On Tuesday, October 21, 2025, OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas: a browser that doesn’t just take you to websites but goes with you everywhere online. It sits beside every page you visit, remembering what you’ve seen, understanding what you’re trying to do, and offering to complete tasks on your behalf. “A true super-assistant,” OpenAI calls it, one that “understands your world and helps you achieve your goals.”
Within 24 hours, security researchers had demonstrated successful attacks against it. Prompt injection exploits. Clipboard hijacking. Hidden instructions embedded in webpages that could trick the AI agent into exfiltrating your data or redirecting you to phishing sites. Simon Willison, a programmer and security researcher, wrote that “the security and privacy risks involved here still feel insurmountably high to me.” Even OpenAI’s own Chief Information Security Officer admitted that “prompt injection remains a frontier, unsolved security problem.”
But here’s what concerns me more than the security vulnerabilities, although those are real and serious. What concerns me is that this is precisely the kind of product we’ve been conditioned to want.
From Search to Surveillance to Formation
Atlas represents the next evolutionary stage in how digital platforms disciple us. Google taught us to search. Social media taught us to perform. Now, AI-powered browsers are teaching us to surrender agency and calling it assistance.
The promise is seductive: “ChatGPT can come with you anywhere across the web, helping you in the window right where you are, understanding what you’re trying to do, and completing tasks for you, all without copying and pasting or leaving the page.” No more friction. No more effort. Just seamless, ambient intelligence that removes the burden of attention itself.
This is not merely a browser. It’s a liturgy.
James Williams, in Stand Out of Our Light, argues that the liberation of human attention is the defining moral and political struggle of our time. He writes as a tech insider who helped build the attention economy at Google, and his concern is that digital environments systematically undermine our ability to live according to our own values. Atlas takes this dynamic and makes it architectural. The browser is the very infrastructure through which we encounter the digital world. It is now designed to watch us, remember us, predict us, and act on our behalf.
The “browser memories” feature is particularly revealing. Atlas doesn’t just record your browsing history; it creates a persistent, AI-interpreted narrative of your interests, habits, and desires. OpenAI frames this as personalization. But as Shoshana Zuboff has shown us in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the logic here is extraction: the more the system knows, the better it can shape what you see, what you want, and ultimately, who you become.
The Convenience That Costs Your Soul
Here’s where my Reformed theological commitments meet the secular critique: formation always precedes function. Before Atlas helps you research a recipe or book a flight, it has already taught you something more fundamental—that you should want this kind of help. That friction is bad. That agency is burdensome. That the examined life is less efficient than the automated one.
This is discipleship by design, and it operates beneath the level of conscious choice. As James K.A. Smith has shown, we are liturgical animals: we are creatures whose loves are trained through repeated practices and immersive environments. The feed taught us to scroll. The algorithm taught us to perform. Now the AI browser is teaching us to abdicate.
And here’s the tragedy: it works precisely because we’re exhausted. We live in a world where every digital interaction demands attention, discernment, and vigilance. We’re burned out from decision fatigue, from managing our digital lives, from the constant cognitive load of the attention economy. So when a system offers to lighten that load—to watch for us, to remember for us, to act for us—we’re grateful.
But the cost is our interior freedom. The cost is the slow erosion of the habits and practices that constitute human agency: attention, deliberation, judgment, and patience. These aren’t just cognitive skills. They’re spiritual disciplines. And they don’t feel important in the moment—until you realize they’ve been shaped out of you entirely.
The Security Flaw as Parable
The prompt injection vulnerabilities that researchers immediately found in Atlas are more than technical problems. They’re parables.
Prompt injection works because the AI cannot reliably distinguish between your instructions and malicious instructions hidden in the content it encounters. Your agency and the system’s programming become fatally entangled. The AI that’s supposed to serve you can be turned against you—not through your explicit consent, but through invisible mechanisms you never see and cannot control.
Sound familiar?
This is the structural vulnerability of algorithmic discipleship. Systems designed to predict and shape your behavior don’t just serve your interests; they create exploitable pathways into your life. And the more seamlessly they integrate into your daily practices, the less visible these pathways become.
Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s CISO, acknowledged this plainly: “Prompt injection remains a frontier, unsolved security problem, and our adversaries will spend significant time and resources to find ways to make ChatGPT agent fall for these attacks.” His proposed solution? “Watch Mode”—a feature that expects users to carefully monitor what the AI is doing on sensitive sites.
In other words, the defense against an AI taking actions you don’t want is you watching the AI take actions. The promise of seamless assistance collapses into the burden of constant vigilance. But we’re already exhausted from vigilance. That’s why we wanted the assistant in the first place.
What the Church Must See
This isn’t just a story about technology. It’s a story about rival liturgies competing for the formation of souls.
The church must recognize that digital platforms are not neutral tools. They are discipling environments with their own teleology, their own vision of human flourishing, their own answer to the question: What is the good life?
And the answer Atlas gives is this: The good life is the frictionless life. The life where you never have to struggle with attention, or wrestle with desire, or practice patience. The life where an invisible intelligence anticipates your needs and acts on your behalf, training you through a thousand small surrenders to stop asking whether you should want what the system has learned to give you.
This is not the gospel. The gospel does not promise us friction-free lives. It calls us to die daily—to take up crosses (Matthew 16:24), to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). These are not things an algorithm can do for us. They require the very capacities Atlas is designed to make obsolete: sustained attention, deliberate choice, patient endurance, and the examined life.
As Herman Bavinck wrote, the Christian life is not absorption into the divine, but the restoration and perfection of our humanity—including our agency, our particularity, our capacity for genuine response to God. Atlas offers us the opposite: a kind of digital quietism where our agency is incrementally outsourced to systems that cannot love, cannot worship, cannot pray.
The Path Forward
I am not a Luddite. I’m not calling for the church to reject technology wholesale or retreat into nostalgic fantasies of a pre-digital age. But I am calling for discernment.
We must ask: What habits of heart and mind are being formed by the technologies we adopt? What vision of human flourishing is embedded in their design? And are we willing to let those visions disciple us?
With Atlas, the answers should give us pause. This is a technology explicitly designed to make itself indispensable by reducing the friction of human agency. It promises convenience, but the cost is your attention itself. The cost is your capacity to notice, to choose, to deliberate, to be present to your own life.
The church has always known that formation takes time, that discipleship requires embodied practices, that the interior life cannot be automated. We know that souls are shaped through liturgy: through the repetition of practices that, over time, train our loves toward God.
What we must now recognize is that the digital world operates on these same principles, but toward different ends. And if we do not form intentional counter-liturgies that resist the logic of seamless automation and cultivate human agency, we will find ourselves discipled by systems that have no interest in our flourishing, only in our compliance.
So, here’s my challenge: Before you download Atlas, ask yourself what you’re being trained to want. Not just what the tool does, but who it teaches you to become.
Because the browser that watches you is also shaping you.
And the question is not whether you’ll be formed. The question is: By what?
Holly is a frequent contributor to Substack.
This blog, The Discipling Browser: What ChatGPT Atlas Reveals About Digital (de)Formation
and several other discussion threads may be found on the Substack platform.
This is insightful and wise. Thank you Holly!