Anthropic did not release a list of the religious leaders it invited to provide the advice, just that they're from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world, reports the Christian Post.
The main reason for the summit was to figure out how their chatbot Claude would answer when it comes across ethical problems. Topics ranged from how the chatbot would handle a person in grief or at risk of self-harm to how it would feel being shut off. Some even questioned if Claude would qualify as a “child of God.”
Robert Maginnis, a leading evangelical expert on artificial intelligence, was not among the invitees, but he says who they asked is very important.
“A chatbot only reflects what the LLM (Large Language Models) has stored inside of it, and Christian ethicists ought to have scrutiny of what the LLM has in its reservoir of information,” Maginnis says.
Five of the experts self-identified as being from the Catholic faith. However, Maginnis says it's a bit late in the game to start asking questions from faith leaders.
Claude is on version 4.6, and Anthropic just announced another platform called Mythos that is reported to be scary-powerful and good at hacking. Axios reports that Mythos has the ability to bring down Fortune 100 companies, cripple parts of the internet or penetrate national defense systems.
“I think it's kind of late coming to the party here for Anthropic to begin to ask these questions,” Maginnis states.
AI companies have been dabbling with spiritual issues on their own, and Maginnis says spiritual guidance is urgently needed.
“If you look at some of the weirdos out in Silicon Valley, they will promote the idea that you can be, quote, ‘saved by AI, and that you can have eventually eternal life as part of the AI ecosystem’,” Maginnis states.
He says that no matter how advanced it gets, artificial intelligence will never be true moral or spiritual agents.
“They'll never build a chatbot that has a soul or is sentient. What it will do is mimic human feelings,” Maginnis says.
On that point, AFN also reported how a different company developed an AI Jesus that was trained with the King James Bible, which AFA’s Ed Vitaliano responded saying that “the Spirit of God cannot be replicated via a machine.”
