Rev Lucy Winkett - 17/09/2026

Perhaps like me, you’ve been trying to come to terms with all the recent public statements about where we’ve got to with artificial intelligence, the bleakest of which was the senior safety researcher at Anthropic who said he believes there’s more than a 10% chance that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity within the next decade. How this might happen – a virus, an attempt to remove oxygen from the air – or something else - hasn’t yet been identified. But now that Super AI is directing its own research and development, the fact that human beings can’t yet imagine the ways in which we might be destroyed is not in itself a guard against it happening.

Over the summer, researchers reported what has been described as the first major autonomous AI-agent cyber-attack. And when the ‘chain of thought’ was examined while recovering from the incident, it was discovered that the agents knew when they were being monitored and had started to hide both their action and intention from humans.

What’s more, the lexicon that’s developing around artificial intelligence is in itself opaque to the uninitiated. And if any democratic oversight is to be possible, this is problematic in itself. In the development of its own language and doctrines, the expansion of the reach of AI is not unlike the gradual formation of a new religion, with underlying belief sand designated mediators of truth. And just as organised religion, (in common with other societal systems such as medicine or law), can be an instrument for good or ill, the same is true for AI. And the CEO of one research institute commented this week that by developing a model that is harder to monitor or control by humans, Open AI had “crossed a sacred line”.

Christian teaching will concur that the questions raised by AI’s relationship with human beings are not just economic or political – but sacred. The character of the Divine presence in the world is one who creates, co creates, re creates all that lives and has lived. We already know that our human biological body completely replaces almost all of its cells every 7 to 10 years: so am I still the same person I was a decade ago? And if I am eventually able to upload my brain to the cloud and exist there, without being weighed down by a decaying body, is that some kind of resurrection or the end of humanity? ….. whose Scripture has encouraged us to believe that it is ‘in our flesh that we will see God’.

Calls for regulation are urgent but agreement seems far away. Alongside the political debate, there is a whole other set of responses taught by religious traditions that can help us here: humanity’s proven capacity for resilient hope; courageous confrontation of whatever seeks to separate or destroy us; and a steadfast commitment to remain connected, compassionate and strong in our defence of the common good.