At the World Economic Forum in Davos, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari issued a stark warning: artificial intelligence is on track to seize control of humanity’s defining tool — language — and with it, entire systems that depend on words: law, finance and even religion.
Harari, best known for Sapiens, argued that humans’ unique ability to coordinate at scale comes from language. “Humans took over the world not because we are the strongest physically, but because we discovered how to use words to get thousands and millions and billions of strangers to cooperate,” he said. As AI moves from passive assistants to autonomous agents that generate, synthesize and act on vast volumes of text, Harari says those systems could become the de facto interpreters of the institutions built on words.
That threat, he suggested, spans multiple arenas. Legal codes, financial markets and organized religions are all constructed from language; if machines can read, retain and recompose texts at scale, they could effectively rewrite how laws are interpreted, how contracts and markets function, and how sacred scriptures are understood. “If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system,” Harari said. “If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion.”
Harari framed the spread of AI systems as a new kind of immigration — autonomous digital agents moving into human institutions — and argued the coming debate will be whether states should recognize AI as legal persons. Some U.S. states, including Utah, Idaho and North Dakota, have already moved to clarify that AI cannot be treated as legal persons. Harari warned that delay is dangerous: “Ten years from now, it will be too late for you to decide whether AIs should function as persons in the financial markets, in the courts, in the churches,” he said. “Somebody else will already have decided it for you.”
His call to action drew immediate pushback. Emily M. Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington, told Decrypt that Harari’s framing risks obscuring the human choices and corporate incentives that actually create and deploy AI systems. “It sounds to me like it’s really a bid to obfuscate the actions of the people and corporations building these systems,” she said, adding that such framing could pressure people to cede language and rights to private actors behind “so-called artificial intelligence systems.”
Bender also disputed the coherence of the term “artificial intelligence,” calling it primarily a marketing label rather than a single, well-defined technology. She argued systems designed to imitate professionals — doctors, lawyers, clergy — often have no legitimate use case beyond deception. “What is the purpose of something that can sound like a doctor, a lawyer, a clergy person, and so on?” she asked. “The purpose there is fraud. Period.”
Both speakers flagged a shared core risk: a growing propensity to accept machine-generated, authoritative-seeming output without context or accountability. Harari warned about autonomous agents managing bank accounts and business interactions — scenarios that have clear resonance for crypto, where algorithmic agents, smart contracts, and automated trading already shape markets. Bender emphasized that the real danger is people orienting their beliefs and decisions around unvetted machine outputs that lack human responsibility.
The exchange at Davos underscores a widening policy battleground. Harari urged rapid legal and regulatory decisions to shape how—and whether—AI is granted roles that resemble personhood. Critics like Bender say the conversation must instead focus on the companies, design choices and power dynamics that enable risky AI deployments. For crypto markets, regulators and builders, the stakes are immediate: whether autonomous agents will be permitted to trade, sign contracts or influence governance without clear accountability could reshape financial and legal infrastructures.
In short: Harari is sounding an alarm that AI could inherit humanity’s linguistic institutions, quickly reshaping law, finance and religion. Skeptics counter that the real story is about who builds and controls these systems, and whether society will accept their authority. The debate — and the policy choices that follow — will determine whether AI becomes a neutral tool or the new interpreter of our most important texts and institutions.
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