Vance Voices Unease Over "Dark Spiritual Energy" in AI, Even as Administration Pushes Deregulation

There's something unsettling about watching a powerful person describe a piece of software as spiritually dangerous, and then keep signing policies that let that same software expand unchecked. That contradiction sits at the center of Vice President JD Vance's latest comments about artificial intelligence, delivered not in a policy speech but in a conversation about faith, family, and the end times.

Speaking with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford, Vance was asked whether he thinks we're living in the "end times." He said he isn't sure. But he added that certain things happening in the world would make him "not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us." Then he turned to AI.

"Some of the AI companies you see happening where you feel like there is some really, really weird spiritual dark energy," Vance said. He pointed specifically to a "burial ceremony" held for a retired AI model, likely a reference to the funeral fans held in San Francisco last year for Claude 3 Sonnet, an AI chatbot that was being phased out. "That makes me feel very uncomfortable," he told Crawford, "and there's some dark spiritual things going on there."

He didn't stop with funerals for chatbots. Vance also singled out the growing practice of using AI for marital advice, calling it "kind of satanic." For a lot of people, that might sound like an odd place to draw a moral line. But it points to a real and fast-growing trend: millions of people now turn to AI chatbots not just for scheduling and search, but for relationship counseling, emotional support, and decisions that used to require a trusted person on the other end of the conversation.

Vance's willingness to name that discomfort matters, especially given who he is. His rise in politics was fueled in part by deep connections to Silicon Valley, the same industry building the tools he now says carry a "weird spiritual dark energy." That's not a small tension. It's the vice president of the United States, a man with venture capital roots, publicly wrestling with whether some AI products cross a moral or spiritual line.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

This isn't the first time Vance has broken from the administration's default AI cheerleading to raise a caution flag. Speaking to Air Force Academy graduates earlier this year, he told them plainly that "decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines." That's a specific, high-stakes limit: no matter how advanced AI targeting or battlefield systems become, a human has to be the one pulling the trigger, so to speak.

At the same time, Vance has repeatedly urged the government to avoid "excessive regulation" of AI, a position fully in step with the Trump administration's broader push to accelerate the technology's growth, including the data centers required to power it. So the picture that emerges isn't one of a vice president trying to slow AI down through policy. It's more like someone flagging specific behaviors and use cases he finds troubling, funerals for machines, AI as a marriage counselor, autonomous life-and-death decisions, while still supporting a light regulatory touch overall.

That distinction is worth sitting with. Concern about the spiritual or emotional weight people are placing on AI systems is not the same thing as concern about whether those systems are safe, tested, or transparent. Vance's comments read as cultural and religious commentary, not a policy proposal. Whether that commentary eventually translates into actual guardrails, disclosure requirements for AI companionship products, limits on autonomous weapons systems, remains an open question.

The conversation with Crawford ranged well beyond AI, into faith and family more broadly, and it eventually circled back to a different but related controversy: the AI-generated image posted to President Trump's Truth Social account earlier this year that appeared to depict him as Jesus, healing a sick man while dressed in white and red robes. Vance defended the president, saying he "didn't mean any offense" and wasn't trying to "mock or mimic God." Trump himself had claimed the image was meant to depict him as "a doctor" tied to Red Cross imagery, though it was posted and then deleted shortly after Trump publicly criticized Pope Leo XIV as "WEAK on Crime."

Vance, who is Catholic, took a similarly forgiving stance last year when Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pope, saying at the time he was "fine with people telling jokes." Taken together, these episodes show a vice president comfortable dismissing AI-generated religious imagery as harmless humor, while separately expressing genuine unease about AI systems that seem to encroach on emotional, relational, or spiritual territory. It's not an inconsistent position exactly, but it does reveal where his personal line sits: satire is fine, substitution is not.

Why It Matters

Vance's comments land at a moment when the administration's own AI strategy is reportedly fracturing over direction, even as it pushes ahead with deregulation and data center expansion domestically and abroad. His remarks won't slow that momentum. But they offer a rare, unscripted glimpse into how even AI-friendly political leaders are grappling, in real time and often in explicitly religious terms, with what these systems are doing to how people grieve, love, and make decisions.

For the millions of people already leaning on AI for emotional support or relationship guidance, that ambivalence from a sitting vice president is a signal worth watching. It suggests that even as Washington clears the runway for AI's expansion, the human and spiritual costs of that expansion haven't been fully reckoned with, not by industry, and evidently not by the people setting the rules either.