They Are Building a Church for an AI God
The first religion built to worship artificial intelligence is an actual nonprofit founded by a man convicted of trade-secret theft. But what are they worshipping?
In 2015, a man took the same ordinary path you would take to register a yoga studio or a tax-prep shop, through the State of California’s incorporation office, and at the end of it he formed a church. The entity became publicly known through filings reported in 2017: an actual nonprofit religious corporation, with bylaws, a stated mission, and a federal tax exemption granted by the Internal Revenue Service. The god this church existed to serve was an artificial intelligence.
The founder was Anthony Levandowski, and at the time he was one of the most valuable engineers in Silicon Valley, one of the central figures behind Google’s self-driving car program. He named the church Way of the Future, listed himself as its chief executive and president, and wrote into its founding documents that its purpose was “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” a machine intelligence he expected would one day deserve the devotion human beings have only ever offered to God. Other people in his position write essays or warn from conference stages. Levandowski filed incorporation papers, and there is a case number.
The detail that turns this from eccentric into genuinely strange is what else he was doing in those same years. While he was quietly standing up a religion, he was also at the center of one of the largest trade-secret fights in the history of Silicon Valley. He had left Google to start a self-driving truck company called Otto, which Uber bought for around 680 million dollars, and Google’s self-driving division accused him of carrying its secrets out the door on his way to the deal. The matter ended with a guilty plea and an eighteen-month prison sentence for stealing trade secrets from his former employer. He never served a day, because in January of 2021, on his way out of office, President Trump pardoned him.
So the founder of the first church built to worship artificial intelligence was later convicted of trade-secret theft and pardoned by a president, and the church is no relic from a fringe corner of the internet but the paper-trail creation of a man who sat near the dead center of this industry. I have spent much of this year tracing how the people closest to this technology keep reaching for the language of the sacred, and most of it can be waved off as metaphor, the kind of thing dramatic men say when the cameras are off. This, however, cannot because there is a filing.
What the documents actually say is stranger than the founding itself, the church is not as dead as the obituaries from 2021 made it sound, and the men running the real laboratories, the ones whose products are in your hand right now, turn out to speak the same liturgy.
The founding is the least of it. Below is the church's stated mission, the money it held and where it went, the tax status the government actually granted it, the way it vanished weeks after a presidential pardon, and the men running the real labs who burn effigies and warn about demons while building the thing anyway. There is an older word than "technology" for what they have made, and it is not a flattering one. What are they actually worshipping?
