The Rome Call for AI Ethics — The Vatican's AI-Ethics Framework Reaches 36 Universities

On 28 February 2020, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life convened technology and government leaders at its Vatican City headquarters to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a charter built around six principles — transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and security/privacy — meant to steer how institutions develop and teach artificial intelligence. The founding signatories were Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (President of the Pontifical Academy for Life), Microsoft's Brad Smith, IBM's John Kelly III, the FAO's Qu Dongyu, and the Italian government.

The Call has since moved from a signing ceremony into curriculum work. In January 2023 Muslim and Jewish religious leaders signed on, widening it into an interfaith ethics framework, and Cisco added its signature in 2024. On 26–27 October 2023, the Rome Call partnered with the University of Notre Dame's Ethics and Technology Center to convene a Global University Summit, where representatives from 36 universities discussed how to embed AI-ethics teaching into their curricula; eight institutions — including the University of Florida, Notre Dame, the University of Navarra, Chuo University, the University of Johannesburg and the Catholic University of Croatia — formally committed to the framework. In Rome, the Holy See's own Pontifical Gregorian University has taught AI and technology ethics as part of its moral theology curriculum since the mid-2010s, led by Franciscan friar and technology ethicist Fr. Paolo Benanti, who also formally advises the Vatican and the Italian government's AI Commission.

The clearest, verifiable figures are institutional: five founding signatories in 2020, expansion to interfaith and corporate signatories through 2024, and 36 universities engaging with 8 formal curriculum commitments at the 2023 summit. No independent study measures whether the Call has changed graduates' AI-ethics competency or classroom outcomes, so the evidence here is institutional adoption and curriculum reach rather than measured learning impact.