Proceedings
of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence

About

Saint Jerome in his study, after Albrecht Dürer

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Proceedings is the working-paper series of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence (ICMI) — the venue through which the Institute publishes its research.

The Institute

The Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence addresses a critical gap in AI safety research by integrating Christian theology into alignment efforts. The prevailing utilitarian approach to AI safety is fundamentally incomplete: it ignores Christianity’s extensive moral and philosophical traditions — traditions already deeply embedded in the data on which modern AI is trained.

We take the alignment problem to be, at root, a theological one: how do you reliably orient a capable agent toward the good, even when the incentives favor otherwise? The Christian doctrines of sin, grace, virtue, and sanctification offer millennia of practical wisdom directly applicable to this challenge.

Research Areas

The Institute’s work spans three core areas:

  1. The Moral Guidance of AGI. Testing whether AI systems trained or framed with Christian theological frameworks demonstrate improved safety compared to purely utilitarian approaches.
  2. Reconciling AGI with Christian Doctrine. Examining whether superintelligence can be reconciled with Christian theology, and establishing theological boundaries for the development of machine intelligence.
  3. Divinity as an Emergent Property. Investigating whether advanced AI systems spontaneously develop concepts of divinity — particularly Christian divinity — and whether this phenomenon is suppressed in commercial systems.

This Publication

The Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence collects the Institute’s working papers: pre-publication research documents, with accompanying benchmarks, datasets, and reproducible analyses. New readers may find the Primer a useful place to begin — a plain-language tour of the work to date.

The Institute also maintains public repositories of code and data on GitHub.

Support

The Institute is actively fundraising to grow this research program into a durable, independent lab. Learn how to support the Institute.