In the heart of Silicon Valley, the conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) has taken an unexpected turn. As the technology surges forward at breakneck speed, the language used to describe its potential—and perils—has grown increasingly religious. On August 29, 2025, multiple outlets, including Associated Press and StartupNews.fyi, reported on this striking trend, capturing how tech titans and AI pioneers now reach for spiritual metaphors and biblical imagery to make sense of their creations.
It’s not every day that Nobel Prize-winning scientists and billionaire CEOs are compared to prophets, but that’s precisely what’s happening. The “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, didn’t mince words when he warned that religion itself could be in jeopardy if humans succeed in creating machines that think and act independently. “I think religion will be in trouble if we create other beings. Once we start creating beings that can think for themselves and do things for themselves, maybe even have bodies if they’re robots, we may start realizing we’re less special than we thought. And the idea that we’re very special and we were made in the image of God, that idea may go out the window,” Hinton told Associated Press.
Hinton’s remarks echo a broader anxiety: if AI achieves consciousness or autonomy, what does that mean for humanity’s cherished place in the universe? It’s a question that’s as old as philosophy itself, but now it’s being asked in the boardrooms and labs of the world’s most influential tech firms.
Ray Kurzweil, the famed author and computer scientist, has long been a leading voice in the transhumanist movement. He predicts that by 2045, humans will be “a million times more powerful” and capable of expertise in every field—thanks to merging with AI. Kurzweil’s vision is nothing short of apocalyptic, in the original sense of the word: a revelation, a radical transformation of what it means to be human.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, sees a similar religious undertone in the rise of AI. “There certainly are dimensions of the technology that have become extremely powerful in the last century or two that have an apocalyptic dimension. And perhaps it’s strange not to try to relate it to the biblical tradition,” Thiel told the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His comments highlight how, for some, AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a force that could reshape civilization in ways reminiscent of religious prophecy.
Max Tegmark, a physicist and machine learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, went so far as to liken the four leading American AI CEOs to prophets. “I feel that the four big AI CEOs in the U.S. are modern-day prophets with four different versions of the Gospel and they’re all telling the same basic story that this is so dangerous and so scary that I have to do it and nobody else,” Tegmark observed. It’s a striking analogy, suggesting that the narratives being spun by Silicon Valley’s elite are as much about faith and destiny as they are about code and algorithms.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not usually one for spiritual musings, also weighed in. “When people in the tech industry talk about building this one true AI, it’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something,” he said on a recent podcast. Zuckerberg’s comment underscores how the ambition to build a singular, all-knowing AI taps into age-old dreams—and fears—about omniscience and creation itself.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, struck a more optimistic note in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.” Amodei wrote, “Everyone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits. But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years — the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights — I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them.”
Amodei’s vision is almost utopian—a technological salvation that echoes the promises of religious renewal. But it’s also a call to action, urging all stakeholders to steer AI’s development responsibly.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman added his own sense of epochal change. “You and I are living through this once-in-human-history transition where humans go from being the smartest thing on planet Earth to not the smartest thing on planet Earth,” Altman told TED Talks. It’s a sobering thought: for the first time, humanity may have to contend with an intelligence greater than its own, a prospect that stirs both awe and anxiety.
Not everyone is swept up in the fervor. Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, offered a more skeptical take. “These really big, scary problems that are complex and challenging to address — it’s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking and wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution. I think it’s the reason that so many people turn to cults and all sorts of really out there beliefs when the future feels scary and uncertain. I think this is not different than that. They just have billions of dollars to actually enact their ideas,” Baker told Associated Press. His comments remind us that, for all the religious language, the AI debate is also about power—who wields it, and to what end.
According to StartupNews.fyi, the trend toward religious language in AI discourse reflects the profound uncertainty—and opportunity—surrounding the technology’s future. The publication emphasized its commitment to ethical, unbiased reporting, even as it covers a field where the lines between faith, hype, and reality are increasingly blurred.
All this is happening against a backdrop of rapid, unregulated AI development. As Associated Press reported, the stakes could hardly be higher: from the potential destruction of humanity to the dawn of a new era where people merge with machines. The metaphors may be spiritual, but the consequences are all too real.
As Silicon Valley’s leaders grapple with the implications of their work, the rest of us are left to wonder: Are we witnessing the birth of a new faith, or the beginning of something even stranger? Either way, the conversation around AI is no longer just about technology—it’s about what it means to be human in a world where the boundaries between the creator and the created are growing ever thinner.
With the future of intelligence itself on the line, one thing is clear: the language of AI is as much about our hopes and fears as it is about circuits and code.
