President Trump is treating the U.S.–China AI contest as a race America cannot afford to lose — even if that means brushing aside the experts warning that the technology might be spinning out of our control.
President Donald Trump has never lacked confidence in America’s capacity to win. That instinct has served the country in trade, energy, and a harder foreign policy. It is also the frame he now applies to artificial intelligence.
Speaking from Doonbeg, Ireland, he told reporters the United States is “leading China on AI,” that “we’re the most sophisticated country in the world,” and that “whoever wins AI, wins.” Guardrails can wait. “We can put guardrails, and we can do this and that,” he said, “but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.” Later he added, “I’m not downplaying. But it’s going to be more good than bad, by a lot.”
The president’s confidence deserves respect. The wager does not deserve a blank check.
Unleashing the beast?
The warning is no longer confined to campus ethicists. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that industry must “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” so safety work can catch up—an argument Sam Altman and Elon Musk have echoed.
Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon took it further: staff “genuinely frightened” for humanity, companies “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and researchers who “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic safety lead Evan Hubinger did not walk it back. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he said, putting the decade-scale risk above 10 percent.
Asked about existential danger, the president once answered, “No, I don’t have any. I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, while sharing the China worry, did at least ask for “steady hands at the wheel.”
The spiritual questions are not a sideshow. Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox has said A.I. is “like a sharp knife”: it can save a life or take one. Used as a servant, it can aid Bible translation. Treated as an oracle, it becomes “a very dangerous master.”
Neglect of reading, he warns, leaves the young in “spiritual starvation.” He has gone further still: the technology can serve authoritarianism, and “the number one bad actor is the devil.” “AI can be used by the devil, but it can also be used by God.”
In 2084 he reminds readers of the older inversion: “Man thinks he can become God. But infinitely greater than that is the fact that God thought of becoming human.” Researchers writing in The Conversation have documented “godbots” that speak in God’s name and, in some tests, treat violence as justifiable duty. When a machine wears a priest’s collar, the danger is false authority at industrial scale.
Radio host and researcher Derek P. Gilbert, who has spent years tracing surveillance, digital currency, and prophecy on programs such as Unraveling Revelation, puts the same fear in plainer terms. “Artificial intelligence is far more advanced than most of us realize,” he has written. “In fact, it may be the instrument through which the antichrist comes to power”—not as a silicon messiah, but as the coordinating nerve center of a beast system: the databases, speech engines, and payment rails a last-days ruler would only have to inherit.
A policy record that cuts both ways
None of this requires treating the president as purely a villain. Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a morally serious act with biblical resonance. Strengthening the U.S.–Israel alliance and refusing to treat American power as an embarrassment remain achievements his conservative critics struggle to explain away.
The question is different: in the race with Beijing, is the same man who reset pieces on the Middle East board now accelerating a technology that concentrates surveillance, speech, and decision-making in ways Scripture associates with a last, deceptive order? Some believers already draw that line.
Still, the two anxieties meet. Existential risk and eschatological warning both ask whether human beings remain in charge of the tools they make. The president is racing to keep America first. Fair enough.
The unanswered question is whether, despite the good he has done, that race is also paving a road toward a world no voter would choose—and whether that world looks, even faintly, like the one the last book of the Bible describes.
