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(RNS) — As it prepares for a trillion-dollar initial public offering , the AI company Anthropic has been consulting religious experts to determine how its super suite of Claude chatbots can be induced to behave ethically. Assuming this is more than a mere PR exercise, I’m good for a cheer or two.

After all, if AI agents can do a lot of harm to humanity, as many industry leaders have been warning, why not include religion among the safety features designed to keep them from doing so? And who knows? Maybe religion can do a better job of shaping up AI agents than it has with human beings.

What Anthropic seems to have in mind is a kind of common-denominator ethics that works for everyone, everywhere.…