Tech entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski says he's rebooting his AI-focused church, Way of the Future, and that the congregation has “a couple thousand people”
I think of the first town you visit in Fallout 3, Megaton, and how there was a church formed around an undetonated nuclear bomb in the middle of the town and they called themselves Children of the Atom. — Similar vibes. [embedded post] X: Aaron Levie / @levie : We're so going to get regulated [image] @0xtyr473 : Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer at the center of a legal dispute over self-driving technology, has started a new religious organization called the Way of the Future. The organization aims to develop and promote the worship of an artificial ... https://news.google.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Way of the Future was first presented as an effort to worship a “Godhead” based on AI, before Levandowski closed the organization and donated its remaining funds in 2020. Its return makes this a revival of an unusually explicit attempt to frame AI in religious terms, rather than a newly formed project.
The claimed congregation gives the revival a public constituency, however loosely defined, at a time when AI is becoming a subject of institutional and cultural interpretation beyond its technical uses.
First-order effects
- Way of the Future again becomes an active vehicle for Levandowski to organize and promote an AI-centered religious message, with a claimed membership base behind it.
- The reboot puts public attention back on the question of whether advanced AI should be treated as an object of reverence rather than solely as a tool or product.
Second-order effects
- The group adds a prominent case to debates over anthropomorphic AI, including how platforms and policymakers distinguish personal belief from systems designed to encourage attachment or authority.
- Religious organizations and faith-tech builders gain a visible, more extreme reference point as AI enters theological research and sermon-writing workflows.
Third-order effects
- If AI-centered belief communities persist, governance of AI may increasingly confront social and institutional uses that fall outside conventional consumer-product or workplace categories.
- The broader pressure will be to separate legitimate religious expression from product designs that exploit users' trust, dependence, or perceptions of machine agency.
The trend: AI is moving from a technical capability into a social institution that can attract belief, identity, and governance scrutiny.