David Durman is an administrator at the University of Kentucky who supports researchers applying for grants. He is also a Humanist — a nontheistic one — and last week he became the first person in that tradition known to have secured a religious accommodation letting him abstain from using AI at work.
He did not stumble into it. As AI spread through his workplace and colleagues and leadership began recommending the tools, Durman went looking for the legal machinery that would protect him if a suggestion turned into a mandate. He approached the American Humanist Association, which published a statement from him earlier this week and confirmed his case.
"The way we become moral actors for ourselves and for others is through the active application of our minds," he told TechCrunch, "and the diminishing of that through AI use is going to necessarily have a negative impact on our ability to do so." In the statement, he was blunter about the stakes: AI is "interfering with people's ability to earn a living", its environmental costs "spell disaster for humanity and our planet", and its "supplanting and theft of human creativity" threaten the parts of culture that make society flourish.
The legal point is the one worth carrying away. In the United States, religious accommodation in the workplace does not require a deity. Federal anti-discrimination law protects "religious observance and practice" as well as belief, and courts and the EEOC have long treated sincerely held moral or ethical beliefs that occupy the place of religion as covered — which is why Humanism, a framework explicitly built without the supernatural, can function as a religion here when it needs to.
"Concern about AI and human dignity can run through several different faiths and traditions, whether that's Catholic teachings, or Universalism, or Humanism," Alexandria Huiskens, staff attorney at the American Humanist Association, told TechCrunch, "and we want Humanists or nontheists to know that they fall into these categories — that they are also protected by the law at work."
Durman was not the first to test it. Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist and a software engineer, secured similar protections before him, a case that is stranger on its face: software engineering is close to the field where writing code without AI assistance is now most unusual. Durman read about her and followed.
The employer's side of the ledger matters too, because it shows how narrow these accommodations are. University of Kentucky spokesperson Jay Blanton said the institution reviews requests individually, weighing the employee's responsibilities and circumstances: "In this case, the university determined that an accommodation could be provided while allowing the employee to continue performing the essential functions of their position." He added a line that will echo for anyone thinking of filing: "As technology and job responsibilities evolve, accommodations may be reviewed to ensure they remain reasonable and workable."
That is the honest shape of this. A religious accommodation is not a right to opt out of a tool; it is a negotiated adjustment that survives only while the essential functions of the job can still be done. For an administrator who supports grant applications, the adjustment was easy. For a developer on a team that has standardised on AI-assisted review, it may not be.
The timing is not accidental. Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly framed AI as a threat to human dignity, giving the objection a theological vocabulary that reaches well beyond the religiously observant. What these two cases establish is narrower and more useful: the objection does not need a god to be legally real, and the paperwork already exists.
Both Durman and Maus framed their decisions as personal rather than political. "I'm obviously not trying to tell people how to think or feel," Durman said. "But I do hope that it encourages people who have similar concerns to pursue not necessarily religious exemption, but pursue their concerns to the best of their ability where they feel is the most appropriate."
What follows is predictable and worth watching: as employers move from recommending AI to requiring it, the accommodation request becomes the only structured channel for refusal — and each one will be argued against a single phrase, "essential functions", that nobody has yet defined for the AI era.
