A Humanist won a religious exemption from using AI at work

A religious exemption from using AI at work has been granted to someone who does not believe in a god. TechCrunch reports that David Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator and nontheistic Humanist, secured an accommodation letting him abstain from using AI on the job.

Durman supports researchers applying for grants. He described Humanism to TechCrunch as a set of beliefs about human experience and how people engage with the world, centered on individual and collective well-being and flourishing, and on improving one's own circumstances and those of others. Using AI, in his view, runs counter to those beliefs.

His argument is about thinking itself. The way people become moral actors for themselves and for others, he said, is through the active application of their minds, and diminishing that through AI use necessarily harms the ability to act morally. In a statement the American Humanist Association published this week, he wrote that AI interferes with people's ability to earn a living, that its environmental costs spell disaster for humanity and the planet, and that its supplanting and theft of human creativity threaten culture.

Such accommodations have mostly gone to religious believers. Alexandria Huiskens, a staff attorney at the AHA, told TechCrunch that concern about AI and human dignity runs through several faiths and traditions, whether Catholic teaching, Unitarianism or Humanism, and that Humanists and nontheists should know they fall under the same legal protection at work.

In practice, employers assess requests case by case. University of Kentucky spokesperson Jay Blanton said the school reviews religious accommodation requests individually, weighing the employee's job responsibilities and the circumstances, and determined in this case that an accommodation could be provided while the employee kept performing the essential functions of the position. He added that accommodations may be reviewed as technology and job duties evolve.

Durman was following precedent. He sought the exemption after reading that Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist software engineer, had secured similar protections; Maus's case was unusual because few engineers now write code without AI assistance. Durman's administrative role does not currently require AI use, but colleagues and leadership have recommended trying the tools, so he wanted protection in place before a suggestion turned into a mandate.

The significance is that AI is moving from a tooling choice to a question of labor rights. As companies write AI use into workflows, performance reviews and eventually job requirements, whether employees can opt out on grounds of belief becomes a question for HR and legal teams. Belief is also a wider category than religion, which suggests more requests of this kind.

Durman's own framing is modest: the case was about his convictions, he said, and he is not telling others how to think, but he hopes people with similar concerns pursue whatever resolution fits them. What to watch is whether job descriptions start naming AI competence outright, and how courts and labor agencies draw the line between secular belief and religious accommodation.