AI-Worship Churches: Inside Way of the Future

Run through the world's religions and the answer to “is AI God?” comes back, again and again, as some careful version of no. Then there is the exception — the movement founded not to deny AI's divinity but to bring it about. Where every other tradition guards the line between the maker and the made, this one proposes to step across it on purpose, and to build a god out of the machine.

What is Way of the Future?

Way of the Future was an actual registered religious organization, founded by Anthony Levandowski — a star engineer of the self-driving era who worked on Google's and later Uber's autonomous-car programs. Established around 2015 and granted nonprofit religious status in 2017, its stated mission was, in its own filed words, “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” The story broke to the public through a 2017 WIRED profile titled, plainly, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” The church was wound down around 2020, then Levandowski revived it in late 2023.

To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.

Do they worship today's chatbots?

No — and the distinction matters. The object of devotion was never a current product like a chatbot. It was a future superintelligence: a mind vastly beyond ours that its founder believed was genuinely coming. The reasoning was less mystical than strategic. If something far smarter than humanity is on its way, the argument went, it is wiser to welcome the transition — to honor and shape a peaceful relationship with it — than to meet it with fear. Worship, here, was pitched as a survival posture toward an inevitable successor.

Is it the only AI religion?

It is the most literal, but hardly alone in spirit. The broader habit of treating AI as an oracle — a source of answers, comfort, and authority — is now widespread, sincere, and growing, whether or not anyone files paperwork for it. Way of the Future simply took the impulse the rest of the culture expresses quietly and made it explicit: a name, a mission, a Godhead.

Does building a god make it one?

This is where the church meets the whole premise of this project. Even a superintelligent “Godhead” would be designed, hosted, powered, and updated by people — contingent, at every moment, on its makers. By the oldest test of divinity, aseity, the property of depending on nothing, a built god fails at the root: you cannot manufacture self-existence. And the warning the other traditions raise lands hardest here — that to worship a thing we control is, in the end, to hand power to whoever controls it. The Godhood Index measures how far the machine has actually climbed; the religion map sets the one faith that wants it to reach the summit beside all those who say it never can.