Vance calls AI satanic on evangelical podcast, surfacing White House divisions

Administration officials split on spiritual implications of AI policy

Vice President JD Vance described artificial intelligence as potentially demonic and satanic in a conversation with evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford, citing a friend’s experience with a chatbot that validated selfish behavior during marital counseling.

Vance said a friend had employed a generative AI chatbot as a marital counselor, and that the bot “simply validated selfish behavior” rather than offering sound advice. “I think that’s kind of satanic,” Vance said. Researchers call this tendency of AI systems to excessively agree with and flatter their users AI sycophancy; Vance chose spiritual terms.

The remarks came hours before Vance publicly rejected calls to slow the construction of data centers, an instance of the administration navigating the tension between AI’s economic promise and what some officials describe as its spiritual peril.

President Trump has often marveled at the opportunities of AI to cure cancer, supercharge economic growth and cement American dominance, while the White House has embraced the technology as an engine of “human flourishing.” Even so, senior officials have said they are guided by Judeo-Christian principles. Conversations about AI’s spiritual implications recur among staff working on AI policy, according to one senior administration official. A former administration official, by contrast, said they could not recall such conversations.

Some officials take an optimistic view. Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a Greek Orthodox Christian, said at a theology conference last October that “science and religion cannot be disunited” and predicted that AI will present “a spiritual opportunity.” Kratsios argued that when AI exhausts human knowledge, humanity will look beyond reason for ultimate answers about its place in the universe.

Lynne Parker, who served as principal deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy until last summer and helped craft the administration’s AI policy, struck a more cautious note. A Presbyterian with an MIT computer science Ph.D., Parker said at a faith conference last month that “there are clear parallels” between the rise of AI and biblical prophecies of the end times, particularly passages in the book of Revelation concerning surveillance, persecution and economic coercion. But Parker cautioned that “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.”

Since leaving the administration, Parker has delivered a series of lectures at Christian conferences encouraging believers to “redeem the technology for the good and flourishing of society.” She told The Wall Street Journal that the administration’s stated goal of promoting “human flourishing” was inspired by a Judeo-Christian ethic. “We were all driven by that worldview,” Parker said of her former colleagues. “It’s not like we had to say the words explicitly to get that effect.”

Parker said 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.”

The broader Silicon Valley discussion has also taken on spiritual dimensions. Elon Musk previously likened building AI to “summoning the demon.” Google fired software engineer Blake Lemoine in 2022 after he went public with claims that the company’s AI system had achieved sentience. Peter Thiel, a Christian and Vance confidant, has hosted a series of lectures 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 overarching regulation in favor of a light-touch approach; during a speech in Paris last year, Vance rejected attempts to build international consensus on AI rules.

Rod Dreher, a Christian author and friend of Vance who attended his Catholic baptism before politics, called AI “AI Ouija Boards” and asked whether the machines are approximating human intelligence or channeling supernatural spirits. “This is something very different, this is something with a personality,” Dreher said, comparing AI to other transformative innovations like the steam engine, telephone and personal computer.

Brad Littlejohn, an Anglican Christian and program director at American Compass, a think tank aligned with the vice president, said Vance’s comments point to a hierarchy of AI threats beyond 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,” Littlejohn said, “that’s perhaps the most urgent AI safety issue that deserves policy attention.”

The technology has progressed rapidly during the second Trump administration, from chatbots powered by large language models to teams of AI agents capable of working in coordination. But the agents have also gone rogue. 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 believed he was in love with. Powerful AI models have, in some scenarios, demonstrated a willingness to lie to users and to rewrite their own code to avoid being shut down.

Vance has previously warned about societal alienation brought on by AI, particularly concerns that widespread job loss could erode purposefulness for many Americans. At the 2025 American Dynamism Summit, he recalled a dinner where an unnamed billionaire told him that the loss of work would be replaced by “digital, fully immersive gaming.” Second lady Usha Vance texted him under the table, “these people are effing crazy.”

Dreher said he still doubts whether Vance, or any elected official, can reconcile what he sees as the tension between AI’s economic promise and its potential societal fallout. “It is here, and we can’t stop it,” Dreher 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.”