She won a religious exemption from using AI at work. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals.

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https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6

Opposed to using AI for her software-engineering job, Erin Maus secured something of a miracle from her employer: a religious exemption.

Maus, a Unitarian Universalist, said she proposed the special treatment in April, citing environmental and ethical objections to AI that don't align with her religious beliefs. She also said she consulted an employment lawyer and her local chapter's minister to help make her case.

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Maus' AI workaround comes as a growing number of employers mandate and track workers' AI usage. The technology has also recently drawn scrutiny from Pope Leo XIV, who warned last month that AI could undermine human dignity and displace workers if left unchecked, in a more than 42,000-word encyclical.

Some people have interpreted the pontiff's letter as grounds for religious objections to using AI in the workplace. It's a stance that carries real legal weight, given that federal law requires employers to consider faith-based requests.

"The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that 'sincerely held religious belief' under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse," wrote Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, on X.

Related::
Meta backs off tracking workers' keystrokes after they revolt

https://boingboing.net/2026/06/03/meta-backs-off-tracking-workers-keystrokes-after-they-revolt.html

Meta has backed off a little. After announcing in April that a tool called the Model Capability Initiative would log employees' keystrokes and mouse clicks to train its AI models, the company has now told staff they can pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" or request an exemption altogether, according to an internal memo seen by the BBC.

The retreat follows weeks of pushback, including a worker petition that has gathered more than 1,500 signatures. Meta's original pitch was that "if we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them," and that the data was "not used for any other purpose." One employee told the BBC the whole thing felt "very dystopian," especially with another round of layoffs expected.

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