A 34-year-old software engineer in North Carolina has been granted permission to avoid AI at work for religious reasons, even as many technology firms push the tools as a standard part of the job. Her case stands out because it arrives at a time when some employers are increasingly measuring how often staff use AI systems.
The engineer filed a workplace accommodation request in April, saying that AI conflicted with her beliefs as a Unitarian Universalist. She argued that technology should be guided by an ethical understanding of humanity, not only by speed or convenience.
Why she objected to AI
Her concerns went beyond personal preference and focused on the broader impact of AI. She pointed to the technology’s demands on energy, water, and land, while also raising ethical objections to the possibility that it could replace human workers.
To support her request, she consulted an employment lawyer and a minister from her local congregation. About a month later, the company approved the accommodation, allowing her to continue working without AI tools.
By hand, even as AI spreads through coding teams
That approval means she still writes and reviews code manually, while many engineers now rely on AI assistants for similar tasks. She said the approach may look outdated, but it has not made her work slower.
According to her account, she recently completed a programming task at the same pace as a coworker who used AI on a nearly identical assignment. The experience reinforced her view that AI is not necessarily a game-changing tool for everyone.
She also said that principles still matter, which captures the core of the dispute. In her view, the debate over AI in the workplace is not only about efficiency, but also about the values employees want to preserve.
A broader sign of resistance
The case comes amid growing pushback against AI in other settings as well. At several college graduation ceremonies this year, students were reported to have jeered speakers who praised AI.
Opposition has also emerged in parts of the United States, where residents have protested the construction of AI data centers on environmental grounds. That wider resistance suggests that concerns about AI are no longer limited to tech insiders or academics.
Religious criticism has also entered the conversation. Pope Leo XIV recently warned that AI could deepen inequality, fuel conflict, and damage human dignity if it is driven mainly by profit rather than human values.
He delivered that warning in his first encyclical on AI, titled Magnifica Humanitas, which examines both the benefits and risks of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
For companies, the North Carolina case shows that AI adoption in the workplace may not be as uniform as many assume. For workers, it demonstrates that objections to AI can rest on deeply specific grounds, including religion and ethical concerns about the technology’s impact.
The most notable part of the case is not simply that one engineer refused to use AI. It is that her employer accepted that choice, leaving room for a worker to keep doing the job the old-fashioned way at a moment when AI is increasingly treated as the new default.