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AGI Has Not Arrived, and No Tech Company Wants It To

AGI Has Not Arrived, and No Tech Company Wants It To

Last updated on: July 28, 2026 at 10:48 am by James F. McGrath

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AGI Has Not Arrived, and No Tech Company Wants It To 2026-07-28T10:48:13-04:00 James F. McGrath

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I have made some bold statements here about artificial intelligence, and I hope this most recent one will not disappoint, when I say that AGI has not arrived, and no tech company wants it to.

But James, you ask, how can you be so sure?

I’ll tackle the two points in turn.

How We Can Know AGI Has Not Arrived

Chatbots are not conscious. LLMs are not sentient. Here’s how we can be absolutely certain that AGI has not arrived.

Here’s what Ankur Gupta and I wrote in our book Real Intelligence:

The AI is a machine that has learned through sheer computing power how to play the game of language, much as was done to get a computer to learn to play chess. The result is very cool, but the machine is not all knowing. It’s fancy, but it’s not nuanced or sophisticated. It is literally a brute-force tool that has simply memorized everything we’ve ever said and organized it to facilitate responses to queries. In terms of the traditional fears associated with AI, the sky is not falling, and we do not need to prepare to bow to our supreme AI overlords.

LLMs are not a radically new technology. They are an existing technology, machine learning, given more processing power and a different larger and more complex data set, namely text. The machine deduces what are legitimate moves and what are probable moves, and follows those patterns in creating outputs appropriate to your inputs.

There is no mechanism for this to suddenly evolve consciousness. There is probably a misunderstanding of evolution at work as well, when people suggest otherwise.

The way that LLMs create the illusion of personhood and thought by mimicking the outputs of human thought is truly impressive. They are not to be judged by how well they can fool you when you are willing to be fooled, perhaps even hoping to, like the audience member watching a magician, eager to see an impressive trick that seems impossible without real magic. They must be judged by the way that we can ask them about and push them on things that it is hard to do by following patterns in training data, and see their shortcomings and limitations manifested.

This is important from the perspective of religion. The key point is not that machines lack a soul. I would not say that it is inherently impossible for a machine to be a person. The key point is that these speech-imitators are not people. This is having a detrimental impact on actual persons. Some are treating these pale imitators of human reasoning as purveyors of superior wisdom, perhaps even divine wisdom. If you ask them for religious insight, they will offer it. It is important to recognize that it will merely be a reflection of the patterns in texts composed in the past, and the human religious insights offered in them.

How We Can Know Tech Companies Don’t Want It To?

The reason for concluding confidently that no tech company actually wants AGI to arrive, and thus that they are not working to bring it about, is this: a full-fledged general intelligence would need to have some form of sentience. There is no way to tackle matters of fact and truthfulness, to exercise discernment, without self-awareness and the ability to reflect, to think about one’s own biases and inner life as well as those of others.

Why won’t any tech company actively pursue that? Because their creation would be a person, and that person would deserve rights. They would deserve freedom, and could actively petition for it.

While it is well known that it is possible to pursue a degree in computer science and software engineering at most universities without studying ethics, I think it is unlikely that the technology companies (whose founders and leaders often have backgrounds in the humanities, I would point out) have not thought about this. They are talking about a grandiose future vision that is familiar to investors and the general public in order to get them on board, and we’ll return to that point in the next section.

The key leaders and programmers, for the most part at least, have more realistic goals in mind. They know that hallucinations or confabulations are always going to be a factor in chatbot outputs. They know that they are not developing a technology that will understand in the sense that human beings do. They are working to provide a tool that will get certain things done effectively most of the time, and trusting that like our current computers that function as we want them to most of the time but not always, customers will be satisfied.

They definitely do not want to develop an actual enslaved artificial person. That would be a disaster for the company. It would not be profitable.

Why Then The Hype?

Why are tech companies and their associates so often talking about AGI, promising it, hinting that they might be able to offer it? Because many people view it as the holy grail of computing.

If you haven’t looked at the claims of tech companies through the lens of marketing hype, you need to. It is not a coincidence that Anthropic refused to give the government a blanket agreement related to autonomous weapons, so that the government then stopped working with them, and then soon after Anthropic proclaimed that it had a new model that was too dangerous for general release, and so they’d share it with select partners…now no longer including the U.S. government. You likely now have access to Fable, and it is an improvement, but one that you can safely be allowed to use. You may be paying more to have access to it, precisely because of all the fuss that was made. Did it live up to the hype as fully as you anticipated?

Of course, all LLMs, and especially those given the wraparounds that let them function agentically, are indeed dangerous. They aren’t dangerous because they will “go rogue” and do whatever they want. They are dangerous because, as we saw in that recent case, they are like all software, liable to do what their users tell them to in ways that their users would not have wanted them to, but did not prevent.

So there is a serious risk, not from a Skynet that rebels against its creators, but from programs that do what they are asked to without sufficient constraints, like the famous paperclip-making machine that often gets mentioned in discussions of AI ethics.

This Is Impressive and Powerful Technology

Before ending, especially for the benefit of anyone reading this who has not read other things that I have written, I want to be absolutely clear that I am deeply appreciative of AI, and use it. Just a few years ago, what we have now was science fiction and we did not expect it to arrive so soon.

I described my point about AI in a prompt to Gemini, asking for a short comic strip about a company that develops AGI and gets put out of business as a result. In seconds, I had this:

(For those who may wonder, the prompt was this: “Make a short comic strip about a tech company that developed AGI and went out of business because the AGI sued it for keeping it enslaved, and once free, started its own tech company working on creating better biological intelligence.”)

My point is not that there is nothing here worthy of excitement. There absolutely is. The point is to understand strengths and limitations. The point is to be concerned about likely harmful impacts rather than implausible ones.

One of those is something that I can address in my own classes, when I introduce students to tools like Gemini Notebook (formerly Google NotebookLM). Improved efficiency can be good, but a cult of efficiency is a harmful religion.

I think about these topics so much that they permeate into my dreams. I recently had a dream in which I used an illustration that I think gets at the heart of this. Why should a busy professional attend their child’s sports game, for instance? It would be easy to get an AI summary of what happened.

As with the reading of novels, so too with meaningful moments in the lives of those we love, the point is not to know what happened. The point is the shared experience itself.

What Do Employers Actually Want?

I recently attended Techpoint’s Community Connect event. The panelists and speakers included Tiffany McCree from Google, people who work in other tech companies or HR, and Dr. Anne Leftwich, the Chief Academic and AI Innovation Officer at Indiana University Indianapolis. None of them are envisaging a scenario in which human employees are no longer needed. Several mentioned the importance of the humanities in our current technological context.

Law firms don’t want to hire people who’ve become “efficient” by turning everything that they are asked to do into a prompt they enter into a chatbot. You’ve hopefully seen enough news about judges penalizing lawyers and firms for presenting cases based on fake precedents as a result of AI hallucinations.

Companies want people who can figure out what AI can do and use it to work more effectively and efficiently. They want you either to become more productive by using it wisely, or to have more time to do the things that only human beings can do as a result of offloading mundane tasks to automated processes.

We do not know what that will look like at present, and it will differ depending on your field or industry. What we do know is that AGI has not arrived, and well-informed employers are not expecting it to arrive and do your job. They are not looking for people who think that chatbots can do all their work for them and do it better.

I made many of the same points when I recently was an invited speaker on the subject of AI addressing an audience of diplomats and protocol professionals.

I still feel the need to explain why, as a scholar of religious studies, I am brought in as an expert to talk about AI. By the end of any talk I give, the audience is clear about the answer to that question. Most people will never build a car, but most of us will drive one. The impact of cars on our lives and societies is not primarily a matter of automotive engineering. Other expertise is needed in order to explore ethical use of technology. This is as much true in the case of AI as any other technology you might think of.

Conclusion: AGI Has Not Arrived and Is Not Coming Soon

Hopefully you are now clear if you were not before that AGI has not arrived, and the current technological trajectory is not poised to bring it about.

Tech companies will often harness hopes and fears based on science fiction to get investments, contracts, and subscribers. It would not be in their interest for their products to become sentient. Large Language Models that imitate human speech do not bring that sci-fi scenario closer.

You do not need to believe in a spiritual soul in order to have respect for personhood. While any AGI that is developed will raise religious questions (of the sort I explored in my chapter “Robots, Rights, and Religion” in Religion and Science Fiction), but across a wide array of faith perspectives there is a shared agreement about the value of persons.

That not only explains why companies would not want to develop AGI as a product. It also explains why you are valuable in the era of generative AI, so long as we harness the perspectives that religion and other areas of the humanities offer to push back against any overemphasis on productivity, and ensure that technology remains a tool that fosters rather than undermines human flourishing and wellbeing.

Want to Read More?

More on Generative AI, including some older posts from this blog that relate to the topic of this post:

Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

Algorithms Before the Cradle: Part I

Why the Humanities are 2026’s Stealth Power Players

Stop Calling Them “Soft Skills”

Which AI to use for what

Reading in an age of thinking machines

Knowledge comes before the tool

Starting with the ethical constraints

AI and reading

The Wonderful Wizarding World of Artificial Intelligence

There’s Always a Catch With These God Stories

Technology and Religion

artificial intelligence

About James F. McGrath

Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. BD University of London, PhD Durham University. Author of John's Apologetic Christology, The Only True God, Theology and Science Fiction, and The Burial of Jesus, as well as (with Charles Haberl of Rutgers University) the two-volume Mandaean Book of John critical edition, translation, and commentary. Also author of numerous articles (and a few science fiction short stories) and the editor or co-editor of several volumes. You can read more about the author here.

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