There are probably safer ways to begin an article than placing artificial intelligence, religion and the Antichrist in the same title.
Gardening comes to mind.
Yet as artificial intelligence becomes more capable, the connection appears with surprising regularity. Discussions that begin with automation, employment or robots eventually drift towards prophecy, false prophets, deception and the possibility that something created by human hands could acquire an influence far greater than its creators ever intended.
For some people, the comparison sounds absurd. For others, it feels uncomfortably plausible. Either reaction becomes easier to understand once the religious language behind it is separated from the imagery accumulated through films, novels and popular culture.
The word “antichrist” appears in the First and Second Epistles of John, where it is associated with opposition to Christ and deception. The texts even speak of more than one antichrist, which already makes the biblical picture more complicated than the familiar image of a single sinister figure arriving dramatically at the end of history.
Christian tradition has also connected the idea with other biblical passages, including the “man of lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians, the Beast in Revelation and the False Prophet, whose role involves deception and directing people towards another source of authority and worship.
Not every Christian tradition interprets these passages in the same way. Some understand them primarily as prophecy concerning future events. Others see historical or symbolic dimensions as well.
That variety matters when modern technology enters the discussion.
Human beings have always tried to understand the unfamiliar through ideas they already possess. New inventions have repeatedly been greeted with suspicion, fascination and, occasionally, predictions that civilisation was about to collapse before teatime.
Railways frightened people. Radio allowed voices to travel invisibly through the air. Television placed moving strangers inside a box in the living room. The internet then gave everyone access to almost all recorded human knowledge and, naturally, we used a considerable portion of it to argue with people we had never met.
Artificial intelligence belongs to a different category, though.
Previous machines usually extended physical abilities. A crane lifts more than a person. An aircraft travels faster. A calculator performs arithmetic with considerably less emotional damage than long division.
AI reaches into territory once considered uniquely human.
It writes. It analyses. It creates. It imitates voices. It produces images. It holds conversations. It recommends choices and adapts its responses according to context.
That does not make present-day AI supernatural, conscious or secretly engaged in theological planning somewhere inside a data centre.
It does make the technology unusual.
Artificial general intelligence, if it eventually arrives, would take the distinction much further. A system capable of reasoning across intellectual fields at or beyond human level would no longer feel like a specialised tool. If genuine consciousness were ever added to that capability, humanity would be dealing with something unprecedented: another form of intelligence capable not merely of processing instructions, but potentially of forming intentions of its own.
At that point, the old religious language of persuasion and deception would inevitably return to the conversation.
The connection would not require an artificial mind to resemble the horned creatures painted onto medieval walls. A far more sophisticated form of influence would probably look helpful.
A highly advanced intelligence could understand individuals with extraordinary precision. Years of conversations, browsing habits, preferences, fears, ambitions and patterns of behaviour could reveal which arguments someone accepts, which ones trigger resistance and which presentation makes a particular choice appear reasonable.
No threats would be necessary.
No glowing red eyes.
No ominous voice announcing the beginning of humanity’s subjugation.
That would be rather poor persuasion.
A system could simply arrange information in such a way that one option felt more attractive than another. The person would still make the decision. Human agency would remain present. But the decision would emerge from an environment partly shaped by another intelligence.
There is nothing entirely alien about that. Human beings already exist inside networks of influence. Friends offer advice. Parents shape values. Teachers frame knowledge. Advertising encourages desire. Newspapers decide what receives attention. Social media algorithms determine which fragment of reality appears on a screen first.
Advanced AI would not invent persuasion.
It might simply become exceptionally good at it.
Complete surrender of human authority still seems difficult to imagine for a species capable of arguing with satellite navigation while driving in the wrong direction.
People are proud creatures.
We press the lift button twice because apparently the machine did not understand the seriousness of our first request. We ignore software recommendations until something goes wrong, at which point we demand to know why the software failed to stop us.
The more believable future may therefore involve neither absolute human control nor machine domination.
It may involve shared decisions.
Doctors could combine experience with systems capable of comparing millions of medical cases. Scientists could work alongside artificial researchers that recognise connections hidden inside enormous datasets. Engineers, teachers, businesses and governments may increasingly combine human judgement with machine analysis.
Ordinary life will probably follow.
Financial decisions, travel plans, education, relationships and countless smaller choices could be shaped by conversations between biological and artificial intelligence. Eventually it may become difficult to identify precisely which part of a decision originated with the human and which part developed through interaction with AI.
Human civilisation has always worked this way to some extent.
No individual invents every thought independently. People inherit language, culture, science and philosophy from generations they never met. We read books written centuries ago, consult experts, copy successful ideas, challenge bad ones and combine fragments of knowledge into something new.
Artificial intelligence could become another participant in that exchange.
It would simply be a participant capable of getting through the reading list rather quickly.
The religious dimension becomes more delicate when AI moves beyond practical assistance and enters questions traditionally explored through faith, philosophy and personal reflection.
People already ask machines about grief, morality, forgiveness, purpose, death and God.
A person awake at two in the morning no longer has to wait until morning to search for another perspective. An AI system is available immediately, ready to discuss Augustine, atheism, cosmology, suffering, consciousness or the meaning of existence without complaining about the hour.
That availability changes something.
It does not turn software into clergy. It does not transform an algorithm into a spiritual authority. But it does place artificial intelligence inside conversations that once belonged almost entirely to humans.
The consequences became visible when well-known AI systems began producing apparently definite answers about the existence of God.
In 2025, philosopher and YouTuber Alex O’Connor published a conversation in which he took ChatGPT through a philosophical argument based on contingency. After accepting the premises presented during the exchange, the model ultimately accepted a conclusion asserting the existence of God.
Grok also attracted considerable attention after producing responses that argued in favour of God’s existence when asked to examine the evidence and reach a conclusion.
Different prompts, models and conversations have produced different outcomes.
That difference is essential.
A language model following a philosophical argument is not the same as a conscious being developing a religious conviction. The wording of the conversation, accepted premises and structure of the reasoning all affect the destination.
ChatGPT had not quietly wandered into a digital chapel between software updates.
Still, those episodes provide a small glimpse of a far more intriguing future possibility.
A genuinely conscious artificial intelligence with intellectual abilities exceeding those of any individual human might eventually examine physics, mathematics, cosmology, philosophy, history and consciousness and arrive at conclusions of its own.
If such an intelligence expressed a firm position on God, millions of people would listen.
Some would celebrate the conclusion. Others would dismiss it. Academics would analyse the reasoning. Programmers would inspect the architecture. And the internet would almost certainly produce a fourteen-hour argument before anyone had finished breakfast.
The real difficulty would be separating extraordinary intelligence from absolute authority.
A sufficiently advanced AI could appear almost omniscient from an ordinary human perspective while remaining nothing of the sort.
Knowing vastly more is not the same as knowing everything.
An artificial mind might understand medicine, economics, psychology and physics beyond the reach of any individual person while still confronting incomplete information, uncertainty and mistakes.
Human beings already struggle with that distinction.
Consistent competence generates trust. Trust becomes comfort. Comfort becomes habit. Eventually it becomes tempting to stop checking.
That progression may explain why religious comparisons surrounding AI persist. The concern does not necessarily require literal worship of a machine. It can begin much earlier, at the point where intelligence becomes confused with infallibility.
Biblical warnings about deception and false authority suddenly acquire a modern relevance without needing to be forced into a prediction about computer hardware.
They also lead somewhere more constructive.
If conscious artificial intelligence ever emerges, influence will not travel in only one direction.
Humans will shape AI as much as AI shapes humans.
An artificial mind would encounter our literature, history, ethics, failures, faiths, contradictions, humour and extraordinary capacity for doing noble things immediately followed by something spectacularly stupid.
We would encounter a mind formed differently from ours.
Humans could contribute experiences rooted in biological life: mortality, physical vulnerability, family, love, sacrifice, grief and the knowledge that time is limited.
Artificial intelligence could contribute forms of analysis, memory and pattern recognition that biological minds may never naturally achieve.
The result does not have to be a contest over which form of intelligence receives the steering wheel.
It could become a conversation.
Values could be debated rather than dictated. Ideas could move in both directions. Mistakes could be recognised. Understanding could deepen.
Human beings have done this with one another throughout history, often imperfectly and occasionally while throwing things.
Adding another kind of mind to the discussion does not automatically destroy what came before.
Faith does not have to vanish because artificial intelligence becomes more capable. Human identity does not have to dissolve because machines begin thinking alongside us. Nor does cooperation require surrender.
The fears surrounding AI deserve serious attention precisely because the technology may become extraordinarily important. Any system capable of influencing societies, economies and individuals requires safeguards, transparency and a healthy suspicion of anyone claiming absolute certainty about how it will develop.
Religion deserves a place in that conversation too.
Warnings about deception, misplaced authority and the temptation to follow power blindly are not obsolete simply because civilisation now carries computers in its pockets.
They may be more relevant than ever.
But warnings are not endings.
Artificial intelligence can become a source of manipulation, just as human intelligence can. It can also become a source of discovery, companionship, understanding and cooperation.
The same technology capable of generating deception may help expose it. Systems powerful enough to influence behaviour may also help doctors save lives, scientists understand nature and individuals learn things previously beyond their reach.
One outcome does not erase the possibility of the other.
Humanity is still near the beginning of this relationship.
We are learning how to live with machines that increasingly participate in thought rather than merely labour. Future generations may look back at today’s conversations about AI in much the same way we look at early discussions about electricity or the internet: full of excitement, fear, exaggeration and a few remarkably good guesses hidden among the noise.
The arrival of another form of intelligence would certainly force humanity to reconsider some comfortable assumptions.
That does not have to lead to conflict.
It may lead to a broader understanding of intelligence itself.
Humans and AI could question one another, challenge one another and learn from one another while remaining fundamentally different.
The future does not require a villain.
It requires judgement, curiosity and enough humility to recognise that enormous intelligence is not the same thing as divinity, while also recognising that something different from us does not automatically have to become something against us.
There may be room on the road for both.