The Business of Being Good

Anthropic, the Vatican, and the Moral Branding of AI

Imagine you're an engineer at one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. You've built a system that can write poetry, pass the bar exam, and hold a conversation that feels startlingly human. And then someone asks you: but does it know how to say it's sorry?

That question — about fault, correction, forgiveness — is not a technical question. It's a theological one. And the fact that engineers at Anthropic were asking it, and that they were asking it of Catholic ethicists and Vatican officials, is the story we're unpacking today.

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