New Delhi, June 22 -- THE PARADOX of religious authority is that, to believers, there is nothing more important, yet spiritual leaders typically wield little practical power. Indeed, it is often the refusal to sully themselves with the quandaries and compromises of everyday life that confers moral authority on holy men. That, in turn, makes it both easy for worldly leaders to subdue them in the short run (they have no weapons) and difficult in the longer term (their persecution only increases their moral standing).

This dynamic, although familiar to medieval prelates and princes, may not be as well understood by Dario Amodei, the supreme pontiff of Anthropic, one of America's leading artificial-intelligence firms, and Donald Trump, Ameri...