Religion and AI Ethics — Who Decides What Machines Are Allowed to Do?

When a major religious leader publishes a document on artificial intelligence, secular tech leaders pay attention. Religious institutions speak for billions of people whose values shape consumer choices, voting patterns, and the legitimacy of new technologies. The question is whether faith-based ethics belongs in the room where AI policy is written — and if so, whose faith. The answer used to be optional. As AI touches medicine, end-of-life care, surveillance, and identity itself, it has become unavoidable. A century from now, ethicists may look back at this moment as the one where humans decided whether to let centuries of moral reasoning shape silicon, or to start the moral vocabulary over from scratch.