Anthropic and OpenAI meet with religious leaders to develop ethical guidelines for AI systems

Representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI met with faith leaders in New York last week for the first "Faith-AI Covenant" roundtable, organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities (IAFSC). Additional roundtables are planned in Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi.

Anthropic has already involved faith leaders in shaping its "Claude Constitution," while the initiative aims to establish a shared set of ethical standards as regulation struggles to keep pace with AI development.

Critics including researchers from the Distributed AI Research Institute and Humane Intelligence argue the talks distract from more fundamental questions about whether certain AI systems should be built at all, and some view the meeting as a public relations effort by Silicon Valley to rebuild trust.