On Nov. 5, in a harshly lit conference room at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ main administrative hub in Salt Lake City, Elder Gerrit Gong delivered an impassioned speech about the future of AI.
“Man can create AI, but AI cannot create God,” he told the assembled audience.
Gong was speaking at a conference put together by Organized Intelligence, an initiative not directly associated with the church but one that advances Latter-day Saint perspectives on AI, namely that these tools are safe, properly regulated and don’t impede or replace users’ relationship with morality or God.
Gong, who is one of the 12 Apostles of the church, has spent much of the last year thinking and speaking about this rapidly evolving technology. A former State Department official and Oxford-trained Rhodes Scholar, he is able to discuss AI at a technical level or a more abstracted one. And he is the public face of a concerted Latter-day Saint effort to begin to take seriously the risks associated with AI development.
Over the course of two days at the Organized Intelligence conference, Latter-day Saint leaders weren’t the only ones taking the stage. The speakers included officials from the Future of Life Institute, which works to reduce existential risk from advanced AI, historians from around the country and the executive director of Utah’s Department of Commerce. As quickly became apparent, there is a fast-growing collection of people and interests in Utah who are deeply focused on the future of AI.
Top officials in the state have also shown no hesitation when it comes to going up against the agenda of Big Tech — or the industry’s allies in the Trump administration.
The state Legislature has been aggressive about trying to impose new restrictions on social media companies, leading to a protracted fight that continues to play out in the courts. More recently, Utah GOP Gov. Spencer Cox has drawn the ire of major online prediction market companies — and the attention of their lawyers — after he and Utah Attorney General Derek Brown vowed to make sure their apps were illegal in the state. But it’s the debate over AI that has made Utah the epicenter in the fight for regulation of a technology that its biggest boosters and critics alike say could transform life as we know it.
“Utah being a majority Latter-day Saints state, it has a unique way of doing politics,” said Medlir Mema, the executive director of Organized Intelligence and a Latter-day Saint himself. “It has this mantra about ‘disagreeing better.’”
Utah officials say they’re trying to find a middle ground on AI — guided by faith and morality while also embracing modernity. If they succeed, they could prove to be a national model for tech development and safety. But first, the state will have to find its way out of the crosshairs of the White House.
Utah stumbled into its clash with the Trump administration in January, after GOP State Rep. Doug Fiefia introduced HB 286. A sweeping piece of legislation, it was aimed at increasing transparency and building safeguards around frontier AI models, requiring companies to post public safety and child protection plans on their websites and report safety issues to Utah’s policy office. It also established civil penalties for offenders and protections for whistleblowers.
But after weeks of public debate on the bill, the Trump administration stepped in with a directive: Stop.
“We are categorically opposed to Utah HB 286 and view it as an unfixable bill that goes against the Administration’s AI Agenda,” the entirety of the letter read.
President Donald Trump has embraced Silicon Valley’s efforts to unleash AI and signed an executive order in December designed to preempt any state regulations on AI with a potential federal standard, one that critics are concerned will amount to no regulation at all. Trump’s influential AI czar David Sacks, a venture capitalist by trade, has pushed the federal government away from regulating AI, a move he believes would stifle growth.
Advocates of regulating AI ripped the administration’s opposition to the Utah bill.
“It is very disheartening to see certain parts of the federal government — the Sacks wing of the federal government — attack a red state,” said Mema. “[They’re doing so because] if Utah is successful in passing ambitious legislation that makes AI companies accountable and transparent, then you have shown it’s doable, and there’s no reason why the federal government cannot do it.”
Fiefia expressed a similar frustration. “My job as a state legislator is to protect my constituents and their families now,” he said. “If Congress hasn’t acted, I can’t go back and tell them, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t react because David Sacks doesn’t want me to.’ It’s disappointing to see an unelected federal bureaucrat discourage states from addressing issues that affect our own communities.”
Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, said, “It is the policy of the Trump administration to sustain America’s AI dominance to protect our national security and ensure we remain the world’s leading economy.” A White House official added that the White House fully supports child safety and has never told a state that it cannot enact child safety protections.
Still, the Trump administration has singled out Utah in the battle over AI. The federal government has not gotten this directly and publicly involved in any other AI-related state legislation. And the intervention has had two obvious downstream effects: It has upset some in the Trump coalition who were already nervous about White House AI policy, and it has firmly established Utah as an irritant to the Trump administration’s drive for unfettered AI development.
“I think they’re scared to death of major conservative states passing regulation,” said a conservative business leader who backs some AI oversight and who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about his frustrations with the White House. “They don’t want any state regulations at the state level to happen at all.”
This Trump backer added that the Big Tech-friendly wing of the White House was placing their boss in a tough political spot.
“You’re putting the president on the 10 percent side of a 90/10 issue,” he said. “To me this is not a conservative or a politically shrewd thing to do. This is completely in service of a small set of big companies.”
Public polling largely bears this out. A Gallup survey from September showed 80 percent of Americans think the government should regulate AI, even if it means the technology develops more slowly; a September poll from the Institute for Family Studies, a pro-AI regulation group, showed that 90 percent of Americans want Congress to prioritize safeguards for children around AI.
Latter-day Saints actually tilt more positive on AI than many other Americans; a fall 2025 survey of U.S. Latter-day Saints by Organized Intelligence showed that 36 percent expect AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years to be positive, compared to just 16 percent of the broader public. However, only 21 percent of Latter-day Saints say they trust AI for ethical advice.
And despite being a deep red state, Utah has long been thornier terrain for Trump. Latter-day Saint voters were deeply skeptical of his 2016 presidential campaign, so much so that independent candidate Evan McMullin siphoned off enough support to hold Trump below 50 percent in the state.
But even for an independent-minded state like Utah, pressure from the White House was too much to buck.
Utah’s legislative session is only 45 days, one of the shortest in the nation, and it ended on March 6, without Fiefia’s AI bill coming up for a vote.
Still, the attention from Washington confirmed Utah’s place as a leader in what some advocates call a human-centered approach to tech.
Much of the state’s leadership on the issue is coming directly from its governor, who is walking a fine line on the matter. “AI has enormous potential, and Utah is committed to supporting the innovation that will drive the next generation of economic growth,” Cox said in a statement. “But we also know that new technology brings real questions — about jobs, about the agency of individuals, and about the impact on young people.” He added, “We’re working closely with the White House and partners across the country to help get this right.”
Cox has been blunt about his skepticism of Big Tech while also pushing for tech development in the state under the banner of “pro-human AI.” He and other prominent state officials have for years courted the business of tech companies, so successfully that they can now boast about the “Silicon Slopes.” Established companies like Adobe and eBay have decamped to Utah, while a host of other homegrown startups have thrived.
In 2024, Cox led the state to become the first to regulate generative AI, installing disclosure requirements on the new tech while creating an “Office of AI Policy” within the state’s Department of Commerce. Cox more recently set up a task force on “pro-human AI,” led by Margaret Busse, the executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, and Jefferson Moss, a former state representative who is now the executive director of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity.
“The sides have formed, if you will, into the [AI] boomers and the doomers,” said Busse, while noting that Utah has had legislation on the books concerning AI development for a couple years. “We don’t want to be part of either of those groups. We want to be pursuing this middle way, and so that philosophy is what really formed into what we’re now calling our pro-human AI initiative.”
The state Legislature has proved to be a willing partner. A decade ago, Utah garnered national headlines as a deep-red state which struck compromises on contentious issues — first on immigration, then on religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights. While the Legislature has since shifted to the right, advocacy organizations hoping to install moral guardrails on AI say they are still optimistic about working with the state.
“Utah has some of the lowest corruption in our Legislature of any state,” said McKay. “You get bills started in Utah because that’s where you can pass them clean. Normally [in other states,] tech lobbyists will come in and change them.”
Chris Koopman, the founder and CEO of Utah-based Abundance Institute, a think tank working on energy policy and AI, praised the state for moving carefully on AI regulation and noted proposals have been narrow and focused, often including a legal safe harbor for developers that comply with regulation.
“Utah has staked out this very measured approach to making sure whatever they end up doing here, it’s going to be thoughtful, and it’s going to be done the right way,” he said.
If God is dead in California and engineers are trying to build a new one, Utah’s religious leaders are urging the state’s bustling tech scene to take a different approach from Silicon Valley.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is typically reticent about engaging in politics, but it recently stuck its neck out to endorse state legislation that would make it easier to sue over “deepfake” AI images. It was a rare moment in Utah politics, and the church’s backing helped ensure the legislation was one of the few tech-related bills to pass this session.
One of the church’s principal aims is establishing a “Faith and Ethics AI Evaluation,” a tool that would measure large language models’ religious literacy and ethical fairness.
“It’s a very difficult task,” noted Bennett Borden, the church’s AI counsel and the founder and CEO of Clarion AI Partners. “Because when you start saying, ‘Does it have a moral compass,’ you’re getting into, what does moral mean, and by whose perspective, and how do I measure it?” But the effort has nonetheless found growing support, thanks to the American Security Foundation, a “pro-human” tech nonprofit, which is rallying faith groups and researchers at religious universities. Last year, the group spearheaded a joint letter laying out its aims, which Gong signed; in October, Gong spoke at the group’s conference in Rome, where he said AI models must be “faith-faithful” and “pluralism-aware.”
Tim Schultz, a religious freedom lobbyist who has worked with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, praised their efforts to grapple with AI questions. “They have their own voice on it but they tend to be an early actor in building conversations on this stuff,” he said. “Their multi-faith activity has been early and thoughtful, but in a characteristically LDS way: As part of a chorus, not a soloist.”
Meanwhile, both the church and state government are actively rolling out AI solutions internally. Even as they look to place guardrails on AI, Utah officials are eager to deploy the technology where they can.
Gong said nearly every department at the church’s headquarters is exploring how to use AI to bolster their work, from translating publications to expanding the church’s vast genealogical archives. The state government has offered Google Gemini to most state employees and is exploring ways to replace up to 2,000 state employees who work call lines with chatbots. State leaders say they’re aware of the obvious ramifications of such a move for a “pro-human” approach, and that they’re exploring ways to mitigate job loss. “Those 2,000 employees could be deployed immediately to do even more effective work for us,” said Marvin Dodge, executive director of the Utah Department of Government Operations and a member of Cox’s “pro-human AI” task force.
Cox, a Latter-day Saint himself, has cited the teachings of Russell M. Nelson, the late former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his campaign to get people to “disagree better.” And disagree he has, often quite publicly, with the Trump administration’s tech agenda.
“It’s one thing if we’re fighting China, and you’re developing your [AI] model. But once you start selling sexualized chat bots to kids in my state, now I have a problem with that,” Cox said at POLITICO’s 2026 Governors Summit last month.
He also slammed comments from Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig that the federal agency alone — and not states — can regulate online prediction markets, which critics view as just another form of gambling.
“Look, this is a joke, and I can’t believe he tried to say this with a straight face,” Cox said. (The CFTC did not respond to a request for comment.)
It’s the sort of direct criticism of the administration that most political leaders on the right fastidiously avoid. But Cox has been willing to go there — perhaps in part because of his home state.
The issues on which Cox is staking out positions of disagreement with the Trump administration — gambling, social media, AI development — all tie back to the kind of traditional family values that have deep roots in the United States and still remain a politically potent force across the country, particularly in communities with large Latter-day Saint populations. They hit on concerns that Cox, like many lawmakers in Utah and beyond, have with the safety and wellbeing of young people. And they largely align with how Elder Gong laid out his own philosophy at Organized Intelligence back in November.
“Profit-driven technology companies should not determine society’s AI moral compass,” Gong said. “AI’s pervasive reach and power can warp our understanding of who we are, what we believe and feel, how we love and serve … even our relationship with the divine.”
