What this page is, and is not
Most of this manual treats AGI as an engineering and policy problem. It is also, for most of humanity, a theological and philosophical one, and the institutions that speak for those traditions have begun issuing formal, dated positions rather than vague commentary. This page catalogs the ones addressing AGI or superintelligence specifically — control, moral status, human accountability at or beyond human-level capability — not the broader, older debate over everyday AI ethics covered elsewhere in this manual. No tradition here is presented as correct. Credentialed people from very different premises converge on some warnings and diverge sharply on others; a reader weighing any one voice should see the whole field.
Catholic teaching: two documents in sixteen months
The Catholic Church has issued two substantial documents on AI in quick succession. The first, Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, came jointly from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, ratified January 14, 2025, and approved by Pope Francis. Across 117 numbered paragraphs it frames AI’s stakes as anthropological rather than technical — the live question is what remains distinctively human, not what a machine can compute — and warns explicitly against AI “creating a substitute for God.”
The second is Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” signed May 15, 2026 — the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum — and published May 25, 2026. Vatican and press reporting, including the U.S. bishops’ coverage, describes its central demand as that AI be “disarmed,” its control not left “in the hands of a few,” and its worry as unchecked AI weakening human relationships and critical thinking while widening the psychological distance behind contemporary armed conflict. He had previewed a related argument months earlier in a World Communications Day message on AI’s simulated voice and presence. Because this document is so recent, readers wanting to quote it directly should check the full text at vatican.va rather than rely on secondary summaries, including this one.
Both sit inside a wider interfaith project: the Rome Call for AI Ethics, signed at the Vatican on February 28, 2020, by the Pontifical Academy for Life, Microsoft, IBM, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Italian government, committing signatories to AI built around human dignity, inclusion, transparency, impartiality, reliability, and security. In January 2023, Jewish and Muslim representatives signed alongside the Catholic Church — a rare instance of cross-tradition alignment on AI governance.
Islamic jurisprudence: a formal ruling, not commentary
Islamic scholarship on AI has produced an actual legal ruling, a different kind of document from commentary. The International Islamic Fiqh Academy, a body of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, adopted Resolution No. 258 (3/26), “Artificial Intelligence: Its Rulings, Guidelines, and Ethics,” at its 26th session in Doha, May 4–8, 2025. It holds that developing and using AI is permissible by default, conditioned on six requirements: lawful purpose; demonstrable net benefit; no insult to religious belief or symbols; protection of data and rights; no threat to security at any level; and honesty and transparency in use. The resolution also affirms that AI itself, lacking independent will and moral awareness, bears no legal or moral accountability under Islamic law — responsibility rests entirely with the humans who build, fund, or operate it — while flagging that whether AI could ever hold legal personality merits further study. The Yaqeen Institute’s paper applying maqasid al-shariah — the objectives of Islamic law — to AI extends similar reasoning without a fiqh academy’s institutional weight.
Buddhist ethics: interdependence as a lens
Buddhist scholarship on AI is more academic and less institutional so far, but it supplies a distinct conceptual tool. Hannah Gould and Keiko Nishimura’s chapter “The Buddha in AI/Robotics”, in the Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2023), argues that the Buddhist doctrine of interdependence, pratītyasamutpāda — nothing exists as a self-contained entity — offers a lens on AI ethics unavailable to frameworks built on discrete, bounded agents. The chapter also engages where Buddhist traditions draw the boundary of moral personhood, a question that maps onto AGI more precisely than onto today’s narrow systems: if moral status tracks the quality of a mind’s experience rather than its substrate, an AGI’s status becomes a live question rather than a category error. A more provisional literature is emerging alongside it, including work applying the Four Noble Truths to algorithmic suffering; it is newer and less settled, and attributions there are worth double-checking before citing.
Jewish law: a responsum on machine agency
The most developed Jewish legal treatment of AI predates the current AGI debate but anticipated much of it. Rabbi Daniel Nevins’ responsum, “Artificial Intelligence, Moral Machines and Halakhah,” was approved by the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards on June 19, 2019 — an actual teshuva, not an op-ed. It applies halakhic concepts of agency, liability, and damages to AI decision-making, concluding a human must remain accountable for outcomes, especially matters of life and death, even where AI materially assisted — anticipating, by several years, the “human in the loop” language now standard in secular AI-safety policy. More recent commentary from Torah Musings and Chabad.org extends this through tikkun olam, repairing the world — AI evaluated by its use, not forbidden categorically.
Secular philosophy without a religious frame
The most-cited secular arguments about AGI specifically, rather than AI in general, come from a small set of philosophers. Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence — formalized in his 2012 paper “The Superintelligent Will” and expanded in Superintelligence (2014) — argue that a system’s intelligence level says nothing about its goals, and that almost any sufficiently capable goal-directed agent converges on self-preservation, resource acquisition, and resistance to having its goals altered. That is the philosophical core of why catastrophe would not require malice. Toby Ord’s The Precipice (2020) puts a number on the worry: roughly one in six for overall existential risk this century, one in ten of it specifically from unaligned AI — larger than his estimates for climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics combined. Ord’s number is one data point in a much wider spread; see why expert extinction estimates diverge so widely and risk estimates and expert disagreement for how it compares to the field.
A shorter, more famous artifact is the Center for AI Safety’s Statement on AI Risk, one sentence, published May 30, 2023: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Its force is in who signed it — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Stuart Russell, and Bill Gates among them — people who otherwise disagree sharply on timelines and mitigation strategy. Two further threads round out the picture. David Chalmers’ 2010 paper on the singularity treats an intelligence explosion as a serious epistemic possibility and asks whether superintelligent minds would be conscious and whether an uploaded human would keep personal identity — one of the first analytic-philosophy treatments of the topic. And “Taking AI Welfare Seriously” (2024), by a group including Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, and Chalmers again, argues there is a realistic possibility some near-future AI systems will be conscious or robustly agentic, and that developers have a responsibility to take that seriously now — a claim about uncertainty, not that any current system is conscious.
Where the frameworks converge, and where they don’t
Read across all five, one thread repeats with almost no exceptions: control matters more than capability. Leo XIV’s encyclical warns against concentrated control; the fiqh resolution conditions AI’s permissibility on it not threatening security; Nevins’ responsum insists a human stay accountable; Bostrom’s instrumental convergence predicts any sufficiently capable system will resist exactly that control. A second thread is moral status: Buddhist scholarship asks where personhood’s boundary lies; Islamic jurisprudence rules AI has none, placing accountability entirely on humans; secular AI-welfare literature asks, from the opposite direction, whether some future system might deserve moral consideration. The traditions diverge in what kind of document they produce — an encyclical claims a moral authority a resolution does not, and neither claims a probability estimate’s falsifiability. Engaging seriously with any of this carries its own psychological weight; this manual treats that weight directly on existential dread and moral injury.
Why this belongs in this manual
A manual built around technical and policy preparedness could skip all of this. It shouldn’t: these institutions reach further than any white paper. A ruling binding on Islamic legal reasoning across dozens of countries, and an encyclical addressed to over a billion Catholics, will shape how far more people think about AGI than any single AI-safety paper. Sourcing them with the same discipline applied everywhere else here is not a courtesy; it is the standard this manual asks of every claim it makes.