The Priest Inside Anthropic’s A.I.
Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.
He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more complicated: a true believer in both God and technology, trying to hold them in the same hand. “I left the tech industry, but it never really left me,” McGuire told Observer.
Before donning the collar, McGuire was a Silicon Valley executive with degrees in engineering and software. Born in Ireland, he studied cryptosystems at Trinity College Dublin in the 1980s, relocated to the U.S., and became executive director of the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association — the kind of résumé that, in the Valley, would have set him up for a very comfortable life. Instead, he left to become a priest.
He never fully left the industry behind. As friends ascended corporate ladders, McGuire deepened his understanding of the ethical challenges emerging with each new wave of technology. Through a partnership with the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education and Santa Clara University, he helped establish the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture, which in 2023 published a handbook on ethics in the era of disruptive technology.
Then, Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, got in touch. What followed was, by McGuire’s own description, mind-blowing. “They basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road,” he recalled.
A.I. developers have long been accused of playing God. Anthropic, it seems, is taking that role seriously.
McGuire contributed theological insight to the Claude Constitution, offering a perspective on how to make the model “more discerning.” A.I. has no soul, he acknowledges. But he sees parallels in how humans and machines develop judgment—through iteration, correction and exposure to the full spectrum of human behavior. “That’s the genuine formation of a conscience,” he said. “I think we have to help these machines be tilted towards good, otherwise they’re just going to reflect back the good and evil of the world—that’s a horrifying thing, right?”
McGuire wasn’t Anthropic’s only religious collaborator. Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Brian Patrick Green, a technology ethics director at Santa Clara University, also reviewed the Claude Constitution. Green and other Catholic scholars recently filed a federal court brief supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. government, which challenges the company’s effective blacklisting by the Pentagon after it refused to allow its A.I. systems to be used for autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. The brief praised those ethical limits as “minimal standards of ethical conduct for technical progress.”
McGuire considered filing his own brief. “They’re having a moral conversation,” he said. “They may not call it moral, but I call it moral.”
Anthropic says its engagement with religious voices—part of a broader effort to engage a wide variety of communities to keep pace with technological acceleration—is only a beginning. The company plans to expand outreach beyond Catholic institutions to other religious leaders going forward. These efforts include upcoming meetings that McGuire, alongside other religious leaders, will attend to discuss how to help A.I. internalize their own experiences in aiding humans who are “striving to be the best versions of ourselves,” according to the priest.
“I’m still trying to help them grapple with the human element,” said McGuire, “and keep that at the forefront of their mind.”
His novel, meanwhile, remains in progress. The working title? The Soul of A.I.: A Priest, an Algorithm, and the Search for Wisdom.