Holy See (Vatican City State) AI Regulation

Binding internal regulation

On 16 December 2024, the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State adopted, through Decree No. DCCII, the Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence, which entered into force on 1 January 2025. The Guidelines establish the general principles governing the development and use of AI within Vatican City State and the areas covered by the Lateran Treaty. They take an anthropocentric approach grounded in human dignity and the common good, and require that AI serve as an aid to human decision-making rather than a replacement for it. Notable provisions prohibit the use of AI to draw discriminatory anthropological inferences, bar subliminal manipulation capable of causing physical or psychological harm, require transparency and the labelling of AI-generated content, mandate protection of personal and biometric data, and reserve judicial functions to human judges. Oversight is exercised through a dedicated commission responsible for monitoring compliance and evaluating risk, with implementing laws and regulations envisaged to follow.

Magisterial teaching

Alongside its internal rules, the Holy See has issued doctrinal texts addressed to the wider world. On 28 January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education published Antiqua et Nova, a Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, examining the implications of AI across education, the economy, labour, health, human relations, and war.

On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, signed on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. An encyclical is among the highest forms of papal teaching and ranks well above a dicasterial Note in magisterial authority. The text argues that technology is never neutral, because it reflects the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it, and it calls for AI to be "disarmed", condemning lethal autonomous weapons and warning against the concentration of technological power. It assigns developers a particular ethical responsibility, on the basis that every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. The encyclical does not create legal obligations and is not expected to drive legislation directly, but it sets out a moral baseline that has been widely debated within the AI industry and policy community.

Status and effect

Within Vatican City State, the 2024 Guidelines are operative law. Beyond it, Antiqua et Nova and Magnifica Humanitas function as soft normative instruments: they bind no government or company, but they contribute to the international discourse on AI governance and sit alongside, rather than within, hard-law regimes such as the EU AI Act. For practitioners, the Vatican's significance may lie less in enforceability than in its potential role as an early and high-profile moral voice on autonomous weapons, labour displacement, surveillance, and the governance responsibilities of AI developers.