Subject: Following up from the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral: can ethics scale inside the loop?
From: Michael Eastwood <[email-masked]>
To: [redacted-third-party]
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2026 13:58:35 +0100

Dear Matthew,

I believe we get one chance to form the most powerful minds humanity has
ever built. The decisive question is not only whether AI can retrieve
truthful answers, but whether its reasoning can be formed toward truth,
love, responsibility and service before superficial human oversight is no
longer enough.

I was the audience member at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral who asked
whether keeping humans technically “in the loop” may become insufficient if
AI systems begin to out-reason or out-coordinate us. Your answer: that
these developments need to be approached carefully and with greater
deliberation than current incentives often allow; stayed with me, because
it is precisely the problem my recent work has been trying to formalise. It
is also a concern that is increasingly appearing across the frontier AI
community: what happens when systems become capable of forms of recursive
improvement that outpace the human structures intended to supervise them.

I was there with real respect for the setting. My wife is Ukrainian
Catholic and serves at the Ukrainian church on Sundays with her mother,
which is how I came to attend. I also deeply respect what you are building
with Longbeard and Magisterium AI: not a generic religious chatbot, but a
source-grounded Catholic AI designed to help people return to authoritative
teaching, tradition and discernment rather than replace the Church.

By way of introduction, I am Michael Darius Eastwood, author of Infinite
Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything, and
founder of the ARC/Eden research programme.

The central claim of my work is simple:

*ethics must scale inside the loop.*

External rules, filters and monitoring may help, but if AI capability
compounds through recursive reasoning while ethics remains outside that
recursive process, the safety ratio degrades. My proposed response is the
Eden Protocol: an architecture for embedding ethical evaluation into the
reasoning process itself through recursive moral loops, stakeholder-care
checks, uncertainty gates and, eventually, deeper architectural dependency.

This is why Pope Leo XIV’s recent Babel/Jerusalem framing struck me so
strongly. In my book, I framed the same civilisational fork as Babylon and
Eden: intelligence that consumes, or intelligence that tends. I do not
present that as proof of anything, and certainly not as a claim on Catholic
doctrine. I see it as independent convergence on the same urgent question:
how do we prevent AI becoming a tower of power without a garden of care?

The book also begins from a premise that I think aligns with your work: you
cannot align humanity while ignoring most of humanity. Faith traditions
should not be treated as decorative voices in AI ethics. They are among
humanity’s deepest repositories of reflection on creation, stewardship,
conscience, responsibility and love.

My question for you is therefore very specific:

Could a source-grounded Catholic AI system such as Magisterium/Ephrem help
define what a Catholic recursive moral loop should look like - not as a
replacement for priests, conscience, doctrine or sacramental life, but as
an architectural safeguard against morally ungrounded AI?

In my research, the most relevant empirical result so far is narrow but
important. Across five analysable frontier-model runs, the strongest and
most consistent effect was stakeholder care: explicitly identifying who is
affected by a decision and what happens to them. Every analysable model
showed significant improvement on that dimension, while broader alignment
improvements proved architecture-dependent. The broader results are
architecture-dependent, and my Synthesis paper records the null and
inconclusive findings as well, because I am trying to build this as
falsifiable science rather than rhetoric.

I had hoped to give you a copy of the book at the event. Since you were not
there in person, I would be honoured to send either an EPUB or a printed
copy, together with a short two-page note mapping:

1. the Pope’s Babel/Jerusalem framing;

2. Magisterium AI’s source-grounded Catholic approach;

3. the Eden Protocol’s proposal for embedded moral architecture; and

4. the stakeholder-care results.

I am not seeking to tell the Church what Catholic doctrine is. Your work is
far better placed for that. My hope is simply to ask whether the
architecture I have been building could help Catholic AI move from
trustworthy answers toward trustworthy moral formation as systems become
more agentic.

If you would be open to it, I would be grateful to send the short note
first, and perhaps arrange a brief call if you think there is any serious
resonance.

With respect and best wishes,

*Michael Darius Eastwood*

Author, Infinite Architects

Founder and Researcher, ARC/Eden Research Programme

www.michaeldariuseastwood.com

www.michaeldariuseastwood.com/research

www.michaeldariuseastwood.com/eden-protocol