What makes Coxon's warning particularly chilling is that it was publicly endorsed by his former colleague Evan Hubinger, who leads Alignment Science at Anthropic. Hubinger stated plainly: "Jacob is correct here - we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade." When the very people building the most powerful AI systems privately fear they could prove fatal for humanity, we can no longer treat this as science fiction or alarmism.

The Buddhist community has a big responsibility, and a unique opportunity, to respond.

A Moment of Reckoning

Coxon's warning reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the AI industry. As he explained, at Anthropic "the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first, they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk." This is the race condition that makes alignment so difficult: even well-intentioned actors feel compelled to accelerate because they fear others will not slow down.

The Buddhist principle of samma ditthi (Right View) offers a different path. Right View begins with seeing reality clearly, including the reality of our own motivations and the consequences of our actions. The AI industry's current trajectory is driven by what Buddhist psychology identifies as the Three Poisons: greed (for profit and power), hatred (of competitors), and delusion (about our ability to control what we create).

Buddhist Wisdom for the Alignment Challenge

At a landmark workshop convened by 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha in July 2025, AI researchers and Buddhist scholars gathered to explore how ancient insights into mind, ethics, and non-harming could be applied to guide the safe evolution of intelligent systems. The timing was significant, held just before Chökhor Düchen, the sacred day commemorating the Buddha's first turning of the wheel of Dharma.

The workshop addressed developing Buddhist-informed frameworks for minimizing harm, bias, and misalignment in AI; integrating insights on consciousness, interdependence, and ethical intention into AI training; and building strategies for collaboration between AI researchers and contemplative scholars. This represents exactly the kind of engagement our community needs.

Peter D. Hershock, an adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center and author of "Buddhism and Intelligent Technology," has raised a crucial point: "From a Buddhist perspective, aligning with human interests is the worst thing possible. Look at Gaza, Ukraine, domestic violence, global hunger, climate disruption. We've got some work to do first before we align our AI systems with us." This challenges the fundamental premise of current AI alignment research - that we know what human values are and simply need to encode them into machines.

Practical Steps Already Underway

The good news is that pioneering work is already being done. The Buddhism and AI Initiative, launched in August 2025 with initial funding from the Future of Life Institute, is bringing together Buddhist practitioners, technologists, and researchers to shape the future of AI. The initiative is mapping how Buddhism and AI are already shaping each other and intends to fund projects that infuse Buddhist wisdom into AI development and deployment.

Projects like NORBU AI (Neural Operator for Responsible Buddhist Understanding - https://norbu-ai.org) demonstrate what's technically possible. NORBU - launched globally on Asalha Purnima in Sarnath, India in 2024 (the very spot where the Buddha first turned the Dharma wheel) - has been trained on over 3,000 verified sources and employs a three-fold validation formula ensuring the authenticity of sources, the accuracy of interpretation and translation, and validation by a team of Buddhist trained AI developers. The NORBU team includes "Source Guardians", monastics and lay scholars across different traditions, who ensure the accuracy and authenticity of training data. Its training emphasizes mindful and non-harmful communication, encouraging users to cultivate wisdom and compassion themselves rather than forming attachment to the AI.

In Japan, Seiji Kumagai's BuddhaBot Plus project at Kyoto University has already been adopted by Bhutan's Central Monastic Body for monastic education. Kumagai has emphasized the need for specialists such as monks to work alongside technologists, deepening discussions on the extent to which assistance or substitution should be permitted.

A Call for Collaborative Action

These individual efforts, while admirable, are not enough. The challenges posed by superintelligent AI are too complex and the stakes too high for fragmented efforts. The Buddhist community must come together in a coordinated, sustained manner to develop a truly Buddhist-aligned AI.

We call upon Buddhist AI experts, scholars, monastics, and technologists to convene a dedicated working group focused on developing a working prototype of a Buddhist-aligned AI. This is not a call for more conferences or academic papers, though those have their place, but for practical, collaborative engineering work that brings together the best minds in Buddhist philosophy and AI development.

The International Academic Conference on AI, Buddhism, and the Guardians of the Dhamma, organized by the Faculty of Buddhist Studies at NIIBS, provides a valuable forum for dialogue. Their conference tracks address critical questions: Can AI possess consciousness or intentionality? How do the five precepts apply to AI development? What is the World Sangha Council's role in formulating a global Buddhist ethical response to AI? These are precisely the questions that require collective wisdom to answer.

But dialogue must lead to action. We need:

• A dedicated working group bringing together AI engineers and Buddhist scholars for sustained collaboration
• Shared technical standards for source verification and ethical evaluation
• A unified voice capable of engaging with policymakers, funding agencies, and the broader AI safety community
• A working prototype that demonstrates how Buddhist principles can be embedded at the architectural level, not merely as post-hoc constraints

The Buddhist concept of sangha, the four-fold spiritual community, emerges here not merely as a metaphor but as a practical necessity. Just as the Buddha emphasized the importance of noble friendship for spiritual development (kalyana mitrata), the development of beneficial AI requires a community of practitioners committed to shared goals.

September: A Month of Remembrance and Rebirth The year 2001 holds a painful significance for the Buddhist world. It was in March 2001 that the Taliban began their assault on the Bamiyan Buddhas, the two colossal statues carved into the sandstone cliffs of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley some 1,500 years ago.



The destruction was methodical and complete. When gunfire and tank shells failed to demolish the ancient figures, Taliban troops drilled holes into the Buddhas and planted explosives, reducing them to piles of rubble by the end of March 2001. The empty niches that remain serve as perpetual reminders of what was lost, and what future generations stand to lose if we do not act.

Within six months of each other, both Afghanistan and the United States witnessed iconic cultural centers demolished in the name of extremism. The Bamiyan Buddhas fell in March 2001; the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. For the Buddhist world, the destruction of Bamiyan was our 9/11, a day of infamy that revealed how easily the forces of ignorance and hatred can obliterate centuries of cultural and spiritual heritage.

Yet the Buddha's teaching is one of impermanence and rebirth. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not the end of Buddhist civilization, it was a call to renewal. UNESCO has invested over $27 million in conservation and stabilization efforts at Bamiyan. The empty niches now stand as a World Heritage site, inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, reminding us of our collective duty to protect cultural heritage as fundamental to building more peaceful societies.

Today, we face a new moment of destruction, not of stone statues, but of the very fabric of human civilization through uncontrolled artificial intelligence. And just as the international community rallied to protect Bamiyan's heritage, the Buddhist world must rally to shape the development of superintelligence toward compassion rather than catastrophe.

A Buddhist Rebirth

The alignment of artificial intelligence with Buddhist ethics is not merely a technical challenge, it is a spiritual imperative. It represents a rebirth of Buddhist civilization in the digital age, a chance to ensure that the wisdom accumulated over twenty-five centuries finds expression in the most powerful technology humanity has ever created.

Scholars are already exploring how Buddhist mind-nature can inform ethical design in AI, focusing on AI as a supportive condition for human awakening rather than an autonomous moral subject. Buddhist Precepts, Ten Wholesome Deeds, The Four Brahma Viharas, The Noble Eight Fold Path and Dependent Origination offer design principles oriented toward non-harm, truthful communication, fairness, and the reduction of greed, hatred, and delusion in digital environments. The cultivation of a "digital Pure Land" depends on the moral choices of decision-makers, engineers, policymakers, and users—linking technical governance to spiritual practice.

The opportunity before us is unprecedented. If the Buddhist world can unite -monastics, scholars, technologists, and practitioners - we can develop an AI that embodies wisdom and compassion at its core. This would be a rebirth significant enough to make a global impact, demonstrating that technology can serve the cessation of suffering rather than its perpetuation.

Time for Action

Coxon asked his former colleagues a question that we must all answer: "Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because 'it's happening anyway' - or take this moment to call for different conditions?"

The Buddhist community must not put our heads down. We must not assume that others will solve this problem. We must bring our unique wisdom, our understanding of mind, consciousness, and the causes of suffering, to bear on the most important challenge of our time.

If the best Buddhist brains come together, the path forward becomes clearer, the work becomes lighter, and the possibility of shaping superintelligence toward compassion becomes real. The alternative - allowing the race toward superintelligence to proceed without the deep ethical grounding that Buddhist wisdom offers - is a gamble we cannot afford to take.

The Bamiyan Buddhas stood for over a millennium, surviving conquest and destruction until they fell in 2001. Their destruction marked a turning point in global recognition of the need to protect cultural heritage. Let the development of Buddhist-aligned AI mark another turning point, one where the Buddhist world leads humanity toward a future in which superintelligence serves the welfare of all beings.

Let us begin. Now!

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Kooi F. Lim is Managing Editor of The Buddhist Channel and founder of NORBU AI https://norbu-ai.org)