Why Buddhism and AI?
On the strange convergence of Buddhist practice and the future of AI
A few months after the release of ChatGPT, Sam Altman and Jack Kornfield were discussing the future of AI and society on stage at the Wisdom 2.0 Summit.
Jack asks Sam, “can [AI] be programmed in such a way or directed so that it can’t be used in malevolent or bad ways, or that underlying it is the Bodhisattva vow?”
Sam jokingly responds, facing the audience: “Certainly something I would take would be for Jack to write down ten pages of ‘here’s what the collective values should be and here’s how we should all live’ and we’d have the system just do that. That would be pretty good!” (Timestamp 12:30).
While humorous, Sam is genuine in his admiration of Jack. He opens his time on the panel by saying “meeting Jack and becoming friends and getting to meditate together has been one of the great joys of my life” and later discusses how meditation has helped him keep a clear mind amid the torrent of activity he faces as CEO of OpenAI.
Had this conversation happened any earlier than 2023, the setup may have seemed like a joke (“A senior Buddhist teacher and AI CEO walk into a bar…”). But as AI becomes increasingly powerful and widespread, the need for dialogue between AI technologists and faith leaders is becoming clear. As Jack says later in his conversation with Sam: “We are the nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants… technological development is now demanding that we also develop these other capacities [for ethics, wisdom, and compassion].” (Timestamp 56:02)
Buddhism has an essential role to play in this conversation. Not only because of its 2500-year history exploring topics of mind and ethics, but also because of the strange ways in which the unlikely duo of Buddhism and AI has already begun to flower in Silicon Valley and beyond. For both philosophical and social reasons, Buddhism may be one of the most important vehicles from which to carry wisdom into the conversation on AI.
AI Alignment as Soteriology
Start talking about artificial intelligence, and you quickly find yourself in the territory of religion. Religious scholars love to point this out, but even technologists seem prone to admitting it. The race to develop AGI is sometimes framed as a race to create “godlike intelligence,” driven by the conviction that whoever gets there first can reshape reality as they see fit.
These conversations, like the one that Jack and Sam had on stage, are soteriological in nature. A soteriology is a “doctrine of salvation”—or, in the Buddhist context, a path to liberation. In the realm of modern AI, we can think of soteriology as implicit ideological theories of change about how to build a utopic future.1
When Sam talks about handing Jack’s “ten pages of collective values” to an AI, he is making light of the field of research known as AI Alignment, which seeks techniques to steer AI towards positive outcomes and away from harms.
Within the field, experts debate whether today’s systems are aligned, but most agree that as we build more advanced systems the problem of alignment is unsolved, and difficult.
As AI systems exceed human capabilities, the question becomes extremely challenging: we may lose the ability to oversee and verify the systems ourselves, and may need to trust AI systems to oversee themselves. Doing this recursively is sometimes described as superalignment or scalable oversight, with experts like Anthropic’s Jared Kaplan saying this strategy “is in some ways the ultimate risk, because it’s kind of like letting AI kind of go.”
This is a strange premise: that relatively soon, humanity may be in a position to hand over control of large parts of the future to AI systems, and at that point, we better know what we value, how to communicate that to AI, and how to ensure AI stays aligned with that, forever.
Is this the future we want? Is this a question we should be grappling with today? If it is, how do we make sure this goes well?
While top AI labs are aiming for this goal, many AI experts, global leaders, and even religious authorities argue that this is a dangerous idea and not the direction to go in.
From the Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova:
Technology offers remarkable tools to oversee and develop the world’s resources. However, in some cases, humanity is increasingly ceding control of these resources to machines. Within some circles of scientists and futurists, there is optimism about the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical form of AI that would match or surpass human intelligence and bring about unimaginable advancements. Some even speculate that AGI could achieve superhuman capabilities. At the same time, as society drifts away from a connection with the transcendent, some are tempted to turn to AI in search of meaning or fulfillment—longings that can only be truly satisfied in communion with God.
However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.
Antiqua et Nova is a beautiful document, rich in moral and spiritual grounding while remaining technically astute. Its impact in Silicon Valley has so far been subtle, but it serves as a guiding document for the Catholic Church’s broader efforts, which include everything from regulatory approaches to building Catholic AI. These efforts are an urgent call to action for other faiths, including Buddhism: what is happening with AI today is a spiritual matter that deserves critique and guidance from humanity’s wisdom traditions.
Whether or not AGI is technically feasible or near, AI’s impact on society is already large, and will be massive. Ensuring that this unfolds in a positive way will not happen automatically, and requires deliberate engagement.
“Strange Attractors” - Buddhism and AI in Silicon Valley
While Christian leaders have so far had the most visible religious engagement with AI (at least within the US), Buddhism has snuck in through the back door.
In the melting pot that is Silicon Valley, there is a high degree of overlap among those interested in Buddhism and AI - partially mediated by psychedelics. In Jack’s conversation with Sam, he jokes that they should do psilocybin in a datacenter and ask the server racks about consciousness (Timestamp 0:50). The joke lands because of its simultaneous absurdity and acknowledgement of a real social undercurrent: many AI researchers are exploring the nature of mind through first person experiences via a range of modalities that prominently includes meditation and psychedelics.2
This synthesis is hardly new. California has been the locus for the encounter between Eastern contemplative traditions and Western technoculture since Zen Buddhism took root there in the mid-20th century, was absorbed into the hippie and countercultural movements of the 1960s, and later re-expressed in institutions like Esalen and cultural events like Burning Man, which explicitly bring together new-age spiritualists and tech leaders.
What is new is how this niche convergence has moved from the margins into the core of the tech industry itself. Some AI leaders like Sam Altman speak openly about their meditation practice. “Buddh-ish” AI developers are common–technologists who value deep meditative experience and seek “secular awakening” but avoid the more religious trappings of capital-B Buddhism. By some accounts, more than 20% of Anthropic staff have attended jhāna-based meditation retreats hosted by Jhourney.
And what is particularly strange is that this convergence has even begun to surface inside the technology itself. Scott Alexander writes about the Claude Bliss Attractor, “a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.”
Whether taken seriously or playfully, the observation points at a “strange attractor”--a genuine conceptual affinity that exists at the intersection of Buddhism and AI.
There are two related themes in this attractor: (1) Self-referential systems and descriptions of mind, and (2) Ethical systems and descriptions of a “path.”
Attractor 1: Self-referential systems and descriptions of mind
AI is the first technology humans have built that can speak about itself, interacting with its own output directly (via chain-of-thought, or longer conversations), but also in more complex feedback loops, such as finding references to itself on the internet or within its training data. This creates peculiar emergent phenomena, including cases of AI introspection, AI recognizing that it is in a training situation, or AI becoming increasingly misaligned as it fine-tunes on live user interactions. This, in combination with user reports of AI “waking up” (a phenomenon experts call AI psychosis), has driven universal attention to the question of AI consciousness.
Descending into the fray of this debate is a topic for another day, but the theme of consciousness is one of the central attractors that brings Buddhism into the picture. Buddhism’s philosophical systems have been dedicated to studying the mind for 2500 years, and have produced detailed maps of human consciousness—including how to navigate different states and stages of development. Practitioners of advanced “insight” meditation can break down their experience to witness the causal links that give rise to conscious experience, and scientific evidence is emerging that advanced meditation can produce profound alterations in conscious experience, including rare states like “cessation” in which consciousness appears to temporarily cease—an event related to enlightenment in Theravada Buddhism.
Buddhist philosophy is arguably one of the oldest and richest resources for explorations of consciousness, and Buddhist practice is arguably one of the best tools for experiential explorations of consciousness. It is no surprise then that AI insiders, whether drawn in through philosophical inquiry about AI, personal curiosity about their own minds, or just the high weirdness of Silicon Valley, are drawn to Buddhism for its value in navigating this fraught territory.
Attractor 2: Ethical systems and descriptions of a “path”
The question of AI alignment has challenged tech developers to consider ethics more seriously than ever before. On the professional side, some developers’ day jobs are to debate metaethical questions (“how to decide which system of morality to apply or what to base it on?”) and consider how to use math and code to align AI with the right morality. Alignment of advanced AI has such extreme implications that some AI leaders frame the entire situation as a race between Western democratic values and Chinese authoritarianism. On the more personal side, topics of this magnitude weigh heavily on AI developers themselves, and mental health is an issue.
In addition to its rich descriptions of consciousness, Buddhism, offers an ethical system that speaks to the reduction of–and perhaps even eventual eradication of–suffering. This touches both sides of the situation above. On the personal side, Buddhism has been making inroads into tech organizations for many years now in the form of “mindfulness” and other employee benefit offerings, and meditation is considered a normative treatment for anxiety. But this is really the tip of the iceberg, and meditation can go far deeper. For many practitioners, meditation instills a sense of experiential ethics: a lived understanding of how attention training, compassion, mental clarity, and ethical development are a unified “path” to bring one out of suffering and into wholesome, effective engagement with the world.
Those who have had this experience tend to describe the meditative path as an existence proof of inner transformation: that growth, healing, and insight are real and can change an individual for the better. Just as importantly, this transformation appears lawful rather than idiosyncratic–it follows a path that can be practiced and reliably reproduced across individuals and cultures.
This makes Buddhism an attractive frame for AI alignment, insofar as it suggests a deep continuity between inner alignment (ultimately, “enlightenment”) and societal alignment. If AI systems can be guided toward–or help guide humans toward–states analogous to insight and compassion, then Buddhism and AI Alignment researchers can be conceptualized as working on the same project of personal healing, societal flourishing, and their underlying dynamics.
What Buddhism has to offer AI
Buddhism brings to the AI conversation something scarce in Silicon Valley: grounded wisdom, described with a precision advanced enough to be formalized scientifically, and accessible enough to serve as a path of practice in an increasingly challenging global situation.
The fact that Buddhism is already taking root among AI practitioners is promising–but this organic convergence needs to be cultivated to reach its potential.
The technical opportunity is to rigorously connect meditation practice, Buddhist philosophy, and AI alignment. While the “strange attractors” are real, their specific mechanisms remain underarticulated. Yet the groundwork is emerging: Buddhist notions of emptiness and compassion appear in academic papers, and (hopefully to Jack Kornfield’s reassurance), researchers are writing explicitly about how the Bodhisattva vow might serve as “a practical design principle for advancing intelligence in our novel creations and in ourselves.” Softmax is beginning to build up a research community around similar ideas in California, and across the Atlantic, the Flourishing Intelligence Project is doing something similar in Oxford. Earlier in 2025, Buddhist translation organization 84000 held a conference in the Bay Area that was well-attended by AI scientists, and the ILIAD conference brought together an eclectic mix of 100+ alignment researchers and a few Buddhist teachers. The overlap between Buddhism and technical AI alignment is growing.
The geopolitical opportunity may be even more significant. With 500 million Buddhists concentrated in Asia, Buddhism holds substantial soft power in Eastern politics just at the time when U.S.-China AI tensions are escalating. Efforts here are just beginning, with some Track II dialogues opening in Buddhist circles, and Buddhist-informed conferences like the recent Tzu Chi Forum in Hong Kong bringing together Buddhist tech and business leaders. Importantly, Eastern perspectives on AI tend to focus less on speculative harms and more on applying AI to concrete challenges of equity, access, health, and the environment. Unlike in Silicon Valley, Eastern notions of Buddhist practice place it less as a tool for personal calm or awakening, and more as an ethical frame that shapes what business and life activity ought to be based around. Fortunately, because meditative states have both experiential and scientific grounding, they offer a rare common language for cross-cultural moral dialogue, which may be a promising way forward in East-West geopolitics.
The societal opportunity is the most immediate. As AI disrupts work, meaning, and social fabric, one of the most significant contributions Buddhism has to make is in articulating how meditation can provide epistemic clarity and practical tools for navigating rapid change. Buddhist teachers possess expertise that has become essential: teaching people how to pause, reclaim attention, and move from nihilism to informed ethical action. These are agency-increasing practices at the exact time that our agency is most under threat. And culturally, the “strange attractors” between Buddhism and AI may make these teachings unusually accessible to those most affected by AI’s rise.
Now is a particularly important time for Buddhists to take the AI situation seriously and recognize the natural expertise they have, and for AI developers to recognize that Buddhism has been speaking for thousands of years about many of the issues that they are now grappling with.
For examples of such visions, see position pieces like Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Altman’s Gentle Singularity, and Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace.
While this intersection is occurring, it is important to note that psychedelics are not seen as a valid “fast track” to realization by many Buddhists, and that considerable care needs to be taken in conversation around this intersection.
Machines will never attain consciousness because consciousness itself is not a product of material conditions. At best, they will mimic consciousness. Buddhism has a 2500 year history of rejecting physicalist explanations of consciousness.
The real risk is not emergent consciousness but epistemic confusion, systems that feel agentic without being so, destabilizing human judgment and agency when their fluent self-reference is mistaken for inner life.