First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.

Photo by Kris Tian on Unsplash

Over the weekend, a clip about “Anthropic thinks it’s building God” started making the rounds. On the All-In podcast, venture capitalist and author Bill Gurley said he had dived into Anthropic’s writings and concluded that the company sees itself as “midwifing a deity.”

It was spot on. But the missing piece in this “AI and religion” discussion is AI doomerism itself.

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AI Doomerism = a Secular Apocalypse Narrative.

Practically, the “AI doom gospel” translates traditional religious forms into technical language. In the rationalist/effective altruist discourse, God becomes a superintelligence, prophecy becomes timelines and probability estimates, and hell becomes human extinction from AI.

The true believers cast themselves as the tiny group who “get the danger” before the “ignorant masses” do.

This religious structure of AI risk brings a sense of certainty, urgency, moral absolutism, and social authority before any empirical evidence has earned any of them.

This is how this movement is asking for more influence, money, and control over policy.

There are two background reasons: First, AI is a magnet for theological imagination. AI discourse repeatedly returns to ancient religious motifs: creation, forbidden knowledge, omniscience, apocalypse, and salvation.

Second, AI doomerism fills a “religious-shaped hole.” For people who left religious upbringing but retain a hunger for a mission-driven community, the AI-risk subculture offers a replacement meaning system.

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The Shift: Atheist AI theology is now seeking religious legitimacy.

AI doom beliefs emerged from largely secular and anti-religious spaces. The 2023 LessWrong survey, for example, found that 67% described themselves as atheists, 13.7% as agnostics, and only 3.7% as convinced theists.[1]

But once this movement needed broader political and cultural influence, religious communities became useful allies.

Nowadays, the AI existential risk ecosystem is actively recruiting religious communities and faith leaders into its AI politics.

The Future of Life Institute, an AI risk organization that controls roughly $400 million, is explicitly seeking impact-oriented religious initiatives.

Anthropic, an AI-risk-driven frontier lab now valued at $965 billion, has just showcased its moral stance alongside the Pope.[2]

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The Pattern.

AI doomerism borrows religious structure while denying religious content. It offers ex-believers a replacement meaning system with cosmic stakes. Now, it reconnects with organized religion in seeking broader moral authority.

But this is an old playbook: a small group of believers claims it alone understands the coming apocalypse, then asks everyone else to hand it centralized control.

As a religious person myself, I reject the AI doomers’ power play. You should, too.

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Endnotes

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^{[1] Also, the movement’s main leaders (e.g, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom) are atheists or agnostics.}

^{[2] The Future of Life Institute co-founder, Max Tegmark, once wrote in a Huffington Post article, “I’ve been getting lots of angry comments from atheists recently, which I find remarkable given that I’m not religious myself.”}

^{Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, the company’s representative at Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical event, is a self-described atheist. According to The Atlantic’s reporting, Olah compared his role at Anthropic to that of a priest (helping the AI model Claude “be a good person, in some sense”).}

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