Two of the world's leading AI developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, sat down with leaders from a range of faith traditions late last month for the inaugural "Faith–AI Covenant" roundtable in New York — a sign of how far Silicon Valley's relationship with organized religion has shifted as anxiety about advanced AI mounts.
The gathering, held on April 30, 2026, was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, a group that works on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. According to reporting on the event, faith representatives included leaders from the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha'i International Community, the Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A search for shared moral norms
The stated goal is ambitious: to produce an eventual "set of norms or principles" — informed by Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others — that AI companies would agree to abide by. Organizers say the New York meeting is intended to be the first of several around the world, with future roundtables floated for Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.
The initiative is guided by an advisory steering group chaired by Baroness Joanna Shields, a former Google and Facebook executive. "The people who are building this understand the power and capabilities of what they're building and they want to do it right — most of them," Shields said, according to coverage of the roundtable. In a statement tied to the launch she argued that "technical progress and moral wisdom are not in tension — they are essential to each other."
Anthropic leans in
Of the two labs, Anthropic has been the more visible participant in religious dialogue. The company has published a "Claude Constitution" stating it wants "Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude's position," and it previously hosted roughly 15 Christian leaders in San Francisco to discuss the chatbot's moral direction. Both companies have increasingly hired philosophers and ethicists in recent years to work on aligning model behavior with human values.
Why it matters
The Faith–AI Covenant lands amid a broader scramble over who gets to define how powerful AI systems should behave — governments through pre-deployment testing, the labs through their own constitutions and policies, and now a coalition of religious institutions claiming a seat at the table. Critics will question whether a voluntary, faith-led framework can meaningfully constrain commercial AI roadmaps, and whose values get encoded when traditions disagree. But the meeting underscores a notable reversal: companies that long treated organized religion warily are now actively courting it for legitimacy and guidance as their products reach billions of people. Whether the effort yields enforceable commitments or remains a symbolic dialogue will be the test of the rounds to come.
