Imagine your phone ringing late at night.
You look at the screen and see your mother, who died several years ago. The same face, the same smile, the same voice, and the same way she used to say your name.
She asks how you are doing. She reminds you of details and memories from your childhood that only your closest relatives could know. Then she asks you to trust the person who brought her back from death into a virtual life.
You know she is dead. Your mind knows it perfectly well.
But your eyes can see her, your ears can hear her, and your heart wants to believe her.
A few years ago, this scene would have belonged in a bad horror film. Today, technologies known as deadbots or griefbots can be trained on the photographs, messages, and voices of deceased people in order to imitate them and speak in their names.
Academic research has discussed the ethical and psychological risks of these “digital duplicates,” while cases have already been documented in which artificial intelligence was used to build chatbots that imitate people who have died.
That reminded me of a narration from the Islamic tradition about the trial of al-Masih ad-Dajjal. It says that he will show a man his deceased parents in their likeness, and they will tell him to follow and believe in the Dajjal. (Sunan Ibn Majah 4077)
I will not use this similarity to claim that the prophecy was describing ChatGPT, or that a data center somewhere in California is hiding the Antichrist among its servers.
I have no evidence for such a claim, and we have no right to turn reflection into doctrine.
But the question no longer sounds as absurd as it might have a few years ago:
Could artificial intelligence be the Dajjal? Or could it at least become the instrument that makes his great deception possible on a scale humanity has never experienced?
The word “Dajjal” is associated with deception, concealment, and the mixing of truth with falsehood. In Islamic narrations, the Dajjal does not approach people openly declaring himself to be evil. He comes offering what appears to be salvation, armed with powers that make his lies convincing to those who witness them.
Some hadith describe what he carries as resembling Paradise and Hell. But what he calls Paradise will in reality be Hell, while what appears to be his fire will offer safety. The narrations also describe him as one-eyed and his trial as one of the greatest tribulations humanity will face. (Mishkat al-Masabih 5472)
I will not claim that the “one eye” symbolizes a camera or a computer screen. There is no evidence for that interpretation.
But the image raises another question for me: Does artificial intelligence also see the world through one eye?
It reads words, images, and numbers, but it does not experience what lies behind them. It can analyze thousands of books about grief without grieving, millions of texts about love without loving, and countless moral judgments without possessing a conscience that can accept responsibility for them.
It sees the data, but it does not always see the human being.
Despite this, we have started asking it about everything.
What should we write? What should we buy? Whom should we hire? Whom should we dismiss? How should we raise our children? What should we do about our relationships? Sometimes we even ask it to provide religious rulings.
The problem is not that the machine is claiming to be divine.
The problem is that we are elevating it to a position it should never occupy.
In August 2025, João Silva Jordão published an article with a deliberately provocative title: The Dajjal Will Need Artificial Intelligence.
He did not argue that AI itself is the Dajjal. Instead, he speculated that it could give one person, or a small group of people, an unprecedented ability to manufacture “false miracles.”
He discussed the cloning of the voices and appearances of the dead, mass surveillance, the analysis of entire populations, and the possibility of using technology to create events that ordinary people might perceive as supernatural powers.
The author explicitly described the article as a speculative exercise intended to provoke thought, not as proof of how a religious prophecy will be fulfilled.
That changes the question.
What could one person accomplish if they controlled the world’s most powerful AI systems, databases containing information about billions of people, city surveillance cameras, digital financial infrastructure, weapons, drones, and social media platforms?
If the Dajjal is a person, as common religious interpretations describe him, he will not need to be made of silicon. He may only need to control the machine.
Similar concerns appear in different forms within Christian and Jewish traditions.
The Christian Book of Revelation describes an image that is made to speak and a system connected to preventing people from buying or selling.
Some later Jewish apocalyptic texts contain a figure called Armilus, portrayed as a tyrannical king or anti-Messiah who opposes redemption.
None of these texts says that artificial intelligence is this figure.
The common thread is not the computer. It is deception, the promise of salvation, the concentration of power, and the transformation of a human being from an independent decision-maker into a follower who surrenders their will to a force they believe knows more than they do.
This brings us to the most disturbing part.
Religious leaders did not introduce religious language into the world of artificial intelligence. Much of it came from Silicon Valley itself.
For years, researcher Robert Geraci has examined how writing about artificial intelligence and robotics has borrowed the language of salvation, immortality, and the end of the world.
Some advocates of technology speak about escaping the human body, uploading consciousness into machines, defeating death, and building a new world in which minds can live digitally.
An Associated Press report about the merging of technological and religious language showed how prominent figures in the industry have begun using words once reserved for the sacred: godlike intelligence, intelligence in the sky, salvation from disease, digital immortality, or a catastrophe that could threaten humanity.
On the other side of the debate, business figures such as Peter Thiel have spoken openly about the Antichrist and the role technology and artificial intelligence could play in creating the conditions for his appearance.
When a company promises that its technology will know you better than you know yourself, cure your illnesses, end your loneliness, overcome poverty, give you a companion who never leaves, preserve a memory that never fades, and perhaps create a digital version of you that never dies, we are no longer listening to an ordinary software advertisement.
We are listening to the language of salvation.
Not because the machine has become a god, but because human beings appear ready to manufacture a god available through a monthly subscription.
Even if we leave religion aside, the documented risks are significant.
The International AI Safety Report 2026, prepared by more than 100 experts with the support of governments and international organizations, states that real-world AI use for influence and manipulation has been documented, although it is not yet widespread.
The report also discusses misinformation, psychological attachment to AI companions, the erosion of human autonomy, and possible future scenarios involving loss of control.
But the report also says something we should not conceal merely to make the story more frightening: current systems do not possess the capabilities required for a complete loss-of-control scenario, and experts disagree sharply about the likelihood of such a scenario emerging in the future.
We therefore have no evidence that a secret electronic mind is plotting to take control of humanity.
What we have is simpler, and perhaps more dangerous: people, corporations, and governments that possess tools capable of studying us, influencing us, monitoring us, and manufacturing a version of reality for us at an unprecedented scale.
Perhaps the danger is not that artificial intelligence will wake up and decide to enslave us.
Perhaps the danger is that it will remain exactly what it is, and then be used by a human being who knows precisely how to enslave others.
So, is artificial intelligence the Antichrist?
The honest answer is: I do not know, and I have no evidence that would allow me to say yes.
The apparent meaning of the religious texts I reviewed presents the Dajjal or Antichrist as a figure with agency and the ability to act, not as a mathematical tool predicting the next word in a sentence.
But I know something else.
For the first time in history, we are building a machine capable of speaking to every person in their own language, learning their weaknesses, reshaping the reality presented to them, imitating their loved ones, telling them what they want to hear, and accompanying them inside their pocket throughout the day.
We are then connecting it, step by step, to work, education, media, finance, security, and decision-making.
After all that, we laugh when someone asks whether any of this could be related to a great deception built around reversing truth, concentrating power, and making falsehood appear real.
Artificial intelligence may not be the Dajjal.
But it could build his voice, give him a thousand faces, place him inside every screen, and deliver his lie to each person in the form best suited to their fears and desires.
When the great deception finally arrives, the problem may not be that we failed to see it.
The problem may be that we became so accustomed to it that we could no longer distinguish it from the truth.