At 55, Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Ashram and head of the Vedanta Society of New York, finds himself an unlikely participant in one of the defining debates of the 21st century.
During the Durga Puja celebrations on October 17, the Kolkata-born monk will deliver a discourse and blessing at Times Square. A week later, he will travel to Singapore to address a youth forum on a distinctly 21st-century theme: ‘The Silicon Soul: Finding Fulfilment in the Age of AI.’ From there, he will return to India for a circuit of lectures before heading back to New York.
Across continents, Sarvapriyananda’s audience increasingly includes not only religious seekers but also technologists. His subject is the human search for meaning. Silicon Valley’s interest, meanwhile, lies in whether ancient traditions can help shape the behaviour of machines that may soon influence nearly every sphere of human life.
On June 13, while speaking in North Texas about the Vedantic path to happiness, Sarvapriyananda abruptly asked his audience: “Have you heard of Claude?” He then described receiving a call connected to Claude, Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence assistant, and spoke about his visit to the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Earlier this year, Anthropic, the AI research company behind Claude, invited Sarvapriyananda to participate in discussions on AI ethics. During a visit to the company’s San Francisco headquarters, researchers demonstrated several experimental projects. “Claude’s shiny new kid on the block, Mythos, they showed us how dangerous it is, what it can do, what harm it can do,” Sarvapriyananda said. He was also given a preview of Project Glasswing.
Sarvapriyananda was not the only outside expert invited. “They called me. Theologians from different religions. Counsellors. Mental health professionals. Things like that,” he said. “And all of it was to train Claude some things about AI ethics.”
The discussions brought together voices from a range of disciplines as Anthropic explored how ethical and philosophical perspectives might inform the development of advanced AI systems.
“I appreciate that neuroscientists, physicists and AI researchers are wishing to learn from a variety of philosophies, including Advaita Vedanta, as they address the potential intersection of ancient wisdom and modern technology,” Sarvapriyananda said in a written statement to The Telegraph Online.
Yet critics caution that the focus on machine values can obscure a more immediate concern, namely how AI is already reshaping power relationships between governments, corporations and citizens.
AI ethics and limits of self-regulation
Much of the public conversation around AI ethics focuses on the character of the machine. Should an AI system be truthful? Should it refuse harmful requests? Should it demonstrate compassion, humility or fairness?
Underlying these questions is a deeper assumption that the central challenge is how to make machines behave responsibly.
Likhita Banerji, who leads Amnesty International’s Algorithmic Accountability Lab, believes the debate needs a different emphasis. She criticised regulatory approaches promoted by major American technology companies, arguing that firms developing powerful AI systems should not also define the rules governing them.
“The emerging consensus around this model of regulation that these US companies are espousing is self-serving, dangerous and misguided,” Banerji told The Telegraph Online.
Banerji argues that many technology companies are attempting to preserve market power while simultaneously shaping the future of AI regulation, a process she characterises as a form of regulatory capture.
“The question is not whether industry voices should participate in the debate. They should. The question is whether they should be allowed to dominate it,” said Banerji.
The tension becomes sharper when viewed through the lens of financial incentives. Anthropic’s anticipated November stock-market debut after US midterm elections underscores the reality that the companies shaping AI governance are also market actors seeking growth and shareholder value.
Critics argue that the same firms that portray themselves as stewards of AI’s future also have strong commercial incentives to limit oversight, narrow liability and define “responsible innovation” in ways that align with their business interests. They say that warning about existential risks in IPO documents while pursuing rapid commercial expansion creates conflicting incentives.
From AI ethics to human rights
A religious response to artificial intelligence need not begin with the question of whether a machine is conscious. It can begin with a more immediate concern: what obligations do human beings owe one another when technology gives institutions unprecedented powers to observe, classify and control?
A version of that argument appeared on May 25 in Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, a letter written to bishops. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) with the subtitle, On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, its emphasis is not on speculative superintelligence but on defending human dignity in the present: against pervasive surveillance, digital colonialism, the concentration of technological power, threats to workers and the development of autonomous weapons.
“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together,” the text says.
The shift in emphasis is significant. Rather than concentrating on whether machines can imitate moral reasoning, it asks whether political and social institutions can protect human beings from progressively powerful technologies.
Surveillance systems, workplace monitoring tools, facial-recognition technologies, predictive policing systems and autonomous targeting platforms are not speculative possibilities. Many already exist.
For advocates of a rights-based approach, these systems raise more immediate concerns than questions about whether future AI models might one day become conscious.
Sarvapriyananda has said that some of the themes discussed during his visit to Anthropic later appeared in the May 25 encyclical.
“Anthropic itself has pushed hard for ethics,” Sarvapriyananda said during his June 13 public talk. “They say, ‘We ourselves are alarmed.’”
Concerns about AI’s trajectory are increasingly coming from within the industry itself. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, has argued that the development of increasingly capable AI systems should proceed more cautiously, warning that such a powerful technology carries serious risks.
His remarks followed the departure of researcher Jacob Coxon, who accused leading AI firms of “gambling with our lives” in the race to build ever more powerful models.
Yet concerns about future superintelligence are only one part of the debate. Human-rights advocates argue that the most urgent harms are not hypothetical but already visible in surveillance, policing, and warfare.
The case for restricting certain technologies
Human rights organisations like Amnesty International have called for a pause on technologies that they believe are fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
Among the systems they identify are biometric surveillance technologies, including facial recognition; AI-driven risk-profiling systems used in law enforcement, social protection and migration; and social-scoring tools.
They have also called for an end to the use of AI systems in the military “kill chain”, including target-generation systems, remote biometric surveillance and multimodal AI models, including large language models, when they contribute to decisions involving lethal force.
Autonomous weapons that target human beings, as well as systems that cannot operate under meaningful human control, should be prohibited, they argue.
Human oversight, in this view, cannot be reduced to a ceremonial label attached to systems that operate too quickly, too opaquely, or are too complex for meaningful human intervention.
For Banerji, confronting such practices is essential to slowing what she sees as an extractive industry, one that draws value from workers, users, artists, writers, communities and natural resources while concentrating benefits in the hands of a relatively small number of companies.
As Sarvapriyananda travels from New York to Singapore, where Anthropic opened an office on October 14, and then across India, he will speak to audiences searching for fulfilment in an age increasingly shaped by machines. His presence in the AI conversation may remind technologists of the value of contemplation, humility and restraint.
Others, however, contend that before asking whether machines can become wise, societies must decide how to protect the rights, dignity and freedoms of people whose lives are already being reshaped by increasingly powerful AI systems.