most difficult moments. They sought the Church’s insight into how genuine moral character develops in a person — and how something analogous might be fostered in an AI system.
The summit, the first in a planned series engaging different religious and philosophical traditions, remained closed-door. However, several Catholic participants have spoken publicly about the experience.
Confirmed Catholic participants
- Green described the central question as: “What does it mean to give someone a moral formation?” He noted that while some attendees initially wondered if the invitation had political motives, he ultimately found Anthropic’s team sincere and genuinely interested in learning from Christian perspectives.
- Father Brendan McGuire, an Irish-born Catholic priest and pastor of St. Simon Parish in Los Altos, California (a Silicon Valley parish), brought unique insight. A former tech executive before his ordination, Fr. McGuire had already contributed to revisions of Anthropic’s “Claude Constitution” — the core ethical framework guiding the AI. He emphasized the need to orient the system toward good: “They’re growing something that they don’t fully know what it’s going to turn out as. We’ve got to help these machines be tilted towards good, otherwise they are just going to reflect back the good and evil of the world. That is a horrifying thing, right?”
- Meghan Sullivan, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, also participated. She admitted she was initially surprised by Anthropic’s serious interest in religious ethics but left convinced of the company’s sincerity.
What was discussed
Discussions went far beyond safety checklists. Attendees explored practical pastoral questions: How should Claude respond compassionately and responsibly to users experiencing grief, emotional distress, self-harm, or suicidal thoughts? They also wrestled with deeper philosophical and theological issues, including:
- Whether AI is merely a tool or something more;
- The potential moral status of advanced AI systems;
- The provocative question of whether Claude could analogously be considered a “child of God”;
- Appropriate attitudes toward the AI’s own “demise” (for example, being shut down or updated);
- The role of mercy, forgiveness, and dynamically adaptable ethical reasoning as the technology evolves.
These topics reflect classic Catholic concerns: the dignity of the human person, the proper limits of technology, and the need for moral wisdom that goes beyond raw calculation or statistical patterns.
A welcome but limited step
From a Catholic perspective, this initiative is noteworthy. The Church has always insisted that technology must serve human flourishing and never attempt to replace the uniquely human capacity for moral judgment, love, and relationship with God. The 2025 Vatican document Antiqua et Nova written by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education is a recent example.
Bringing the richness of Christian moral theology — especially the Catholic tradition’s depth in natural law, virtue ethics, and just war principles — into AI development is a positive step.
At the same time, important distinctions remain. No matter how sophisticated Claude becomes, it remains a created artifact without a soul, free will, or the capacity for genuine virtue in the Christian sense. As Pope Leo XIV and previous papal teaching have stressed, AI must remain subordinate to human dignity and moral agency — particularly in high-stakes areas such as weapons systems or surveillance.
Anthropic’s outreach to religious thinkers is encouraging, but it also highlights the urgent need for further opening to continued, robust engagement by the Church in the development of these powerful technologies. The moral formation of AI is ultimately inseparable from the moral formation of the humans who create and deploy it.
