Seventy Million Religion Questions a Week Are Now Asked of a Chatbot

What is happening

OpenAI published an analysis in October 2026 of how people use ChatGPT for religion. Across the year from September 2025 to September 2026, ChatGPT received more than 70 million religion-related requests a week. About 22 million of those requests each week concerned studying religious texts. About 16 million concerned practices, holidays, and observance, and about 16 million concerned beliefs, meaning, and guidance.

Where the impact lands

The requests came from every tradition this site covers. Islam accounted for about 45 percent of them and Christianity for about 34 percent, with Hinduism at about 4 percent, Judaism at about 2 percent, and Buddhism at about 1 percent. The pattern shows a change in where religious questions are first asked: a machine now fields, every week, a volume of questions about scripture, practice, and meaning that no clergy body could receive. OpenAI's own position, stated with the analysis, is that artificial intelligence should not become an arbiter of religious truth.

What to watch

How the traditions answer this shift is an open question: whether they treat the chatbot as a doorway that leads inquirers to teachers and communities, or as a substitute that leaves them alone with the machine. This post records the analysis as RELEVANT reported it on October 8, 2026; the source link on this page leads to the report.