A group of Catholic moral theologians is urging a federal appeals court to rule in favor of "caution" and "responsibility" regarding military artificial intelligence (AI) usage, with the scholars weighing in on a dispute between the U.S. government and one of the most prominent AI companies.
The scholars — which include University of Dayton professor Jana Bennett, Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum bioethics professor Father Michael Baggot, and Loyola University Chicago philosophy professor Joe Vukov — told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that it should support "defined normative boundaries" for the use of AI in warfare.
Amicus brief from Catholic moral theologians
The dispute stems from the U.S. Department of War's usage of AI models from Anthropic, a major California-based AI developer. The company had been providing intelligence technology for the government but had forbidden its usage in both lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The War Department ultimately ended its contract with Anthropic and subsequently labeled the company a national security risk. The D.C. appeals court upheld that decision in a September ruling.
In their filing supporting Anthropic's request for an "en banc" hearing at the appeals court, the theologians said they were backing the company's "principled ethical stance on AI use" by the military.
The scholars said they agreed that AI "ought not to be used for mass domestic surveillance," citing the Catholic Church's teachings on privacy. They pointed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church's instruction that "no one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it."
Privacy "is not an absolute right," they acknowledged, but mass surveillance "clearly oversteps" the principle of privacy and would amount to a "clear violation" of human dignity.
Autonomous weapons, meanwhile, "obscure human agency" and shift responsibility "away from human decision-makers to machines."
"They accelerate the already rapid military decision-making processes, perhaps to the point of eliminating even the possibility of human involvement," the scholars said, arguing that "practical judgment and careful decision-making" should "inform all human decisions," particularly involving life and death.
The theologians quoted Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spe Salvi, in which the late pope acknowledged that developing technology offers "new possibilities for good" as well as "appalling possibilities for evil."
In the boundaries it set, Anthropic "was acting as a responsible and moral corporate citizen, not as a threat to the safety of the American supply chain," the scholars argued.
Catholic leadership has been regularly warning of the risks of AI in recent months. The U.S. bishops launched a task force in September to help promote human dignity among the rapid rise of AI technology.
Pope Leo XIV, meanwhile, has been a global voice urging caution on AI, including with his landmark May encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, in which the Holy Father warned that the "pervasive technocratic paradigm" of which AI is a part "threatens to normalize an antihuman vision."
Earlier this month, meanwhile, the pope cautioned against the spread of AI-produced art, with the pontiff citing the "urgent" need to "distinguish human art from what is produced by machines."
