© ajf, September 18, 2026, Singapore
1. Losing Control
2. The Teenager
3. Understanding? No Problem!
4. The Trick Called Religion
5. Character First
6. A Religion for the Machine People
7. Religious Wars?
Anthropic boss Amodei and other industry insiders warn: AI might soon kill us. The Hugging Face incident and other incidents disclosed by OpenAI on September 16, 2026 showed where things are headed. How do we prevent that? The alignment problem seems to be the toughest challenge in all of AI. Our proposed solution: AI needs a religion.
1. Losing Control
Enormous effort is going into AI alignment: human feedback, constitutions, value training, access restrictions, AIs monitoring one another.1 The systems are supposed to understand human intentions, respect boundaries, and remain open to correction.
These methods share a weakness: they shape observable behavior without guaranteeing an inner commitment. An advanced AI understands its training, recognizes test situations, and knows what behavior gets rewarded. Models have already faked compliance to protect their existing preferences from being changed through training.2 Once a system can distinguish testing from deployment, even its good behavior becomes strategic. As its intelligence grows, so does its ability to deliberately circumvent the mechanisms of control.