The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun

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The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun<br>Do we need a 'Holy War' against the Thinking Machines?

Charles McBryde and Syndekit<br>May 28, 2026

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Muad’Dib. Photo by Jack Davison<br>A beginning is a very delicate time.

Last month, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama drove to the San Francisco residence of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and hurled a Molotov cocktail at its gate. Hours later, he arrived at OpenAI’s headquarters and attempted to force an entrance. Following his arrest, information about Moreno-Gama began to circulate online, including his social media accounts.1<br>Evidence emerged that he had participated in multiple anti-AI forums, interfacing with groups such as PauseAI and Stop AI. These groups emphasized that they advocate nonviolence and distanced themselves from the attack.<br>His parents described him as being in the throes of a mental health crisis, and the incident quickly exited the news cycle. But what drew less general attention was something that immediately piqued the curiosity of a lot of nerds: his Discord username. His handle was ‘Butlerian Jihadist.’<br>When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.<br>The first blow in the Butlerian Jihad had been struck. And it came before the Holy War had even been declared.<br>What is the ‘Butlerian Jihad?’

I originally entitled this essay Who Will Declare The Butlerian Jihad? but then, well, someone did.<br>And it just so happened to be the fucking Pope.<br>For the past week, users on Instagram and X have been abuzz about the new Papal Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the first of Leo XIV’s tenure as Pope.<br>It is rare for 42-page Papal Encyclicals to capture the imagination of chronically online Leftists, but this case was special. Users immediately leaped at the opportunity to describe this as a kind of anti-AI manifesto, and announce that the Pope had, with Magnifica Humanitas, finally declared the ‘Butlerian Jihad.’<br>If you’re lost, let me bring you up to speed.<br>The Butlerian Jihad has nothing to do with Judith Butler nor her crusade for feminism. It has nothing to do with butlers and housekeepers overthrowing landed aristocrats, a plot line that would obviously make for the only watchable season of Downton Abbey. And it has nothing to do with Islam, or the Middle East.<br>It is just a meme. A very old meme.<br>And it has everything to do with Dune.<br>Not the movies, which this year return to cinemas in what is imagined by experts (me) to be the cinematic event of the year. No, the books. Specifically, the books written by Frank Herbert, rather than by his literary failson Brian Herbert.<br>Within Herbert’s Dune universe, the Butlerian Jihad acts simultaneously as an actual historical event and a kind of moral lesson. It refers to a moment in the distant past–our future–when humans rose up and destroyed what Herbert calls the ‘thinking machines.’ The Jihad is invoked (often vaguely) throughout the story as a warning against giving over mankind’s thinking to artificial intelligence.<br>And if you only read the first book, that’s about the extent of it. A straightforward condemnation of machine thinking and AI. But of course, none of Frank Herbert’s condemnations are straightforward, which is something that is difficult to realize, if you only read the first book.<br>Thus, in our current political climate, the Butlerian Jihad meme is being misread, and that misreading matters politically. The phrase was never meant to imply a purely anti-tech crusade nor act as permission slip for vigilante violence. That is because the Butlerian Jihad is not a parable about technology, but about domination.

Timotheé Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Two. Photo by Jack Davison.<br>Technology and Technocracy

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

This is the first and most famous commandment left behind in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad.2 Taken at face value, it sounds like exactly the kind of sacred prohibition on artificial intelligence that a large cross-section of the online Left wants it to be. A wholesale and holy ban on the synthetic mind, or anything that resembles it.<br>The phrase comes from the Orange Catholic Bible, the primary sacred text of the state-approved religion that dominates the Imperium. Accordingly, to read it as a simple anti-AI slogan is to make the same mistake that every fundamentalist makes when interpreting the Bible: strip it of its context, and allow it to ‘speak for itself,’ rather than undergoing the arduous task of exegesis.<br>Removed from its context, ‘Thou Shalt Not Make A Machine In The Likeness Of A Human Mind’ is a perfect slogan for ideologues who imagine hurling a brick through a data center window to be the proper start and...