Holy See (Vatican City State)
AI Regulation

Decree No. DCCII of 16 December 2024 promulgated the Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence, effective from 1 January 2025. Their scope covers specified Governorate bodies and personnel, Vatican courts and contractors or suppliers, within Vatican City and in Governorate activities in the areas covered by articles 15 and 16 of the Lateran Treaty. They are not rules governing the worldwide Catholic Church.

The Guidelines protect human dignity, autonomy and the common good. They prohibit discriminatory anthropological inferences and harmful subliminal manipulation, safeguard personal and biometric data, require identification of relevant AI-generated content, and reserve judicial decisions to magistrates. A dedicated AI commission was appointed in March 2025. The framework also provides for implementing laws and regulations.

On 28 January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education issued Antiqua et Nova, a note on the relationship between artificial and human intelligence. Pope Francis approved it on 14 January 2025 and ordered its publication. It considers AI in areas including education, work, health, human relationships and warfare.

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, was signed on 15 May 2026 and published on 25 May 2026. It calls for AI to be “disarmed” of practices that enable domination, addresses developers' ethical responsibilities, and rejects delegating lethal decisions to artificial systems. It also calls for regulatory tools and responsible human control.

The decree establishes operative rules within its defined scope. The note and encyclical set out Catholic teaching; they are not themselves Vatican City AI legislation or generally applicable statutory duties for governments and companies.

Their teaching authority should not be reduced to an automatic ranking based on document type. Catholic teaching distinguishes authentic magisterial teaching from definitive judgments; doctrinal documents expressly approved by the Pope can participate in the ordinary papal magisterium. The absence of a civil regulatory obligation should therefore not be confused with an absence of ecclesial or moral authority.