What is Catholic AI? Technology Meets Theology, with Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Longbeard, a company that proudly proclaims, we're building Catholic AI. As a full-time AI scout, my stated goal is to have no major blind spots in the overall AI landscape. But I have to confess that the intersection of AI and traditional religion was, before I started preparing for this episode, a significant blind spot. I had heard that Pope Leo had chosen his name in part for AI-related reasons, but I hadn't realized just how engaged the church has been with recent AI developments and their implications for society. Matthew thankfully was the perfect person to help orient me. He and the Longbeard team combined sincere reverence for Catholic teachings and tradition with high-end technical skill. And they've built the number one Catholic AI product in the world, serving users across 165 countries.
The first half of our conversation unpacks the concept of Catholic AI from a philosophical and theological perspective, with discussion of how the church has historically understood technological progress as part of God's plan for humanity. How Pope Francis was sufficiently well informed as to call AI a true cognitive industrial revolution at the G7 Summit in June 2024 What human flourishing means from a Catholic perspective, and whether the church might be open to say a post-work future. Whether there's space in the Catholic worldview for the possibility of AI consciousness or moral standing. Where the church draws the line between acceptable human enhancement and what it would see as problematic transhumanism. And how the Catholic principle of subsidiarity supports open source development as a way to resist the concentration of power. In the second half, we turn to the technology that Matthew and team are building, and how. And I'm confident that this part will be valuable to AI builders regardless of their spiritual outlook. Among many other details, we cover why fine-tuning hasn't worked for the Longbeard use case, and how they are ensuring theological alignment by training models from scratch. The retrieval and context engineering strategies they use to help users find the best answers across 28,000 church documents today, and the robotics work they're doing to help digitize even more of the Vatican archives. We also discuss their strategy for optimizing model size, multilingual support, and inference costs, and the economics of running a mission-driven AI company with a generous free tier. I found both halves of this conversation valuable, for different reasons. But as a whole, I think it's a striking indicator of how far AI adoption has already come, and also a bit of evidence for the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence. People from all over the world, with very different conceptions of the good, are using essentially the same techniques to create AIs that are aligned to their own particular value systems. And in a world where Catholics still outnumber ChatGPT users nearly 2 to 1, those of us in the Bay Area AI bubble should not turn a blind eye to Catholic AI. With that, I hope you enjoy this introduction to Catholic AI with Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Longbeard. Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO at Longbeard, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Matthew Harvey Sanders** (3:21)
Thanks for having me.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:23)
I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's going to be really interesting.
The headline on your website says it all. We're building Catholic AI. The intersection of AI and literally everything across society has been one of the big trends that I've been trying to track over the last couple of years. Of course, it's intersecting with science and we're getting all these studies of the labor market. One thing that I think most people who are deeply immersed in the AI space are still sleeping on a bit, honestly, is the intersection of AI and religion. So really interested to get into that with you today specifically from the Catholic perspective. Want to start off by just telling us what is Catholic AI?

**Matthew Harvey Sanders** (4:08)
Yeah, it's a good question, kind of a fundamental question, right? I think the simplest way to explain it would be via contrast. So if you think of secular AI models, they're kind of trained to serve a very, very large audience with diverse value sets and things like that. I mean, Catholic AI is being the objective function of Catholic AI, to put it into kind of more technical terms would be a fidelity. So fidelity to the ministry of the church. So at every point in most of our kind of building and designing AI systems, it's in order to ensure that it properly represents what the church believes.