A group of Catholic moral theologians and ethicists said March 13 that AI giant Anthropic "was acting as a responsible and moral corporate citizen" and "not as a threat to the safety of the American supply chain" in its decision to maintain guardrails concerning use of its technology when it comes to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of American citizens.

Fourteen experts and scholars in Catholic moral theology, philosophy and social thought filed a "friends of the court brief" — amici curiae — in support of Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War (Department of Defense). Anthropic filed suit against the Pentagon March 9 after President Donald Trump directed government agencies Feb. 27 to no longer work with the tech company amid a critical difference in opinion on acceptable uses of the technology by the department. It was submitted, they wrote, "to offer the Court a perspective grounded in a longstanding moral tradition that bears directly on the issues raised by this case, while remaining attentive to the factual record and the technical realities of modern artificial intelligence."

The substantive argument in the brief was authored by four scholars: Charles Camosy, associate professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington; Joseph Vukov, an associate professor of philosophy and the associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago; Brian J.A. Boyd, a moral theologian and scholar at various Catholic institutions; and Brian Patrick Green, a lecturer in ethics at the Graduate School of Engineering at Santa Clara University in California.

Regarding the use of AI for mass surveillance of Americans, the scholars — referred to in the brief as the "Catholic Moral Theologians and Ethicists" — said they are "aligned" with Anthropic's objection to such a use-case based on Catholic teaching on privacy and subsidiarity.

The government sought to deploy Defendant Anthropic PBC’s (“Anthropic”) AI models
for “all lawful purposes” without exception. Anthropic agreed to that request in substantial part,
offering to permit all lawful uses subject to only two limited exclusions. As explained by
Anthropic’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Dr. Jared Kaplan, those exclusions reflect the
company’s technical judgment that current AI systems are not yet sufficiently reliable,
interpretable, or controllable to be entrusted with decisions that directly take human life without
human oversight, or to conduct population-scale surveillance in environments where errors, bias,
or misuse could cause irreversible harm.

[SNIP]

The Catholic Moral Theologians and Ethicists have worked with people of different
faiths—and of no faith—on a central matter of shared and longstanding concern: when technology
is capable of violating life, dignity, and freedom, it is reasonable to draw clear boundaries around
its use. Those boundaries reflect caution, not defiance, and responsibility rather than obstruction.