This is a guest post by Guldana Moldash, Director of the Department for Implementation of the Initiatives of the Congress of World and Traditional Religions and Chair of the Board of the International Center for Interfaith and Interreligious Dialogue (ICIID). I had the privilege to join the last Congress of World and Traditional Religions as a youth representative, and remain inspired at the openness to draw on traditions and teachings of the past, as we look to the challenges of the future. The Code of Ethics for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Religious Contexts represents an excellent example of this.

Algorithms and religions: Shaping AI ethics through faith-based diplomacy

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the institutions that human society has long taken for granted. It’s automating routine processes, sure, but it’s also generating complex analytical forecasts and pushing into territory once considered the exclusive domain of human reason. The collision between technology and the realm of religion and spirituality, though, raises questions of a different order entirely. Religion deals in faith, morality, compassion, and transcendent experience, none of which reduces neatly to a mathematical formula, no matter how sophisticated the model.

Neural networks are already generating sermons, interpreting sacred texts, and simulating pastoral counseling. Given that, the need for clear ethical boundaries has become urgent rather than theoretical. One answer to this challenge is the “Code of Ethics for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Religious Contexts”. It isn’t an attempt to slow progress down. It’s the first large-scale interdisciplinary effort to work out where algorithms belong in humanity’s spiritual life, built on a foundation of fundamental personal rights.

From Declarations to Applied Ethics

The groundwork for the Code was laid amid the rapid spread of large language models and machine learning systems. It traces back to the VIII Congress of the Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, where the Astana Peace Declaration 2025 was adopted. Paragraphs 23 and 24 of that Document locked in a key anthropocentric claim: however advanced computing power becomes, genuine compassion, love, and moral choice stay uniquely human.

The Code that grew out of that........

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