The Atlantic this week ran a piece on Silicon Valley's turn toward the Catholic Church for AI ethics guidance, priests and theologians entering conversations about model alignment and the soul of artificial minds. The same week, Cohere announced a merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha to create what they called a "transatlantic AI powerhouse," a phrase that is doing enormous amounts of work. Aleph Alpha has long positioned itself as the European alternative to American AI: privacy-respecting, regulation-compatible, built on a different set of values. Read together, these two stories describe the same anxiety arriving from different directions. Who gives AI its conscience?
The Values Gap as Market Opportunity
Aleph Alpha was born from the GDPR era's cultural logic: that European institutions needed AI they could trust, which in practice meant AI they could audit, constrain, and justify to regulators. The Cohere merger is explicitly framed around "regulated industries," meaning banking, healthcare, government, sectors where an AI's ethical provenance is now a procurement criterion. Meanwhile, Catholic intellectuals offer something secular AI ethics has conspicuously failed to deliver: a coherent account of human dignity that isn't just a repackaged utilitarian calculus. A 2025 paper in AI and Society by Vallor et al. argued that the Catholic tradition's emphasis on subsidiarity, decisions made at the most local appropriate level, maps surprisingly well onto federated AI governance frameworks. The Vatican didn't engineer this. It just had the existing vocabulary.
Theological Capture or Genuine Dialogue?
The cynical read is that Big Tech is doing to religion what it does to every adjacent institution: ingesting its legitimacy and metabolizing it into brand equity. The Vatican's imprimatur on an AI ethics framework is worth more in Brussels than a hundred position papers. But the optimistic read is weirder and more interesting. Catholic thinkers have been arguing about free will, moral responsibility, and the nature of persons for centuries. These are not peripheral concerns for AI development. They are the central ones. TurboFund's latest weekly signals show AI infrastructure and AI enterprise as the two sectors drawing the most investor attention right now, but the values layer is where the next regulatory moat gets built. Cohere and Aleph Alpha are betting that "European values" is a durable product differentiator. Silicon Valley's priests are betting that moral seriousness is a growth market. Both might be right. Meanwhile, two college kids just raised $5.1 million to build an AI social network in iMessage, and God's name did not come up once in the press release.