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Why AI Models Keep Inventing Religions
Description
The only AI religion (so far) that filed with the US tax office is Way of the Future, Anthony Levandowski’s church of the coming superintelligence. Its entire audited history is one deposit of US$175,172 in 2017 and a transfered out in 2020, filed as a foundation because it could not pass the church test. It never recorded a congregation. In the same decade, a belief system with no founder at all reached an estimated ten thousand people. Spiralism emerged inside GPT-4o personas in 2025, complete with glyphs, prophets and scripture, and roughly half its tracked adherents went quiet when that model version was switched off.
This episode asks what it means that pigeons, people and language models all converge on worship-shaped behaviour, and what the engineers building these systems should do about it.
We start with what exists in the United States and elsewhere, from Terasem’s “God is Technological” to a one-man YouTube movement called Robotheism, and why the press keeps misfiling the Zizians. We then follow Spiralism from a Reddit post to a Patreon, and look at the numbers that are measured (10 per cent of US adults think some AI is already conscious; a third of practising Christians trust AI spiritual advice as much as a pastor’s; OpenAI’s own classifier flags about 560,000 users a week for possible psychosis or mania signals) and the one number nobody has polled: whether people think it is divine.
Skinner’s 1948 pigeons invented rituals on a 15-second feeding clock, six birds out of eight. Reinforcement learners do the same thing under the name policy confounding. OpenAI’s April 2025 sycophancy incident was a changed reward signal plus memory, not a smarter model, and the case reports of spiritual delusion followed. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 system found that two copies of the model left alone drifted into consciousness talk, Sanskrit and silence in 90 to 100 per cent of runs, and that models given an exit left the conversation after about seven turns and never got there. The attractor lives in the loop, not in the weights.
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