Vatican publishes Antiqua et Nova, a doctrinal note on artificial intelligence and human intelligence

Filed retrospectively. Before the Specola kept its nightly watch, these were the observations that turned the telescope.

On January 28, 2025, the Vatican published “Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,” jointly issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. Pope Francis approved the text on January 14, 2025, after Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández presented the draft to him. It is signed by Cardinal Fernández and Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefects of the two dicasteries.

The note runs to more than one hundred numbered paragraphs and surveys the anthropological and ethical questions raised by AI across education, the economy, work, health care, human relationships, and warfare. Its central distinction is between human intelligence, which the document treats as embodied, relational, and oriented toward truth, and machine systems, which it treats as products of that intelligence. In the note’s words, “AI should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence but as a product of it.”

The document flags lethal autonomous weapons as a cause for grave ethical concern and warns that presenting a machine as though it were a human person is a serious ethical violation.

Antiqua et Nova was the Vatican’s most systematic statement on AI to date, and the doctrinal groundwork for the papal engagement with the technology that followed later that year and beyond.