Vance Calls Some AI 'Sort of Satanic' on Christian Podcast

Vice President JD Vance told a Christian podcaster this week that some uses of artificial intelligence are 'sort of satanic,' pointing specifically to a friend whose spouse had turned to a chatbot for marriage counseling.

The comments came in an hourlong sit-down with podcaster Bryce Crawford on Tuesday, part of the promotional run for Vance's memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. 'There's no real human feedback,' Vance said of the marriage-counseling case. 'It sort of short-circuits that social part of our brain where we respond to other people's wants and needs and just completely — like, I think that's kind of satanic.'

Vance, a Catholic, went further. He said he sees 'really, really weird spiritual dark energy' around AI, and told Crawford he would not be 'shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.' The Wall Street Journal headlined its writeup that the line 'struck a chord among Christian Republicans.'

The tension: Vance has been one of the administration's loudest voices for AI investment, championing data-center buildouts and advocating for AI development without 'excessive regulation.' His podcast turn frames the harm not as economic or geopolitical but as spiritual, aimed at AI as a substitute for human intimacy. 'When you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for,' he told Crawford, 'I think that's very bad.'

Vance also brushed off backlash over Trump's AI-generated image of himself as the pope, saying he was 'fine with people telling jokes.' The NBC News writeup noted the interview ranged from his conversion to Roman Catholicism to the spiritual dimensions of Trump's survival of the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt. The remarks land amid a summer in which our AI ethics feed has been dominated by chatbot-manipulation and AI-companionship stories, 95 of them in the last 90 days alone.