{"id":49119,"date":"2026-04-29T11:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T11:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/49119\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T11:12:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T11:12:12","slug":"as-ai-advances-the-question-of-values-moves-to-the-forefront","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/49119\/","title":{"rendered":"As AI advances, the question of values moves to the forefront"},"content":{"rendered":"

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz\u2019s AI & Tech newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest AI & tech news, analysis and insights straight to your inbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over a formal lunch in Washington last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat down with two dozen conservative thought leaders to pitch Claude, his company’s chatbot, as the most ethical option on the market.<\/p>\n

The pitch went sideways almost immediately. When attendees asked which ethical code Claude actually followed, whether Christian, Aristotelian, or Nietzschean, Amodei said he wasn’t sure.<\/p>\n

The anecdote has been making the rounds in recent weeks<\/a>, and it captures a question now bedeviling the AI industry. As chatbots move deeper into education, health care, customer service, and even pastoral care, the companies building them are being forced to answer something philosophers have argued about for millennia. What does good actually mean, and whose version gets coded into the model?<\/p>\n

Anthropic goes looking for a soul<\/p>\n

Anthropic has taken the question more publicly than most of its competitors. The company’s constitution says its central aim is to make Claude a “genuinely good, wise, and virtuous agent,” and the company has hired philosophers and theologians to work on the bot’s character and interpretability.<\/p>\n

This month, Anthropic convened Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Confucian, Sikh, Taoist, Latter-day Saint, Unitarian Universalist, and African indigenous leaders at its San Francisco headquarters for a two-day seminar on “Claude’s moral formation.”<\/a> A separate March gathering brought together Christian leaders.<\/p>\n

Other voices in tech want something more direct. Not religion as one perspective among many in an ethics seminar, but AI development as an explicitly Christian project. Anduril cofounder Trae Stephens told a San Francisco audience last year that humans have “a moral obligation”<\/a> to build technology that brings humanity closer to what he described as divine intent.<\/p>\n

At a private lecture series hosted by ACTS 17 Collective, a Bay Area group cofounded by health care tech executive Michelle Stephens, Peter Thiel \u2014 a longtime Christian who has said his faith is “the prism with which I look at the whole world<\/a>” \u2014 argued that anyone trying to slow AI development is playing the role of the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

Global faith leaders, meanwhile, have lined up on the other side. Pope Leo XIV has urged developers to cultivate moral discernment<\/a>, and Christian groups like The Gospel Coalition have begun publishing benchmarks<\/a> that score chatbots on “theological reliability.” One September evaluation<\/a> flagged Claude as steering users away from Christianity. The top scorer was DeepSeek, a Chinese model whose alignment team answers to a communist atheist government.<\/p>\n

The Christian derivatives market is already here<\/p>\n

If the makers of the biggest AI tools will not build explicitly Christian models, app developers are happy to do it for them. A small ecosystem of faith-branded products has sprung up on top of existing foundation models, and some of them are already generating real revenue.<\/p>\n

Hallow, a Catholic prayer app with more than 23 million downloads across 150 countries<\/a>, charges $69.99 a year for features including chats with an AI assistant called Magisterium, which answers questions based on Church teaching.<\/p>\n

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, now executive chair at the faith-tech company Gloo<\/a>, is building Christian-aligned AI tools for pastors, including a chatbot called Faith Assistant and an AI model called Kallm, which Gloo has built on top of DeepSeek (aka the one that topped the Christian benchmarks). Gelsinger told The Guardian last year<\/a> that his life’s mission has been to build “a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return.”<\/p>\n

Consumer products like Text with Jesus, a ChatGPT-powered chatbot<\/a> that lets users pose theological questions to a hipster-bearded avatar of Christ, have drawn hundreds of thousands of users. Just Like Me, a newer entrant, charges $1.99 per minute for video calls with an AI-generated Jesus trained on the King James Bible and unspecified sermons.<\/p>\n

These products come stacked with concerns. Consumer apps raise the usual questions about privacy, data harvesting, and steering users toward paid tiers. Chatbots carry their own risks, including lawsuits alleging suicides linked to AI companion use and growing evidence that long conversations with chatbots can reinforce delusional thinking. And religion adds a third layer of its own.<\/p>\n

Those stacked risks have not slowed the true believers, in both AI and God, who see themselves in a race. For the builders most invested in this project, AI is the last technology humanity will ever need, which is why getting the values right feels urgent enough to warrant benchmarks and prayer apps and lectures on the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

But a model trained on everything from Reddit to the Quran is not an obvious foundation for a narrowly Christian god, however carefully the prompt is written. The question of whose values get coded into AI is not going to be settled by a benchmark or a seminar. It is going to be settled by whoever builds the fastest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz\u2019s AI & Tech newsletter. Sign up here to get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[593,7527,30559,1164,586,30557,30558],"class_list":{"0":"post-49119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dario-amodei","8":"tag-ai-development","9":"tag-christian","10":"tag-christian-project","11":"tag-claude","12":"tag-dario-amodei","13":"tag-michelle-stephens","14":"tag-unitarian-universalist"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116487700146560720","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}