The Unlikely Red State Trying to Buck Trump and Big Tech
The Unlikely Red State Trying to Buck Trump and Big Tech
Authors: Calder McHugh and Samuel Benson (POLITICO Magazine, The Friday Read) URL: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/13/utah-lds-church-ai-big-tech-trump-00823634 One-line: Utah has become the most active US state on AI regulation — pushed by Latter-day Saint institutions, a governor willing to criticise the administration, and a legislature with a compromise habit — and the White House intervened directly to stop its frontier-model transparency bill.
What the piece reports
The article is a reported feature rather than an argument, so what follows is its factual account.
The trigger. In January 2026, Republican state Rep. Doug Fiefia introduced HB 286, a bill aimed at transparency and safeguards around frontier AI models: public safety and child-protection plans posted on company websites, reporting of safety issues to Utah’s policy office, civil penalties, and whistleblower protections. After weeks of public debate, the Trump administration sent a letter opposing it. POLITICO reports the letter in its entirety as a single sentence — that the administration is “categorically opposed to Utah HB 286” and views it as an unfixable bill that goes against the administration’s AI agenda. Utah’s legislative session is 45 days, among the shortest in the country; it ended on March 6 without the bill coming to a vote.
The reporters note this is unusual: the federal government has not intervened this directly or publicly in any other state’s AI legislation. The context is a December executive order designed to preempt state AI regulation with a potential federal standard, and the position of AI czar David Sacks, who has pushed the federal government away from regulating AI on growth grounds.
The religious dimension. The framing device is a November 5 speech by Elder Gerrit Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at a conference run by Organized Intelligence — an initiative not formally tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints but advancing Latter-day Saint perspectives on AI. Gong, a former State Department official and Rhodes Scholar, has spent much of the past year speaking on the subject, and two of his lines carry the piece: “Man can create AI, but AI cannot create God,” and the argument that profit-driven technology companies should not determine society’s AI moral compass. He has also said at a Rome conference that models must be “faith-faithful” and “pluralism-aware.”
The church, normally reticent in politics, endorsed state legislation making it easier to sue over AI deepfake images — which the article credits with getting one of the few tech bills through the session. It is also working on a “Faith and Ethics AI Evaluation,” a tool to measure large language models’ religious literacy and ethical fairness; the church’s AI counsel Bennett Borden is quoted on how hard that is to define and measure.
The state’s position. Gov. Spencer Cox is described as walking a fine line — courting tech companies (“Silicon Slopes,” with Adobe and eBay relocating) while being unusually blunt in criticising Big Tech and the administration. Utah was the first state to regulate generative AI in 2024, with disclosure requirements and an Office of AI Policy inside the Department of Commerce; Cox has since created a “pro-human AI” task force. Margaret Busse, who leads it, frames the aim as a middle way between what she calls the AI “boomers and the doomers.”
The article also reports both the church and the state deploying AI internally: nearly every department at church headquarters exploring uses from translation to genealogical archives, and the state offering Google Gemini to most employees while exploring replacing up to 2,000 call-line staff with chatbots — with officials acknowledging the tension with a “pro-human” stance.
The polling. A September Gallup survey putting 80% of Americans in favour of regulating AI even at the cost of slower development; a poll from the Institute for Family Studies showing 90% want Congress to prioritise child safeguards. A fall 2025 Organized Intelligence survey found US Latter-day Saints more optimistic than the general public about AI’s twenty-year impact (36% vs 16% positive) but with only 21% trusting AI for ethical advice.
Why it is worth keeping
Two things make this more than a news story. First, it is a clean case of the federalism question in AI policy being decided by pressure rather than by law: the bill did not lose a vote, it ran out of session after a letter. Second, it documents a religious institution attempting to enter AI governance on substantive rather than symbolic terms — a published evaluation methodology, a signed multi-faith letter, endorsement of a specific bill — which is a different posture from the usual statement of concern.
Notable quotes
Man can create AI, but AI cannot create God.
Profit-driven technology companies should not determine society’s AI moral compass.
Archived text
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Connections
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — the institution at the centre of the piece, and the article’s own framing of why Utah’s AI politics differ from other red states’.
- AI Safety — the substantive subject. HB 286’s contents (published safety plans, incident reporting, whistleblower protection) are the standard frontier-model transparency package at state scale.
- Gerrit W. Gong — the apostle who is the public face of the church’s AI engagement.
- Big Tech — the counterparty, and the article’s account of the industry’s alignment with the administration on preemption.
- Regulation — the federalism case: state-level rules preempted by executive pressure rather than by legislation.
- Russell M. Nelson — cited in the piece as the source of the “disagree better” framing Cox has adopted.
- David Sacks — named as the administration’s AI czar and the figure state officials single out.
- Mormonism — the broader tradition, and its unusual combination of institutional caution in politics with early, structured engagement on this issue.
- Social Media — Utah’s earlier and still-litigated attempts to restrict social media companies are the precedent the article uses to explain the state’s posture.