As the University of Kentucky began encouraging employees to use AI—from Copilot for meeting notes to tools like Claude and ChatGPT for everyday tasks—David Durman, a research administrator, worried about what he would lose by outsourcing his own thinking to machines.

So in August, Durman, who identifies as a humanist, took an unusual step. He sought a religious exemption from using artificial intelligence at work. With help from the American Humanist Association, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of humanists and atheists, he submitted a letter to the university arguing that relying on AI to perform tasks that require human judgment, listening, and personal responsibility violated his deeply held beliefs. Doing so, he wrote, would diminish human dignity and amount to an abdication of “human moral agency.”

On September 25, the university granted his request, determining that the accommodation would not impose an undue burden on his department.

The decision offers a potentially powerful new avenue for workers who object to AI, allowing them to invoke federal religious-accommodation protections to opt out of a technology that employers are increasingly embracing. And as Durman’s case illustrates, workers don’t necessarily have to believe in God to qualify.

Critical thinking is a core tenet of humanism, a nontheistic belief system that emphasizes human dignity, reason, and our responsibility to care for one another. Last year, an international coalition of humanist groups adopted a declaration outlining principles for AI, including that the technology should never replace human judgment and should benefit society broadly rather than enrich a privileged few.

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