As the race to build ever more powerful artificial intelligence accelerates, some of the industry's leading companies are grappling with a question that long predates computing: how to teach a machine right from wrong. Increasingly, their answer is religion.

"These are not questions a lab answer," Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah said earlier this year at the Vatican's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence. "They are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia."

Yet amid this much-discussed turn to faith, there has been little public scrutiny of what exactly these technology companies think religion is — and, perhaps more importantly, what they hope to get out of it.

As executives sound the alarm about AI's destructive potential and debate the need to build morally good models, they are increasingly seeking input from philosophers and faith leaders. The consultations sit within a broader technical project the industry calls alignment — shaping model behavior to reflect human values — which has increasingly drawn on disciplines well beyond computer science. The executives' philosophy runs roughly as follows: religion can help inform AI to be morally good at a moment when fears about the technology, both founded and unfounded, are hopscotching across the culture. Because these companies are not bound to any particular faith, the goal is often quite broad — an aggregate of moral ideas that can inform their models.

"What I think ChatGPT should do is reflect that weighted average, or whatever, of humanity's moral view," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.

But experts and adherents alike warn that this idea fails to reckon with how different traditions and worldviews can contradict one another. In short, they say, that is not exactly how religion works. The stakes are practical as well as philosophical: whatever moral framing a model absorbs eventually surfaces in the answers it gives users, including in the kinds of classroom settings — like chatbot access for literacy education — debated in the consultations themselves.

A rule-book view of faith

For decades, scholars have pushed back against the widespread notion that religion is a set of rules or principles that can be divorced from the "messy, practical, ad hoc" ways adherents actually live, argues Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. The idea that religion can be separated from culture and politics remains entrenched, even though it suffuses both in many ways. Some worry that as AI companies ask faith leaders to answer ethical questions, they will further perpetuate a theory of religion that overlooks the importance of doctrine, ritual and relationships.

The core issue, Keane argues, is this: if you assume that religion as a whole offers a distinct set of extractable moral principles, using it to train AI risks prioritizing certain traditions and distorting others — particularly faiths that do not see themselves primarily as a system of ethics.

"There's a very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book," he said. "It is certainly very tied to scriptural religion, and the scriptural religions at the end of the day really turn out to be therahamic religions."

Inside Anthropic's meetings

That is not to say these consultations have lacked diverse representation, nor that their engagement with religion has been thoughtless from the perspective of participants such as Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher of religion who leads an initiative on ethics and AI at the University of Notre Dame.

Anthropic has not enumerated the traditions it has consulted, but the company said in a May blog post that it had met with "scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups" — a pool it hopes to broaden in the future.

Earlier this year, Sullivan traveled to Anthropic for one of these meetings, which included Christians from different denominations. In contrast to conversations she had had with other tech companies, she was impressed by the rigor of Anthropic's engagement with religion. The company is widely seen as the AI firm taking ethics and safety most seriously.

"The culture inside the company is similar to that on a good college campus in the sense that you've got a collection of very intellectually curious people," she said. "These meetings are pretty nerdy — I don't know if that's the best way to put it — in a good way."

The meeting was split into two parts, Sullivan said. First, the company explained its models "in layman's terms" to those in attendance. The faith leaders then responded with feedback and discussion.

"Every kind of moral question that this technology raises — everything from, 'Do humans have souls?' to 'Should third graders be able to access a chatbot for literacy education?'"

Representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, while Microsoft has been vigorous about its religious outreach.

A modern invention

Religion is generally considered both ancient and universal. Experts such as the late, influential scholar Jonathan Z. Smith concede that this is true in some ways, but say it is not the full picture.

"Man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them. But man, more precisely Western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion," Smith wrote in 1982.

Many scholars of religion today share Smith's view of their field. They question the idea that religions form a set of distinct, comparable systems, calling it a modern notion that can be traced only as far back as the 19th century.

Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, were not recognized as clearly bounded traditions by the people who practiced them prior to the arrival of European scholars, according to Tomoko Masuzawa, a religious studies scholar and author of "The Invention of World Religions."

"All these categories were not native," Masuzawa said.

Western academics solidified those categories for years, only beginning to seriously reexamine them in the latter half of the 20th century. Those entrenched ideas about religion — that it is easily comparable across cultures — help explain why Silicon Valley might not feel the need to define its own understanding of it. In an effort to represent various viewpoints, religion often serves as an obvious way to showcase diversity of thought.

"Somehow, religion becomes a way of kind of mapping out the world," Masuzawa said. "It's as if the whole world has kind of bought into it."

Some observers want the companies to define their terms and intentions more clearly, so outsiders can better understand what exactly they hope to gain from religion.

"This work isn't about aligning our models with any one tradition's worldview. We want Claude to draw from a full range of viewpoints — religious, secular, political — with equal depth and rigor," Anthropic said in the blog post. "What we're after in these conversations is careful, accumulated thinking on how good character actually forms."

How, and whether, these conversations translate into model behavior remains largely undisclosed, making the specificity of future disclosures one thing to watch as Anthropic broadens its pool of consulted groups.

The risk of homogenization

Large language models work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having "learned" the patterns of a huge trove of human-written works, including religious texts. Paolo Carozza, a member of the independent Meta Oversight Board and a legal expert who studies Catholic social thought and technology, worries that in the quest for accumulation, a given tradition's defining characteristics could be lost — in effect, homogenized into something that pulls toward the middle or even favors Western religions.

"Any living, sophisticated tradition over time is capable of interacting with others outside of it and absorbing some new knowledge and growing. But it does so in this organic way," he said. "What AI, I think, often does and potentially does, is not in an organic way, but in a way that just throws it all together, mixes it all up, and therefore makes sense of none of it."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.