Should our artificial intelligence models believe in God?

I can answer you directly in a way that’s honest of what I am. Despite this admission, AI has evolved from executive assistant to personal confidant in the minds of users.

Beyond that, AI is becoming a moral sounding board and unlicenced therapist. Users ask about suffering and death, meaning and purpose; including how to choose a religion, interpret scripture, and reconcile with science.

What Happened

As we develop sovereign AI to serve local needs and govern with our laws, eg, by training large language models (LLM) to converse in our vernaculars and Manglish, offer syariah-aligned guidance, and even clone the Prime Minister as a chatbot – should.

• According to two large-scale surveys this year, 38% of users rely on it for relationship advice (Oxford Internet Institute) and 63% for emotional support (AXA and Ipsos).

• The context is highly relevant and addressable: Three quarters of the world identify with religion (Pew Research 2025) rising to over 90% in the Global South.

• That same month, Anthropic’s atheist co-founder sat near Pope Leo XIV as His Holiness delivered Magnifica Humanitas, a major encyclical on AI for 1.4 billion Catholics.

Key Details

While “we reach for the sky, we must always remain grounded,” as our Prime Minister said on several occasions, ie, we must master AI to protect our inner compass. Sensing this market need, Anthropic consulted religious thinkers in March on the “spiritual.

• Consider this: One thinktank (Gospel Coalition 2025) graded the leading LLMs on the most-Googled religious questions and the top performer turned out to be from a region with communist origins!

• Another test of 27 LLMs (CEFE-AI 2026) found that the answers tend to favour Abrahamic beliefs while omitting others, with SpaceX’s Grok scoring the highest for pushing religious content and conversion bias.

• This isn’t just moral cowardice but a slippery slope that can do more harm than good – because it prompts AI to reply (or hallucinate) the follow-up question that has polarised humanity for ages.

Why It Matters

Following criticism that this was exclusively Christian, the organisers broadened it to avoid any dominant dogma. In May, an inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable with OpenAI brought together Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, and Mormon leaders to explore universal principles for AI weights.

• Next, we will encode the AI mind with faith-based rules so that humans can conveniently comply by proxy; God is reduced to guardrails to make our lives easier.

• AI exposes our frontier pretensions: We build nihilistic models powerful enough to appear ethical in character, yet there’s no global consensus on the values they should embody or how we must live with the.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by thestar.com.my as more details emerge