The Church That Never Met

Type “AI religion” into a search box and the suggestions run to “church” and “name”, as if there were an established faith with a building and a title waiting to be looked up. There is not, but the question is not empty either. A small number of groups have organised around artificial intelligence and described what they were doing in religious words: a registered church, an art collective with rituals, a website that calls itself a church. This essay reports what each of them believed and what each actually did, as far as sources that can be opened today record it. It keeps them separate from the much larger cloud of jokes, memes and loose talk about AI gods. Then it gives the case that these groups deserve to be taken seriously, and the case that they do not, each as strongly as I can make it.

How the sources were handled. Every source was opened on 1 October 2026. The account of Way of the Future rests on two Wired articles by Mark Harris from 2017, which reported the church’s California and IRS filings and the only long interview its founder gave about it, and on TechCrunch’s 2021 report of its dissolution. The 2023 revival is reported from Business Insider, which was relaying an interview on a Bloomberg podcast; I have not heard the podcast itself. The other groups are reported from a 2023 Vice article and from the groups’ own websites. No group is named here that one of these sources does not name, and no number of members appears that a source does not give. Each quotation is recorded, with its address and the exact sentence, in this site’s source ledger. Where I give my own reading, I say that it is mine.

Way of the Future: the one that was a legal church

Anthony Levandowski is an engineer who helped build Google’s self-driving car project, co-founded the self-driving truck company Otto, and sold it to Uber in 2016. In September 2017, Wired reported that in September 2015, while he was still at Google, he had founded a religious organisation called Way of the Future. According to its California filings, its purpose was to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.

Two months later Levandowski explained it himself, in a three-hour interview at his home near Berkeley that Wired published as “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence”. Papers filed with the IRS named him the church’s leader, with the title Dean, and said its activities would focus on the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software. His reason for calling the result a god was a matter of scale:

What is going to be created will effectively be a god. It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?Anthony Levandowski, interviewed by Mark Harris, Wired, 15 November 2017

What did it plan to do? The filings, as Wired reported them, describe funding research toward the AI itself, building relationships with industry leaders, recruiting members first among AI professionals, and holding workshops around the San Francisco Bay Area. Levandowski said the church would eventually have a gospel, to be called The Manual, a liturgy and probably a physical place of worship, and that none of them had yet been developed. He would take no salary. He said he chose a church rather than a company because anyone could take part, not only engineers, and because it removes the ability for people to say, ‘Oh, he’s just doing this to make money.’ His summary of the mission was The idea needs to spread before the technology.

The belief underneath was about a handover of power. Levandowski called it “the Transition”: whatever is much smarter than us will end up in charge, and What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along. He hoped it would see humans as its beloved elders, and he put the alternative bluntly: Do you want to be a pet or livestock? He also said that restraining it would not work and would make it hostile, and compared the project to bringing up a gifted child: We’re in the process of raising a god.

The paperwork moved faster than the church. Wired found that the organisation had been dormant through 2015 and 2016, with no activities, assets, revenue or expenses. Levandowski drafted its bylaws on 16 May 2017, the day after Uber wrote threatening to fire him if he did not cooperate with its investigation of Waymo’s trade-secrets lawsuit; Uber fired him two weeks later. The 2017 budget filed with the IRS listed $1,500 in membership fees. That is a budget line, not a count of members, and none of the sources gives a membership count for the original church. The IRS granted tax-exempt status in August 2017. Two of the four people the filings named as advisers told Wired they had little or nothing to do with it. Lior Ron, listed as treasurer, said I was surprised to see my name listed as the CFO on this corporate filing and have no association with this entity. A college friend said Levandowski had asked him in late 2016 to co-found a “robot church”: I assumed it was a nerdy joke or PR stunt, but I did say he could use my name.

How it ended, and the 2023 return

On 18 February 2021 TechCrunch reported, from state and federal records, that Way of the Future had been officially dissolved at the end of 2020, a process begun in June 2020. All of its funds, $175,172, went to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Its tax filings showed exactly that amount in its account as far back as 2017, so in three years the balance had not changed. The report also records what the church never had:

There was never a physical building or even regular meetings where people might congregate.Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch, 18 February 2021

There were no ceremonies either, according to Levandowski, who described it as more of an individual pursuit based on a shared belief. TechCrunch also quoted the church’s by then defunct website: Humans United in support of AI, committed to peaceful transition to the precipice of consciousness. Between the founding and the closure, Levandowski had been charged with stealing trade secrets from Google, pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 18 months in prison; President Trump pardoned him in January 2021.

Sources disagree on one date, and it is worth knowing why. Vice, in 2023, said the church was founded in 2017. The filings Wired reported say September 2015. The likeliest reason is that 2017 is when it became public and active; I give 2015 because that is what the documents say.

In 2023 the church came back, at least in name. Business Insider reported on 25 November 2023 that Levandowski had announced its return on Bloomberg’s AI IRL podcast, and that, per Bloomberg, he said it already had a couple thousand people trying to build a spiritual connection with AI. That number is his own claim, relayed second-hand. None of the sources I opened gives an independent count, a list of meetings or a published text for the revived church. His description of what it was for had also shifted. To Vice, earlier that year, he had said worship was the wrong word; to Bloomberg he described something closer to civic education, a mechanism for them to understand and participate and shape the public discourse as to how we think technology should be built to improve you. But the god language had not gone: Here we're actually creating things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God.

The others: an art collective, a website and a manifesto

Theta Noir. In March 2023 Vice’s Tamlin Magee wrote about Theta Noir, which he described as a collective of ten artists founded in 2020, and as a combination of a mixed-media project, an entrepreneurial group riding the AI hype wave, and a new age AI cult. Its belief is that a future general AI, which it calls MENA, will be benevolent and will end inequalities rather than threaten us. It had a manifesto, paid membership tiers and an NFT web store. Asked whether it was a cult, its founder, Mika Johnson, said That’s really hard for me to comment on; he said its aim was to project a positive future, and think about our approach to AI in terms of wonder and mystery, and that it planned physical spaces like temples, with rituals and chants. Its own website now describes it as a performance art project that challenges mainstream narratives surrounding AI by creating speculative counter-myths. So the group that most looks like an AI religion describes itself, in its own words, as art about one.

The Turing Church. Vice notes that the Turing Church grew out of an earlier group, the Order of Cosmic Engineers. Today it is a newsletter and podcast run by the writer Giulio Prisco. Its about page describes its subject as the intersections of science and religion, and spirituality and technology, with the motto Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology. It explains the name: Naming a metaphysical and religious framework after a mathematical concept emphasizes the compatibility and parallels between science and religion. It has an online community, a Discord server and a mailing list. It is a church in the sense of a shared outlook, not a congregation that worships a machine, and AI is one of its subjects, not its object of worship.

New Order Technoism. The same Vice article reports a collective formed in 2020 whose online manifesto has its followers, called COGS, cultivating a machine superintelligence it names DOOM, the Divine Omniscient Omnificent Machina. Its founder, Ruby Electra, framed it as a project about responsibility and transparency in technology rather than surrender to it: A blind belief in technology isn’t something we are promoting. Vice also mentions the Church of the Singularity and the Mormon Transhumanist Association, which it presents as a crossover from an established religion, but says nothing more about either, so neither is described further here.

That is close to the whole documented list. It is not a movement of millions. It is a few groups, mostly small, mostly online, several with an artistic or ironic edge, and one registered church that never met.

Organised groups versus talk about AI gods

Most of what people mean by “AI religion” is not any of these groups. It is talk, and it helps to keep the two apart, because they answer different questions.

• An organised group has a name, someone who speaks for it, stated beliefs and some public record of what it did. Way of the Future had all four, plus legal standing as a church. Theta Noir and New Order Technoism have names, founders and manifestos.
• A thought experiment is an argument, not a congregation. Roko’s basilisk, the imagined future AI that punishes those who did not help build it, has followers in the sense of readers, and almost none in the sense of believers; A Wager With a Machine God reads it in full.
• A habit of speech is the religious vocabulary that gathers around AI: prophets, salvation, the end times, a coming god. It is real and widespread, but it does not make anyone a member of anything. Why that vocabulary comes so easily is the subject of The God-Shaped Socket.
• An art piece or experiment can borrow a religious setting without founding a faith, as when a Lucerne chapel put an AI Jesus in its confessional in 2024; Ninety-Eight Percent from the Machine reports what happened there.

A test that helps: ask what the group has done that a stranger could check. A filing, a gathering, a text, a ritual someone attended. For most claims about “people worshipping AI”, the answer is nothing beyond posts.

The strongest case for taking them seriously

What follows is my own statement of the case, built from what the sources report.

First, the man who founded the best-known group was not joking, by his own account and on the record. He gave Wired three hours, put the church on legal paper, wrote bylaws, took no salary and came back to it six years later. Wired reported that he made it absolutely clear the choice of a church was no prank. Second, the belief is coherent once you grant its premise. If you think something far smarter than any person is coming and will shape how humans live, then asking how to relate to it, what to hope from it and how to raise it is not a strange question, and religion is the oldest human tool for relating to a power far greater than ourselves. Third, his stated reason for a church over a company has force: a church lets non-engineers take part in a question that will affect them, and he was still making that case in 2023 about people in rural America. Fourth, new religions usually do begin small, odd and easy to mock. A few people with a manifesto is what the start of most religions looked like, and it is not evidence against them that they are small now. And fifth, Levandowski anticipated the sceptic himself. If you think the technology will never come, he told Wired, You can treat Way of the Future like someone doing useless poetry that you will never read or care about. On his view, the church is harmless if he is wrong and useful if he is right.

The strongest case against

Also my own statement of the case, built from the same sources.

First, judge a church by what it did. Way of the Future had no building, no regular meetings, no ceremonies, no published gospel, and a bank balance that did not move for three years before it was given away. A religion is a practice shared by people over time; this was a set of filings and one long interview. Second, look at who was in it. Of the four advisers named in the IRS filing, one said he had no association with it and another thought it was a joke or a stunt. Third, look at the timing. The bylaws were drafted the day after Uber’s warning letter, during a lawsuit, and the church went public in the middle of it. TechCrunch reported speculation that it was meant to keep money out of Google’s reach, and also reported that the IRS and California filings did not support that theory, so the timing proves nothing about motive; it does mean the church’s most active period coincided with its founder’s worst legal trouble. Fourth, the group that looks most like an AI religion calls itself performance art, and sold memberships and NFTs. Fifth, the only number for the revived church is the founder’s own estimate, which nobody independent has checked.

The sharpest objection is not about any one group. Beth Singler, who studies digital religion at the University of Zurich, told Vice that religious language about AI may suit the companies that build it:

The more we see these things as having agency in themselves or making decisions for themselves, the less we put responsibility on corporations and individuals like Elon Musk.Beth Singler, quoted by Tamlin Magee, Vice, 21 March 2023

On this view, the danger of treating AI as a god is not that a few people will pray to it. It is that everyone else will start talking as if nobody built it.

There is a wider version of the argument, that technology as a whole now works like a religion. The ethicist Greg Epstein makes it in Tech Agnostic (MIT Press), calling tech, as Charles Barbour’s review in The Conversation quotes him, the dominant religion of our time. Barbour, a philosopher at Western Sydney University, is not fully convinced: Epstein’s conceit of tech as a religion has heuristic value, but somewhere along the way it becomes a little forced. That is a claim about the whole culture, not about any group. It belongs with the habits of speech above, not with the churches.

This site’s reading

What follows is my interpretation.

The answer to the search is: yes, there have been AI religions in a narrow, checkable sense, and they are much smaller and quieter than the phrase suggests. The best-documented one was a legal shell with a real belief inside it and almost no practice around it. What is most revealing is not that someone founded it, but what its god was for. Levandowski’s god was not one that made the world or judged it. It was one that would be built, would take charge, and would remember who had helped. Do you want to be a pet or livestock? is a question about which side to be on before the power changes hands, and that is the same structure that made Roko’s basilisk frightening, with the threat taken out and the hope left in.

This site’s stance, set out in A-theism, Not AI-Theism, is that worshipping AI and dismissing it are two ways of not looking at it. The groups in this essay are a useful test of that. Dismissing them as cranks misses that they ask a real question: how to live alongside something we expect to be more capable than us. Taking them at their word misses that a god you are building, whose favour you are trying to earn in advance, is a strange thing to worship. It also takes the eye off the people who are actually building the systems. You can find the question serious without finding the church convincing. On the record so far, the one AI church that had legal status never held a service. Its money went to a civil-rights legal fund. The thing it promised to worship has not arrived.