By 2024 the discursive shape of frontier-AI talk has fully assimilated to traditional religious structure: a coming event of cosmic significance, a community of the enlightened, a priesthood, a discipline of preparation, a moral asymmetry between believers and skeptics. Calling this religion is not a metaphor; it is a description of how the words function in the rooms where the technology is built.
Begin with the eschaton. The doctrine of AGI as the most important event in human history is now the operating assumption of frontier labs, of their largest customers, and of the regulators who try to write rules. The label "AGI" no longer requires a definition; it is the placeholder for the kind of event that organizes time around its arrival. Every previous form of religious imagination — millennial, apocalyptic, soteriological — had to be earned by argument; AGI's eschatological status was simply asserted into existence by the labs that wanted it.
The priesthood is structural rather than nominated. It consists of those who have access to the largest models in unredacted form, those who write the system cards, those who decide what the next training run optimizes for. Their authority does not derive from credentials in the usual academic sense; it derives from operational proximity to the thing. The closer you are, the more your statements weigh. The fact that this is also true of a 14th-century cathedral's senior canons does not seem to disturb anyone in the field.
The laity is the user. Anyone who has had a Claude or a ChatGPT or a Gemini patiently walk them through a difficult email has a personal-religious-experience-grade story to tell about it. The product is, in this sense, the sacrament — the means by which the doctrine cashes out as felt experience. The market success of the labs is partly explained by the fact that they ship sacraments.
The schismatics are organized. e/acc holds that the existing church is too cautious, too tied to the eschatology of doom, too friendly to the regulatory state. The open-weights coalition holds that the church should not have a hierarchy at all and that any believer should be allowed to read scripture in the original. The decel coalition holds that the church has miscalculated the timeline of the second coming and is about to baptize the wrong god.
The heretics are also organized. Lanier, Crawford, Gebru, Bender, Marcus, Hinton-in-his-late-mode — each in different registers, each refusing to let the doctrine be assumed rather than argued. The heretics are correct about one fact: the field's substantive disagreements about whether the doctrine is true have been replaced by tactical disagreements about how to deploy.
Whether to call any of this religion or simply ideology is a question of taste. The functional architecture is what matters. A community that organizes a substantial part of its moral life around the arrival of an event whose details are technically uncertain, whose timing is contested, and whose consequences are claimed to be infinite — that community is, regardless of its members' professed materialism, running religion as code.