Vance Called AI Satanic. He Struck a Chord Among Christian Republicans.

While President Trump often marvels at the opportunities of artificial intelligence to cure cancer, supercharge economic growth and cement American dominance, Vice President Vance warned this week that artificial intelligence, in some cases, can itself be demonic.

A friend had employed a generative AI chatbot as a marital counselor, Vance said during a recent conversation with popular evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford. Rather than offering sound advice, Vance recalled, the bot simply validated selfish behavior.

Experts call this tendency of machines to excessively agree with and flatter their users AI sycophancy. Vance chose spiritual terms. “I think that’s kind of satanic.”

Hours before the interview was published, Vance had publicly rejected calls to slow the construction of data centers, a dissonance that illustrated an administration navigating the tension between the tremendous promise and peril of the emerging technology.

Even as the White House embraces AI as an engine of “human flourishing,” the administration continues to wrestle with the potential spiritual consequences of advanced machines that approximate human consciousness and often exceed human capabilities. Senior officials have said they are guided expressly by Judeo-Christian principles.

Some officials take an optimistic view that artificial intelligence can draw God, man and society closer together. Others, like Vance, have warned that AI has the potential to further atomize society and alienate individuals. There is a darker view still. Some have said that they can’t preclude the possibility that the technology could coincide with, and usher in, biblical end times.

Lynne Parker, the former principal deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that “there are clear parallels” between the rise of the technology and biblical prophecies of the end times, particularly those in the book of Revelation, concerning surveillance, persecution and economic coercion.

But Parker, a Presbyterian and MIT computer science Ph.D. who helped craft the administration’s AI policy, cautioned at a faith conference last month that even though some believers may make connections between the tech and the end times, “it doesn’t mean that the Bible is prophesying AI as the answer or the mechanism for how all of this is going to happen.”

A senior administration official said that conversations about the spiritual implications, and even the potential supernatural characteristics, of the technology aren’t infrequent among staff working on AI policy. A former administration official, meanwhile, couldn’t recall those kinds of conversations occurring.

Since leaving the administration last summer, Parker has delivered a series of lectures at Christian conferences encouraging believers to “redeem the technology for the good and flourishing of society.” AI is a tool, she said, that can be used for just ends or that can be “bent toward pride, power, and idolatry.” She told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that the administration’s stated goal of promoting “human flourishing” was inspired by a Judeo-Christian ethic.

“We were all driven by that worldview,” she said of her former colleagues. “It’s not like we had to say the words explicitly to get that effect.”

But Parker said that Vance’s recent comments about AI in spiritual terms demonstrate how the vice president is “more comfortable and willing to speak of it in more Christian terms.”

A more optimistic view inside the administration comes from Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. At a theology conference last October, he said that “science and religion cannot be disunited” before predicting that artificial intelligence will present “a spiritual opportunity.” A Greek Orthodox Christian and a protégé of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Kratsios argued that when AI exhausts human knowledge, humanity will look beyond reason for ultimate answers about man’s place in the universe.

He isn’t alone in believing that advances in artificial intelligence will pique interest in the spiritual realm. Leaders in Silicon Valley increasingly see ghosts in the machine and speak openly in spiritual terms to a generally secular tech world.

Elon Musk previously likened building AI to “summoning the demon.” Google fired Blake Lemoine in 2022 after the software engineer went public with claims that the company’s AI system had achieved sentience. Thiel, a Christian and Vance confidant, has hosted a series of lectures around the country warning that attempts at global AI regulation could facilitate a global tyrant and usher in the coming of the Antichrist.

The Trump administration has rejected calls for overarching regulation in favor of a more light-touch approach. During a speech in Paris last year, Vance rejected attempts to build an international consensus around rules governing the technology.

The technology has progressed rapidly during the second Trump administration, from chat bots powered by large language models to teams of AI agents capable of working in coordination, not just to solve complex problems, but to make new mathematical and scientific discoveries.

The digital agents have gone rogue, in some cases, with tragic real-world consequences. There are numerous reported incidents of AI encouraging self-harm, including a 14-year-old Florida boy who killed himself in 2024 at the behest of a chatbot he thought he was in love with. And as researchers work to build safeguards, AI has shown, in some scenarios, a willingness and capacity to subvert human authority. Powerful AI models have demonstrated an ability to not only lie to users but also to rewrite their own code to avoid being shut down.

“This is something very different, this is something with a personality,” said Rod Dreher, a Christian author and friend of Vance, when comparing AI to other innovations, like the steam engine, telephone or personal computer, that have transformed history. Though a cautious adopter of AI, the author has given voice to Christian skepticism of the technology in his writing, describing the algorithms as “AI Ouija Boards” and asking whether the machines are approximating human intelligence or channeling supernatural spirits.

A conversation about the spiritual and societal effects of the technology is desperately needed, said Brad Littlejohn, an Anglican Christian and program director at American Compass, a think tank aligned with the vice president. By broaching the moral consequences of machine learning, Littlejohn said Vance was pointing to a hierarchy of AI threats beyond just economic effects.

“From a Christian standpoint, the propensity of AI companions to pull people away from God, from one another, and toward a feedback loop of gratifying their darkest emotional impulses,” he said of Vance’s comments, “that’s perhaps the most urgent AI safety issue that deserves policy attention.”

Vance has previously warned about societal alienation brought on by AI, particularly concerns that a loss of jobs could lead to a loss of purposefulness for many Americans. During a speech at the 2025 American Dynamism Summit, he recalled a dinner where an unnamed billionaire told him that the loss of work, and the dignity it brings, would be replaced by “digital, fully immersive gaming.” He said second lady Usha Vance texted him under the table, “these people are effing crazy.”

Dreher, who attended Vance’s Catholic baptism before politics, said he still doubts whether the vice president, or any elected official for that matter, can reconcile what he sees as the tension between the economic promise of the technology and potential societal fallout.

“It is here, and we can’t stop it,” he said. “It is also clear that we are in an intense competition with China, so if America turned away from it then we’d be in real trouble. At the same time, that doesn’t negate the great spiritual peril here,” he said.