Not even God is saved from AI, so the Vatican has gone from the commandments to being the first State to legislate it

Incredible as it may seem, the Vatican is moving faster than most historical institutions in the face of artificial intelligence and everything that is coming our way (and that, in fact, we are already getting a glimpse of), from disinformation to voice and video deepfakes, to the silent erosion of what we understand as reality. An institution that is more than 2,000 years old and old-fashioned is giving a lesson in institutional agility to governments, parliaments and even technology companies that do not know where they are going.

And it does not do so from naivety, but from a firm and concrete theological conviction: that human dignity is not negotiable, not even in the face of a language model with a billion parameters. It has taken the EU years to approve its AI Act and even so it was a pioneer, but big tech in general is behaving like the tobacco industry by self-regulating tobacco. In this scenario, the Holy See has had internal directions in force for months, alliances in cybersecurity and a pope who has already said that AI cannot preach faith.

The Vatican’s position. In addition to prohibiting the use of AI to write sermons, last February Pope Leo XIV asked the priesthood do not look for “likes” on social networks. A year earlier, the Vatican had issued one of the world’s first regulatory frameworks on AI demanding ethics, transparency and putting humans at the center

Thus, Vatican policy establishes that technology “should never surpass or replace human beings” and must be at the service of human dignity. And it is not something new: the previous Pope Francis already laid the foundations in his Laudato Si’ of 2015, but applied to the digital world.

Why it is important. Because the Holy See is moving more and better than the bulk of traditional institutions to establish norms and safeguards against disinformation generated by AI. While the EU approved its legislative framework as a bloc, the Vatican has been the first individual sovereign State to have immediate compliance guidelines for its administration, ahead of powers such as the United States or China.

By positioning itself as a moral authority, it seeks to fill the regulatory and ethical void that technology companies have left open. This positioning has real institutional weight: the Vatican operates as a diplomatic actor with permanent observer status at the UN and relations with more than 180 states, which allows it to project its ethical standards beyond the religious sphere, in a space where neither governments nor technology companies have achieved global consensus.

Context. We have already seen that the movement is not something sudden or improvised and that the Vatican’s position has been brewing for years. In fact, it is the evolution of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics“, a historical (but voluntary) document where the Vatican managed to get giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Cisco will sign a commitment to develop technologies that respect privacy and inclusion

The current geopolitical context, marked by cyberattacks and the use of deepfakes in conflicts, has forced the Holy See to accelerate its cybersecurity partnerships and establish monitoring within Vatican City itself to protect its information sovereignty. At a regulatory level, the Vatican is not going it alone: ​​the Holy See’s approach is complementary to that of the AI ​​Act: the EU regulates by law and the Vatican provides the moral authority and ethical principles of universal application, something that cannot be legislated.

Retail. The Vatican’s regulatory framework focuses on both technical security and the social impact that algorithms have and seriously warns about the risk of a new inequality gap: between those who control AI and those who are controlled by it.

• The Vatican has established formal cybersecurity alliances with simultaneous focus on defense, diplomacy and ethics.
• The internal guidelines They prohibit AI that manipulates people, generates discrimination or compromises institutional integrity and there are specific safeguards on data.

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Cover | Google DeepMind and Julien DI MAJO