Notre Dame’s $50M grant aims to bring faith-based ethics to AI future in big way

Geoffrey Hinton — the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist known as the “godfather of AI” — recently issued a warning concerning artificial intelligence: “People haven’t got it yet; people haven’t understood what’s coming.”

The AI pioneer estimates a 10 to 20 percent risk the human-created AI will eventually wrest control from them.

So who is discussing guardrails and fail-safes to keep humans in control? Who is having the conversations concerning how AI will impact people, and just what an AI future should look like for humanity?

One answer: The University of Notre Dame, which recently received from the Lilly Endowment a $50.8 million grant — the largest given by a private foundation in the school’s history — to support the DELTA Network, a faith-based approach to AI ethics launched in September 2025.

DELTA is an acronym emphasizing five enduring Christian values: dignity (every human has inherent worth); embodiment (people are embodied, relational and mortal beings); love (Christian ethics begins with love); transcendence (the things that draw people beyond themselves); and agency (human freedom and moral responsibility).

In a Dec. 19 press release announcing the award, Indiana-based Notre Dame said the grant “will fund the further development of a shared, faith-based ethical framework that scholars, religious leaders, tech leaders, teachers, journalists, young people and the broader public can draw upon to discern appropriate uses of artificial intelligence, or AI” and will also “support the establishment of a robust, interconnected network that will provide practical resources to help navigate challenges posed by rapidly developing AI.”

Meghan Sullivan, founding director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and DELTA, said that the grant comes at a key time in the development of AI.

“Any time there’s this amount of really rapid transition, that raises questions for people about what it means to live a good life and what it means to have a good society,” Sullivan told OSV News.

“Suddenly there are opportunities available to you that weren’t available before — because of the technology — and there are also challenges that you never thought you were ever going to have to deal with,” Sullivan continued. “That is an incredible opportunity for Christians, because the kinds of changes and questions that AI are raising are questions where the Church’s teaching has never been more relevant.”

The framework is based on Christian principles and values yet designed to be accessible to people of all faith perspectives.

“We’re not directly focused on changing technology policy. We’re not focused on developing Catholic AIs; there are some people who are doing that,” Sullivan explained. “But we are very, very interested in forming the souls of users and people who are going to live their lives in a society that has this technology in it now.”

Three sectors will be targeted: education, pastoral leaders and public engagement.

Using these communities as foundational audiences, DELTA Network aims to build a system with a wide variety of experiences and platforms to develop a collective consensus about the roles and uses of AI from an ethical, Christian standpoint. That system expects to draw from conversations, conferences, formal classes, classroom experiences and more.

The educational focus will inform internships and grants for course development — including the creation of up to 50 college AI ethics courses grounded in various aspects of the DELTA framework.

Sullivan noted there are “teachers who just feel completely left out of the conversation about AI — and how they’re going to run their classrooms and build cultures in their schools in light of this new technology. We want to come alongside and support them in articulating a vision for what they want going forward, that’s grounded in these kinds of ethical truths.”

Pastoral leadership initiatives, Sullivan said, will range from “supporting the Vatican and the bishop’s efforts to help pastors get up to speed on artificial intelligence, to engaging with evangelical churches and Methodists and Presbyterians on ecumenical conversations about what the Gospel looks like in the era of powerful artificial intelligence.”

Public engagement will include a satellite location in Silicon Valley, California, where Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business already operates an extension program.

“The impression the broader public has about Silicon Valley is that it’s secular, and dismissive of the faith perspective,” Sullivan said. “We know from our work that there are plenty of Christians working in developing technology and technology policy — and there are also plenty of well-meaning, wonderful people that work in these companies that are curious and interested in engaging Christian perspectives.”

“We just have to roll up our sleeves and do the work of getting out there and pursuing that engagement,” she added.

Notre Dame’s president, Father Robert A. Dowd, a Congregation of Holy Cross priest, said the university is uniquely able to address AI’s developing challenges.

“Pope Leo XIV calls for us all to work to ensure that AI is ‘intelligent, relational and guided by love,’ reflecting the design of God the Creator,” Father Dowd said in a Dec. 19 statement. “As a Catholic university that seeks to promote human flourishing, Notre Dame is well-positioned to build bridges between religious leaders and educators, and those creating and using new technologies, so that they might together explore the moral and ethical questions associated with AI.”

Sullivan’s colleague Adam Kronk, director of research and external engagement at the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, said people should not be surprised a Catholic college is wrestling with the future of AI.

“It may seem on the surface kind of counterintuitive or like, ‘Wow, I wouldn’t think of the Catholic Church as exactly cutting edge when it comes to technology,'” he said.

But he shared an illustrative anecdote concerning Sullivan: “She was at one of these (AI) events at the Vatican, and it was a technologist — who’s not a person of faith — who said, ‘We are going to need some ancient wisdom for this one,’ Kronk said.

“I think people realize that when there’s this disruptive or disorienting of a development, what you need is the wisdom and the depths of the tradition of the Church,” he said.

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