When the Vatican released a new document on artificial intelligence this week, some may have considered a version of the early church father Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This time the question might be: “What does the Vatican know about A.I.?”
The answer: Quite a lot. This week’s release of “Antiqua et Nova,” a “note” on human and artificial intelligence, is only the latest step in the Vatican’s decade-long history of leadership in the field of A.I. ethics—a history that has earned it significant influence among tech leaders, particularly at Microsoft and IBM.
As early as 2007, Pope Benedict XVI warned scientists at the Pontifical Lateran University that “contemporary life gives pride of place to an artificial intelligence ever more enslaved to experimental techniques, thereby forgetting that all science should safeguard mankind and promote his tendency to authentic goodness.” His emphasis on the importance of technology protecting humanity and the common good would be echoed by the Vatican over the next almost two decades.
As machine learning developed quickly during that time, with “deep learning” emerging as a breakthrough technology, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences began hosting workshops on data processing. A gathering in 2015 on “Big Data and Science” aimed to bring together experts in the life sciences, earth sciences and astrophysics to discuss “examples of appropriate collection, storage and management of data.” The following year, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences turned its sights specifically to A.I., hosting a workshop on the “Power and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence,” which was attended by Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of Google Deepmind, Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory.
It wasn’t just the Vatican’s scientific academy, however, that was interested in A.I. well before its explosion in the 2020s. In 2016, Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s then-Pontifical Council for Culture attended the Web Summit in Lisbon on behalf of the Vatican, where the hot topic of discussion was the development of A.I. The following year, the Vatican hosted a panel at the technology and culture festival South by Southwest in Austin, Tex.
A major breakthrough in A.I. came in 2017 with the debut of transformer architecture, which would enable the building of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that have expanded into popular use today. By this time, the Vatican was already a reliable collaboration space for leaders in the A.I. field, particularly in medicine, and, as demonstrated by its invitation to host a panel at SXSW 2017, it was increasingly being invited into conversations about tech.
In 2018, the Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti, T.O.R., who has gained some notoriety as Pope Francis’ A.I. advisor, delivered a speech on A.I. ethics. (Father Benanti is known for coining the term “algor-ethics.”) That speech was attended by a senior Microsoft executive, The Washington Post reported, and the two began meeting regularly, eventually also inviting Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Microsoft would ultimately become a major partner with the Vatican on A.I. It was one of the early signatories to the “Rome Call for A.I. Ethics,” a document pioneered by Father Benanti that would go on to inform the G7’s international code of conduct for A.I. The Vatican and Microsoft would also team up in a years-long project, which debuted in 2024, to create an A.I. model of St. Peter’s Basilica.
At the same time, the archivist of the Vatican’s Secret Archives, Marco Maiorino, had collaborated with a team of tech experts to refine an existing A.I. handwriting-reading tool, enabling it to read challenging Latin manuscripts in the archives and contributing to the digitization of some of the Vatican’s 53 miles of books.
Also in 2018, the Vatican hosted its first “hackathon,” offering prizes to teams that created the best software projects in the areas of social inclusion, interfaith dialogue and support for migrants and refugees.
The Vatican hosted another A.I. conference in 2019, “Robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity: science, ethics, and policy.” A few months later, Pope Francis addressed A.I. when speaking to yet another gathering, this one on the "Common Good in the Digital Age,” hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. In that talk, the pope warned against A.I.-generated “false data” that can “manipulate the opinions of millions of people, to the point of endangering the very institutions that guarantee peaceful civil coexistence.” Pope Francis also met with Microsoft president Brad Smith that year, having previously met with Facebook (now Meta) C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg and Google parent company Alphabet’s then-executive chairman Eric Schmidt individually in 2016.
In February 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life hosted yet another A.I. conference, this time focused on ethics, law and health.
The Covid-19 pandemic put the Vatican’s conference-hosting on pause, but the “Rome Call for A.I. Ethics,” published in September 2020, cemented the Vatican as a worldwide leader in A.I.. ethics. Spearheaded in large part by Father Benanti (now a member of the United Nations Advisory Body for Artificial Intelligence), the document was signed by Microsoft, IBM and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization alongside the Pontifical Academy for Life. That document has now been signed by almost 70 organizations, including government authorities, universities, civil society organizations and private corporations.
The Vatican’s use of A.I. tools has continued, as well: In November 2020, the Vatican revealed that it was using A.I. tools to protect its library from cyber attacks. (The Vatican is often a target of such attacks. Most recently, in November 2024, the Vatican website was down for several days; security experts warned that the crash had the hallmarks of a cyber attack, although the Vatican never confirmed this.)
Artificial intelligence burst into the mainstream discourse in November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI, just a month after the University of Notre Dame hosted a global summit in 2022 following up on the “Rome Call for A.I. Ethics.” (The summit was hosted at the Vatican’s request.)
Pope Francis focused his 2024 message for the World Day of Peace, released in 2023, on the theme of “Artificial Intelligence and Peace.” In the document, he aimed to take the Vatican’s influence on A.I. development a step further, from private corporations to national governments. In the message, he called for an international treaty to govern the ethical development of A.I.
In fact, the Vatican’s influence was already being felt in multilateral government discussions of A.I., as the European Commission used the “Rome Call for A.I. Ethics” in 2023 to inform its code of conduct for developing A.I.
Finally, in 2024—a year during which the Vatican hosted two more A.I. conferences—Pope Francis was invited to address the G7 summit of the leaders of the governments of the world’s largest economies on A.I. There, he stressed to world leaders that A.I. should never dominate human decision-making, saying:
We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines. We need to ensure and safeguard a space for proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs: human dignity itself depends on it.
It was a message the Vatican dicasteries (offices) for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education would echo in their long-awaited A.I. document this week, and one that sums up the Vatican’s message to the global governments and tech companies it will likely continue to work with as A.I. becomes ubiquitous.
