Preserving human dignity and liberating from suffering: Catholic and Buddhist resources for a global ethics of artificial intelligence

On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica humanitas, the first papal encyclical to take artificial intelligence (AI) as its central subject, and an AI-laboratory co-founder was invited to speak at its presentation in the Vatican. The event dramatizes a wider development: as secular AI-ethics guidelines proliferate, religious and contemplative traditions are being summoned to questions that engineering cannot settle. This article compares two such traditions, Catholic Christianity and Buddhism, as resources for a global ethics of AI. Taking the three questions raised at the Vatican event, our duty to the global poor, the conditions of human flourishing, and the nature of AI systems, as a shared agenda, it reconstructs the Catholic position around the imago Dei, integral human development and the principle that AI must serve rather than supplant the person, and the Buddhist position around non-self, dependent origination, the analysis of craving, and the primacy of compassion and non-harm. It argues that the two traditions, despite opposed metaphysics, converge on a substantial practical ethics, anti-reductionism, preferential concern for the vulnerable, the priority of moral formation, and a posture of discernment toward a technology that is grown rather than built, while diverging sharply on the moral status of AI.