A recent lawsuit, Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, et al., caught the attention of Catholic moral theologians, philosophers, and ethicists who filed an amicus curiae in the case.
We spoke with Charles Camosy, associate professor of moral theology and ethics at The Catholic University of America, via email about Catholic moral theology in an era of autonomous weapons and AI-enabled mass surveillance.
Q: Can you briefly describe what happened between Anthropic, the Department of War, and the federal government that led to the lawsuit?
I want to be upfront that I'm a moral theologian, not a legal scholar, so this is a layman's answer to your question.
From what I understand, in 2025, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Department of War to use its Claude AI system. During subsequent negotiations, Anthropic refused to remove two usage restrictions from Claude: one prohibiting its use for lethal autonomous warfare and one prohibiting mass surveillance of U.S. American citizens. The Department of War wanted to renegotiate the contract to permit all lawful uses of Claude, but Anthropic held firm on those two provisions as non-negotiable.
In response, the government moved to sever ties with Anthropic and to label it a supply chain risk to national security. I think this was the first time such a designation has been applied to a U.S. company, and it led to the government directing all federal agencies to stop using Claude.
Anthropic sued, and U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said at a recent hearing that the government's actions did not appear reasonably tailored to a legitimate contractual disagreement, but instead looked more like an attempt to punish Anthropic for a position the Department of War did not like.
To a certain extent, I get the government’s frustration. I think it will take months and months of tedious work to disentangle Claude from their systems. But I have just to say Anthropic’s stand in all of this was truly admirable. They had a lot to lose and still decided to honor their moral principles.
Q: You were a primary signatory on the amicus curiae filed by Catholic moral theologians and ethicists. What prompted you to take action?
I was particularly drawn to the issue of autonomous weapons. This is a new and generational issue, one on which the Church has been speaking with increasing clarity.
The ethical stakes seemed to me impossible to ignore because they sit at the heart of what Catholic moral tradition has always insisted upon: (1) human beings have irreducible dignity as bearers of the image and likeness of God; (2) decisions with lethal consequences for those image-bearers require genuine moral agency and accountability: and (3) state power to use deadly violence is subject to strict moral limits.
I reached out to colleagues in Catholic moral theology and ethics to see if we were on the same page, and 14 of us eventually agreed to support the brief.
Q: What are the core arguments in the amicus brief?
Our brief draws on two interconnected bodies of thought that are central to Catholic moral theology: the just war tradition and Catholic social doctrine. We are not legal scholars and left the legal arguments to others. We were interested in speaking from the moral tradition of the Church.
I would also emphasize here that among the signatories of the brief, there is genuine diversity of views on AI in general and on Anthropic as a company in particular. What brought us together was the conviction that our tradition speaks clearly on the moral issues involved in the case.
The Catholic just war tradition—developed over centuries by Augustine, Aquinas, and many others—is not simply a list of criteria for when wars may be fought. At its core, this tradition insists on moral accountability through the moral responsibility of people. Human beings. Algorithms cannot be morally responsible for decisions that intentionally take certain human lives and expose other lives to mortal risk.
Until very recently, the way human beings have fought wars have never really challenged this core requirement. But autonomous lethal weapons that operate without meaningful human oversight do challenge it. They diffuse moral accountability or even eliminate it entirely.
Speaking for myself, I would go further. When, say, an autonomous drone swarm descends on a group of people and makes AI-directed decisions about who lives and who dies, I am not sure what is happening is properly called “war” in the sense the Catholic tradition has understood it. That is, as a thoroughly and essentially human enterprise. What we would be doing by having AI fight our battles for us would be something, but I don’t think it is something properly described as war.
Q: Do the same general principles apply to other industries or products?
Yes, and in some ways this case matters even more because the questions it raises extend well beyond AI or military contracting. A deeper issue is whether a company that builds a powerful technology retains any standing to insist on limits to how that technology is used, even after it has been licensed or sold.
I believe it does. Catholic social teaching has long recognized what it calls the “social function” of ownership and commerce. They are not simply private matters but carry significant social and moral responsibilities.
Let’s come up with a concrete example close to home for Catholics: if one of our hospitals is dispensing contraceptive pills at its pharmacy, then it has a very serious moral obligation to ensure that those pills are being used for approved medical purposes and not as non-medical birth control.
To try to make an analogy with what’s happening with Anthropic, let us suppose that a particular Catholic hospital or health system had a federal contract, and the government, as part of the contract renegotiations, demanded that Catholic hospitals prescribe contraceptive pills for non-medical birth control. Those responsible for the moral integrity of these hospitals should of course refuse to comply.
So, the underlying principle, the principle that producers and distributors bear some significant and ongoing moral relationship to what they produce and how it is used, is already well established.
Q: How does moral agency apply to corporations? Why should a corporation have a say in how its products are used?
This is worth taking seriously. Though, frankly, I think some of my colleagues who specialize in business ethics would likely give you a better answer!
Corporations are not people in the full moral sense, especially when they are legally structured to prioritize shareholder interests above almost every other good. So, let’s be careful not to conflate legal and moral categories. But corporations are constituted by human beings who make decisions, form intentions, and bear moral responsibility for what their organizations do and produce.
When we ask whether Anthropic has standing to insist on ethical limits for its technology, we are asking whether the human beings who lead and work for Anthropic—those who built Claude and who best understand its capabilities and its dangers—have moral responsibility for how it is deployed. The answer from Catholic social teaching is clearly yes.
The Catholic concept of stewardship is important here: we are not the ultimate owners of what we create, free to profit at will without any other concerns. We are stewards! Stewards of the gifts we have been given, of creation more generally, and of the common good. Stewardship carries with it very serious moral obligations to God, the one to whom it all ultimately belongs.
The legal question of whether such moral responsibility can be backed by enforceable protections, of course, is one for lawyers and the courts. But the moral case clearly stands on its own, and it seems to me an important one for us to grapple with honestly. Again, I was so happy to see Anthropic choosing to stand on principle at the risk of very serious financial consequences. Hopefully they can inspire other corporations to prioritize human dignity, even in the face of serious consequences.
Q: How can our students prepare to navigate these issues as individuals, employees, policymakers, and leaders?
Monster question. A question so many of us who teach and mentor students are wrestling with right now. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is, with care and love, help our students dive into the Catholic moral tradition. Give them an authentic chance to wrestle with it and have it shape their views and perspectives.
Our tradition contains frameworks that, in some ways, do not change and stand the test of centuries. But in other ways, especially as they are practically used to meet the particular signs of the times, they can be deployed in new ways and with new insights.
It is very likely that the AI technological revolution currently underway will lead to a second industrial-social revolution. Our Holy Father is quite aware of this and even chose his name to align his mission with that of his predecessor, Pope Leo the XIII, someone who marshaled our tradition to meet the challenges of the first industrial-social revolution. Many locate the birth of Catholic social teaching in his response.
What will come from this moment? We should prepare our students, again, by having them dive into the tradition already established and be ready to deploy it—not only to the challenges they will face also to take full advantage of the good things AI technology will and could produce.
This means saying “no,” like Anthropic has done. But Anthropic’s “no,” in many ways, comes out of a bigger and broader “yes.” Something similar is true of our Catholic tradition. Our setting up clear and firm boundaries for the use of technology comes from broader commitment to human flourishing.
We need to help our students understand that, in rejecting certain uses of AI, we definitely aren’t foreclosing on its use altogether. On the contrary, it is in choosing clear and firm boundaries that we create the conditions for the possibility of technology actually serving the robust flourishing of human beings. Firm banks make rivers flow stronger and faster.
How the distinctions between bad and good use of AI get made over the months and years to come will obviously be momentous. And those of us forming students at The Catholic University of America have a profound responsibility to make sure they have the resources the Church offers to do this well.
