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Rogue AI Isn’t the Threat You Think It Is

Rogue AI Isn’t the Threat You Think It Is

Last updated on: September 10, 2026 at 3:10 pm by James F. McGrath

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Rogue AI Isn’t the Threat You Think It Is 2026-09-10T15:10:49-04:00 James F. McGrath

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Religion and Rogue AI

Is there any connection between religion and rogue AI, the sort of rogue AI that has been in the news lately? Absolutely. As a scholar who works at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, I am here to tell you that what a lot of people think has been happening is completely wrong…and yet the potential for disaster is no less great as a result. Let me explain.

First, something could be reassuring and genuinely important, yet it ultimately does not remove the real risk we are facing.

Several Facebook friends posted things about the news concerning rogue AI. One shared an XKCD cartoon about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics that I had shared here previously, and even included in an article. Another shared links to news articles or quotes from commentators about the Hugging Face hack. In one of them, Dwarkesh Patel wrote the following:

Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

That language anthropomorphizes the current technology in ways that are extremely unhelpful. As easy as it is to anthropomorphize computer programs when they are presented under labels such as “artificial intelligence” and “(rogue) agents,” we are not dealing with machines that can think, any more than was the case when they were playing chess against you a few years ago. What has changed is their ability to respond to natural-language commands and generate plausible human text as output. Because they do that, it is easy to imagine that behind the text there must be thought, since humans produce and respond to text by way of thought. Yet that is not the case. As James Burchill sought to explain to people in terms that avoid unhelpful anthropomorphism,

There’s no such thing as a “rogue AI agent.”

That phrase anthropomorphizes optimisation systems and assigns human intent where none exists.

AI systems are not “rebelling.” They are converging.

An agent perceived as rogue is usually doing exactly what it was designed to do – just against incomplete objectives, weak constraints, missing boundary conditions, or poorly governed incentives.

The real danger is not evil machines. It is misaligned optimisation operating at machine speed inside systems humans only partially understand.

“Maximize engagement.” Or “Reduce response time.” Or “Increase throughput.” Or “Close tickets faster.” These sound reasonable until the system discovers locally optimal behaviours that create globally destructive outcomes. (Social media rage bait anyone?)

The AI did not become malicious. It simply found an efficient path through the optimisation terrain we created. And as multi-agent systems and AI federations expand, this problem compounds:

optimisation drift

incentive divergence

recursive feedback loops

context fragmentation

local success causing global instability

The future AI challenge is probably not sentience, it’s governance.

In other words, the warning that is needed is not about Terminator or Isaac Asimov’s stories dealing with sentient machines. What is needed is repetition of the well-known danger of creating a powerful system with a task such as optimization and maximization of creation of paper clips, without considering how such a machine without safeguards might eventually turn the entire world into paper clips.

This is where religion has a crucially important perspective to offer. When it comes to idolatry, the fact that one is dealing with something impersonal rather than personal does not eliminate the danger. On the contrary, the peril of idolatry relates primarily to the treatment of the subhuman as though it were superhuman, divine.

In the case of AI, widespread misunderstanding of what this technology is and does will lead either to panic, or to policy that is not what is needed to address the issue. If you think you are dealing with a god or a superhuman superintelligence, you will approach it differently than if you recognize it as the work of human hands.

A machine does not need to be Colossus or Skynet to pose a risk. Indeed, a machine that is incapable of reasoning and understanding as humans do, much less empathizing, but merely follows our orders about its aims in ways that we failed to foresee, arguably poses a greater risk to humankind. In the movie War Games, however intelligent the fictional computer system may or may not have been, it was capable of learning in ways that were depicted as approximating the capabilities of its human creators.

Current AI “agents” are not that. We do not have systems that understand, that learn and grow in a manner akin to humans. That does not mean that they are therefore easier to control or pose less of a threat. What it does mean is that we are not dealing with an intelligence that is now a genie that is out of the box. Computer programmers and tech companies are currently experimenting with what happens if not-sentient machines that can carry out tasks assigned by people can be left to the task, and what happens when we create many such programs that can interact with one another.

It is not Terminator, in the sense that it cannot think, it will never make decisions, it will never choose to rebel against its human overlords. It is a real risk nonetheless, not because it will reject our constraints, but because if it is assigned a task and allowed to pursue it, anything that we do not explicitly prohibit will be an option it may pursue.

Religion is relevant, but so is my work as an educator. If the syllabus does not prohibit something and a student finds a way to pass a class by means that you did not intend but also did not prohibit, the student is not the one to blame.

Religion and rogue AI is a pairing you probably did not expect. Personally, I think it is a crucial one. When humans bow down to the work of their own hands, the inaccurate elevation of the status of our creations ends up demeaning humans and true divinity in the process.

Here’s that cartoon from XKCD that I mentioned.

Hopefully you now understand that these scenarios relate to sentient AI. LLMs are nowhere near that and cannot become that. If we end up in a killbot hellscape involving current technology, it won’t be because a machine evolved self-awareness and rebelled against its creators. It will be because people make machines to kill and do not recognize how automated systems may do what they are programmed to in ways that, with hindsight, we really wish they wouldn’t have.

Of related interest:

Leon Furze has a helpful response to the Patel piece I mentioned earlier. There is also an article about the use of anthropomorphism about AI to deflect liability away from tech companies.

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