Artificial intelligence has moved from an emerging concept to daily companion with astonishing speed, and with that speed has come a legion of troubling questions including: who, if anyone, is teaching this powerful new tool restraint? And to accomplish that, how are the coders responsible guided, constrained, and inspired? Each week seems to bring fresh evidence of AI’s promise and its peril—systems that can accelerate discovery, deepen learning, and expand access, but also confuse truth, erode trust, make human and humane skills redundant, and outpace the moral habits needed to govern them. We have opened something vast. The urgent question is not whether we can close it, but whether we can create interventions that shape it wisely before it reshapes us. 

With the goal of building theologically informed ethical materials to inform and shape AI engineers, practitioners, and executives, the CCCU’s UK subsidiary—Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford (SCIO)— was part of founding the Oxford Collaboration on Theology and AI (OCTAI). Based out of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, OCTAI’s first major project has been the creation of the Oxford Oath and Open Letter which is modelled on the historic oath that has shaped medical professionals for centuries, the Hippocratic Oath.  Like that oath, the AI oath speaks to both affirming positive aspirations and outcomes while also setting limitations, as well as exerting caution and encouraging humility.   

The project is collaborative and interdisciplinary, led by members of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford within a wider cross-institutional core group including AI professionals, and shaped by business leaders, AI engineers, and academics from Oxford, other UK universities, among other influences. 

OCTAI has given particular weight to global majority perspectives, drawing substantial participation from contributors outside the UK, continental Europe, and the USA, and from those working in roles without significant institutional control such as engineers. 

One of the project’s aims is to develop vocational principles for ethically serious AI practice, now emerging publicly through the Oxford Oath and its companion Open Letter. 

With funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the team set about interviewing and working with a diverse variety of AI-related practitioners representing all continents and multiple industries.  I am a member of the core team which includes Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, Andrew Davison, the Andreos Idreos Chair of Science and Religion, Mark Harris, and SCIO’s former director of grants and research, Dr Michael Burdett, now associate professor of theology and Christian ethics at the University of Nottingham. 

The Oath is deeply informed by Christian theological anthropology but endeavours to reach broad audiences. To this end, the oath can be taken and signed in either a religious form or a secular form, but the commitments are the same. The text and the variations are as follows: 

Oath 

• (OPTION 1) In the presence of God and 

• (OR OPTION 2) In the light of truth and my conscience and in the presence of 

these witnesses, I make these commitments: 

Disposition 

I will bring optimism and caution to my work. 

I will approach my work with humility. 

I will honour the dignity of humanity. 

Vision 

I will make my work governable and an enabler of proper human judgement. 

I will align my work with worthy motivations and objects of attention. 

I will develop my work to advance the common good of humanity. 

Responsibility 

I will embed appropriate truthfulness in my work and demonstrate honesty in how I describe my work. 

I will build with restraint and towards conditions that support justice, peace, and care of the natural world. 

I will orient my work towards respect for human identity, enhancement of human creativity, and support for dignified human work. 

Conclusion 

I will uphold the integrity of this oath. 

(OPTIONAL: May God who has given me the will to profess these commitments grant me also the grace to perform them.) 

(OPTIONAL: May truth inform me, and my conscience guide me, as I strive to keep these commitments.) 

In addition to providing this to working AI researchers, practitioners, and enterprises, our hope is to see the oath implemented in educational environments much as medical schools have a ‘white coat ceremony’ with the taking of the Hippocratic Oath at matriculation.  That is why the Oxford team is inviting CCCU member institutions to join this effort and implement the oath as part of their curriculum for those students working in AI-related studies. Additionally, CCCU member administrative leadership and faculty are invited to be signers to our open letter!  (See the below.)  

Might you or your institution join this effort? We have a collective opportunity to impact the establishment of standards for the development and use of AI at this watershed moment with a technology poised to redefine so many aspects of daily life, educational instruction and future learning. But the window will close quickly. Your voice matters, and the time to take action is now.  

Open Letter on Responsible Use of AI 

We, the undersigned, offer our support for these statements: 

We are committed to the dignity and worth of every natural human person. Technology should serve humanity and contribute to the common good, enhancing human freedom and protecting the vulnerable. The intelligence of artificial systems does not confer on them equality of moral worth with humans, much less divine-like status. While anthropomorphism can be useful, we should guard against misrepresenting artificial systems as if they were humans. 

We are conscious that our creativity is both a gift and a responsibility, and that the tools we form in turn form us, including our cognition and moral reasoning. 

We celebrate the ways AI can aid understanding, improve well-being, democratise opportunity, enhance creativity, support efficiency, and empower humanity in our shared vocation to develop knowledge, advance human flourishing, and enrich culture. 

We observe that AI can offer pathways towards or away from knowledge of reality. We believe that design choices around data and algorithms involve implicit and explicit moral and ethical decisions, noting especially the issues of truthfulness and transparency. 

We recognise a responsibility to sustain and care for the natural world, and to avoid forms of development that impose reckless or irreversible harm. 

We regret the ways AI has been used to erode attention, confuse understanding of reality, misuse data, displace dignified work, and contribute to new burdens in societies and the natural world. 

We recognise that work on AI techniques, systems, and products requires the ongoing exercise of judgement for technical choices made amid uncertainty, with limited information and agency. It also requires judgement about how we present to others the choices we make, and the impact of those choices on the nature, imperfections, biases, influences, and limits of AI systems. Our judgements in these matters have consequences for humanity, and we commit to giving serious attention to the moral reasoning these judgements require. 

When faced with a conflict between conscience and the demands of our profession, we will exercise wisdom in giving voice to conscience. We acknowledge the reality of wide variation in individual agency to effect change or speak out.

Stan Rosenberg, Ph.D., serves as vice president for research & scholarship at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.