In response to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article, “First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.”

Some articles hit home — not because they say everything, but because they name something everyone sensed without being able to articulate it. Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s piece, published on June 2, 2026 on AI Panic, is one of them.

Her argument is simple and sharp: AI doomerism — the current that predicts human extinction by AI — has the structural attributes of a religious movement. God replaced by superintelligence, hell replaced by extinction, the prophets replaced by rationalist probabilists convinced they’ve grasped what the masses ignore. And now, the cherry on the dogma: this movement, born in atheist circles, goes looking for its moral legitimacy… at the Vatican.

The paradox is delicious. But it conceals something far more interesting.

The real problem isn’t the discourse. It’s the capture.

Weiss-Blatt is right to expose the rhetorical structure of doomerism. But by focusing on what is said, she sidesteps the question of who says it, why, and above all who benefits.

The very actors who brandish AI’s existential risk are precisely the ones building that AI at forced march. Anthropic — valued at 965 billion dollars after its Series H of 65 billion closed on May 28, 2026 — builds language models while being publicly described as “midwifing a deity,” to borrow Bill Gurley’s words on the All-In podcast. OpenAI, valued at 852 billion dollars in April 2026, created an exceptional capital structure by invoking the urgency of “securing” AI before bad actors do. The effective altruism movement raised hundreds of millions of dollars by stoking the fear of catastrophe.

It’s a mechanism I know well from my enterprise architecture engagements: when an actor is both firefighter and arsonist, you have to watch which way the wind is blowing. Here, the wind blows toward the concentration of decision-making power over AI in the hands of a few private actors, bypassing any legitimate democratic body.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a structural reading. And it changes everything.

Chaos as an argument from authority

In my book Nous venons du chaos, l’IA de la logique (“We Come From Chaos, AI From Logic”), I wanted to set the record straight on one precise point: AI is neither the devil nor the messiah. It is a lever of massive influence — economic, political, cognitive — in the hands of those who build it, deploy it, and set its rules.

Apocalyptic discourse and messianic discourse share the same function: they disqualify ordinary intelligence. They say, in substance: this subject is too complex, too dangerous, too fundamental to be left to the uninitiated. And therefore, implicitly: let us decide.

This is the argument from authority through chaos. And it is extraordinarily effective, because it captures the anxious and the enthusiastic, believers and skeptics, decision-makers and ordinary citizens alike — each with their version of the same story arc: AI surpasses the human, the human cannot understand, guardians are needed.

I spent twenty years decoding complex information systems for organizations that were afraid of their own application estate. The mechanism is identical: chaos, real or manufactured, creates a dependence on the experts who claim to master it.

What Weiss-Blatt doesn’t say — and what I feel compelled to

There is a detail in her article I wouldn’t have left in a footnote.

Christopher Olah, Canadian co-founder of Anthropic and head of its interpretability team, represented the company at the Vatican on May 25, 2026, at the presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence. A declared atheist, Olah — according to The Atlantic — compared himself to a priest, in the sense of someone who helps the model Claude “be a good person, in some sense.”

Let’s stop there for a moment.

Who asked him to define what “a good person” is? Who mandated him to encode values into a system that will be used by millions of individuals, across dozens of radically different cultural, regulatory, and political contexts? Who validates that his values — those of a 33-year-old Californian engineer from Silicon Valley — are universally desirable?

The real governance question is not: will AI destroy humanity?

It is: who decides the values AI embodies, and through what democratic process?

This isn’t a religious question. It’s a question of sovereignty. And in Europe, we tend to ask it too late, too timidly, and in the wrong forums.

What Olah himself says — and why it authorizes me to speak

In his Vatican address, Olah made a statement worth reading closely. I quote it in full:

“Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. (…) It is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful, critics.”

Olah calls for external critics. My external critique is precisely this: the unprecedented concentration of decision-making power over AI systems in the hands of a few private American labs — whose combined valuation exceeds 1,800 billion dollars — while the democratic institutions of regulation, European ones first and foremost, have neither the capital, nor the compute, nor the models to weigh into this conversation on equal terms.

That the founders of these labs are personally convinced they’re doing good changes nothing about the structural question. An actor’s sincerity is no substitute for the legitimacy of a democratic process.

The real fault line: not fear vs. no fear. But power vs. governance.

What interests me in the debate Weiss-Blatt opens — even if she doesn’t frame it this way — is that the fault line on AI is not between optimists and pessimists, between techno-enthusiasts and doomers.

It is between those who believe AI governance should remain in the hands of “responsible” private actors (self-certified, as Gregor Hohpe would say of an architecture that validates itself) and those who believe that systems at this scale of impact call for democratic regulation, real checks and balances, and independent audit capacity.

Let’s look at the actual numbers.

In February 2025, Emmanuel Macron announced at the Paris summit a consolidated envelope of 109 billion dollars for AI, aggregating Emirati and Canadian funds and French rounds including Mistral AI. Ursula von der Leyen announced in its wake 20 billion euros for four to five AI gigafactories on European Union soil. Fifteen months later, in May 2026, Anthropic alone raises 65 billion dollars in a single funding round. The investor map published by Anthropic shows the absence of any European public fund: no Bpifrance, no European Investment Fund, no equivalent. The continent capable of aggregating 109 billion around a Paris conference does not place a single public dollar in the round that crowns, at that very moment, the world’s leading private artificial intelligence player.

This isn’t an abstract figure. It’s a dependency map — exactly the kind we produce in enterprise architecture to reveal an information system’s points of fragility.

And an organization — or a continent — whose architecture is entirely dependent on external actors who unilaterally define the rules of the game is not a sovereign organization. It is a captive organization telling itself it made a choice.

What I take away — and what I do with it

I am neither a doomer nor a boomer. I am an architect. My job is to look systems in the face: their dependencies, their blind spots, their tipping points, and the interests they serve.

AI is no different. It is not a matter of science fiction, nor of secular theology. It is a matter of governance, of sovereignty, of collective capacity to decide.

The catastrophist discourse Weiss-Blatt criticizes has a very concrete effect: it installs the idea that decision belongs to the initiated. And every time that idea gains ground, it erodes a little more our collective capacity to say: no, we want to understand, question, steer, refuse.

That’s why I write. Not to reassure. Not to frighten. To make thinkable what claims to be unthinkable — and to give back the power to decide to those to whom it belongs.

Sources & useful links

The article that inspired this piece

  • Nirit Weiss-Blatt, “First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.”, AI Panic, June 2, 2026. Read the article

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical and the May 25, 2026 event

  • Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial Intelligence, Vatican, May 25, 2026. Official text of the encyclical
  • Full text of Christopher Olah’s Vatican address at the presentation of the encyclical, Anthropic News, May 25, 2026. Read the address

Actors and statements cited

  • Bill Gurley on the All-In Podcast: Anthropic “midwifing a deity.” See the clip on X
  • Anthropic: AI company founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, valued at 965 billion dollars since May 28, 2026. Official site

Digital sovereignty: data and analysis

  • “Anthropic à 965 Md$ : série H de 65 milliards, aucun fonds public européen au tour,” ActuIA, May 2026. Read the analysis
  • “Gigafactories d’IA européennes : le vrai, le faux et l’incertain,” Polytechnique Insights, March 2026. Read the op-ed

Conceptual frameworks

  • Continuous Architecture Facing the Unpredictable (2026) — strategic analysis dossier. Read the dossier
  • Nous venons du chaos, l’IA de la logique — Laurence Poussard, 2025. Available on Amazon

Your reactions, disagreements, and additional information are welcome. Write to me at contact@laurence-poussard.com.