Religious Accounts of Digital Moral Status and AI Welfare

AI welfare research is moving from speculative philosophy toward empirical methods and institutional policy, yet much of the discourse relies on a narrow set of welfare theories and consciousness assumptions. Religious traditions contain long-running disagreements about souls, embodiment, non-self, moral agency, suffering, created nature, kinship, obligation, and the status of beings whose inner lives are uncertain. These sources could widen the question set, surface hidden premises, and improve precautionary governance, but only if they are represented with doctrinal care and translated into contestable public reason rather than treated as a single religious answer.