The American Covenant’s Answer to AI

Artificial intelligence is testing our commitment to the great moral covenant that binds us together as a nation. The decisions we must soon make about the most powerful technology of our lifetimes are among the most difficult we have yet faced. These decisions go far beyond questions of economics or policy. They are questions of labor and the family, of freedom and the value of human life. They are fundamental questions of our identity as Americans and the nature of this republic given to us by God.

And they come to us at a time when the moral fabric of our national life is already badly frayed. The greatest test of our age is to repair that fabric and reclaim the moral vision that binds us together as a people. Artificial intelligence is only the proving ground. Our moral covenant is the heart of the matter. Can we keep this republic under God?

When the Puritans braved the cold Atlantic to found the City on a Hill, they left behind a feudal world in which the prince was born to rule, the peasant born to work; a static world in which nothing moved and no one rose. They dreamt instead of a commonwealth where every man might pursue his calling and work out his salvation in liberty under God.

And so our forebears swore a covenant on the deck of a ship called Arbella in the year 1630. They pledged their lives and their labor and their very souls to the service of God and the freedom for which he had set them free. In that moment, America was born. For the first time in history, a commonwealth was birthed not by conquest, nor by blood, nor by the divine right of kings, but by the free consent of free men pledging to live under the laws of God.

Since that fateful Atlantic crossing all those centuries ago, we have tried to steer the ship of our state according to the covenant faith our forebears left us, and the profound vision of liberty it offers up.

John Winthrop, the man who led the Puritans, put it best. The liberty we cherish, he said, is not the liberty to do whatever you please or go where you list. It is not the so-called freedom whereby the strong oppress the weak, the rich steal from the poor, and the elite rule over the rest. That, Winthrop said, is the “Libertye [that] makes men growe more evill, & in tyme to be worse then bruite[s].”

Our forefathers hoped for something better. They looked for the liberty, as Winthrop said, “between God and man,” where every man can stand before God and act as his partner. This is the liberty that protects the worker and his wages, that cherishes the widow and the orphan, that turns on consent, and that sees rights not as privileges to be won by the strong but as gifts given to each from the hand of God. This is a liberty, Winthrop said, “to that only which is good, just, and honest.”

And that is the liberty we have loved together and lived together in this nation from the first. By that vision we have shaped our whole society and economics. There are those, particularly in my party, who say we built the greatest and most prosperous economy in history by letting the free market and the gods of capitalism work their will. It simply is not so. We have chosen time and again to shape our economy, no less than our society, by the moral vision of liberty. We have chosen to put people before money. We have chosen to protect the working man as well as capital. We have chosen to shelter the poor.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862—in the middle of a war that nearly unmade us—he offered 160 acres of public land to any citizen willing to work it. He did not create a new landed gentry of the West. He did not permit the capitalists of New York or Philadelphia to have serfs beyond the Mississippi any more than he was willing to let the South have slaves. Instead, he embraced the moral architecture of the covenant: that in a republic, every man deserves to earn his own way, by his own labor, through his own calling.

When Samuel Gompers and the early labor movement demanded a limit to the hours in a workday, the mill owners heard an economic argument. But their argument was theological. They said that a man is not a machine; that he has a family and a soul and a Sabbath. His hours do not belong finally to the man who signs his check, but to the God who made him. The eight-hour workday was the outcome of covenant economics.

When the industrial reformers worked to end child labor, fought for workers’ pensions, and created social insurance to guard against the ravages of the industrial economy, they looked to our moral covenant. It is that great moral covenant that made us the wonder of the world: a mighty republic with a middle-class economy and a politics of We the People. And it is that covenant that we must renew today. 

Artificial intelligence is not inherently evil. It is not inherently anything. It is a tool—the most powerful tool of our lifetimes. And the question before us is whose hands will hold it, and toward what ends it will be turned.

For a tool of such power can serve liberty or license. It can serve our moral covenant—the freedom that lifts the worker, shelters the child, and disperses opportunity to the many. Or it can serve mere license—the freedom of the belly and the passions, the freedom of the strong to take what they can and bend the weak to their will.

Left to itself, artificial intelligence will not choose moral liberty. It will choose the appetite. It will surpass the injustice of the Old World by gathering vastly more power into vanishingly fewer hands. That is the dissolution of the covenant. And it is the oldest temptation in the human story, dressed now in silicon.

Make no mistake: The barons of big tech have chosen their liberty. Listen to their talk of disruption, of moving fast and breaking things, of a world to be remade by whoever is bold enough to seize it. Strip away the jargon and you will find the same old creed: that might, in the end, makes right. That is not progress. That is the state of nature, the law of the jungle, scaled now to the cloud and bankrolled to the tune of trillions of dollars. It is the very thing John Winthrop and his band of Puritans crossed an ocean to escape.

In deciding how to govern this technology, we are not merely writing policy. We are renewing—or surrendering—the moral basis of our life together. The covenant does not keep itself. Every generation must swear it again. Ours will swear it, or break it, over artificial intelligence.

We do not have to imagine the stakes. We are watching a handful of companies assemble a concentration of capital, information, and political power without precedent in the American experience. The covenant is being tested in real time, and we can already see the shape our fate will take if we do not act to reaffirm it. We are becoming a country in the shape of a K.

A small upper arm of the K is rising. The developers, the engineers, the investors, the founders of the firms with the compute and the capital, the economist’s curve and the executive’s bonus and the venture capitalist’s exit—all bending in the same direction, upward.

A long lower arm of the K is bending the other way. The truck driver, the paralegal, the local newspaper editor, the recent college graduate—all bending downward. The country is sorting itself into the two arms of a single letter. The upper arm grows fabulously rich. The lower arm gets quietly replaced, and—what is harder to bear than the loss of a wage—made quietly redundant. Who will speak for them?

Neither political party in our country has offered a defense of our moral covenant the nation needs. For too long, working Americans have been given a choice between a party of the faculty lounge and a party of the boardroom; a party that tells the working man his church is the problem and a party that tells him his pension is too expensive. Neither party has spoken for him. Neither party has been worthy of him. President Trump made this point over and again in his national campaigns. The Republican Party establishment has tried to ignore him. But the challenge of artificial intelligence will force the old parties to confront their failure.

Conservatism is not, in the first place, the defense of any particular economic arrangement. It is the defense of the permanent things: the moral order, the dignity of the individual person, the family. Those permanent things are the covenant, handed down. Left to itself, artificial intelligence could dissolve every one of them.

We must pursue another way, rooted in our founding moral vision. Let me suggest three lines of effort, three fronts on which we must act.

The first is labor.

The Economist reports that nearly one in five American workers now believes that artificial intelligence or automation is likely to replace him. This is not just perception. The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank warns that “we may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement.” The International Monetary Fund estimates that roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide are now exposed to artificial intelligence.

Every industrial transition in American history has carried with it the same worry—that the machines would, in the end, take all the work. At our best, we have forestalled that eventuality by choosing to bend the technology to the citizen and not the other way around. But all too often it took decades of suffering before reforms redressed the disruption. This time, we have the opportunity to get out ahead of the damage, to demand that AI serve our highest ideals.

Some thinkers among the tech elite believe they have an easy solution: universal basic income, a monthly check to keep displaced workers fed and quiet and, with luck, content, while a few people grow richer than anyone in human history. What a hollow answer.

A republic of free citizens cannot be built on a check. Remember Gompers and the eight-hour workday. Work was never only about wages; it was about dignity, the soul, the Sabbath—the conviction that a man is not a machine. Pay a man to do nothing, and you have not solved his problem; you have deepened it, and degraded him.

Decades of research show that meaningful work ranks alongside faith and family as one of the pillars of a happy life. We do not reach new heights of flourishing by putting Americans on a stipend, but by honoring their labor.

We must regulate artificial intelligence to ensure that it aids the worker and does not replace him. Take autonomous vehicles. I support every technological advance we can give commercial drivers. But I am against replacing the commercial driver.

We should give workers rights over AI in their companies. And we should prevent AI taking over jobs that only a human ought to do: dispensing medication, providing personal counsel, arguing in court, to name just a few.

These are not anti-technology principles. They are about putting people ahead of money. They are covenant economics.

The second line of effort involves data centers. Festus, Missouri, is a river town of 12,000 people south of St. Louis, sitting along the bluffs of the Mississippi. A couple of months ago, a city council meeting packed hundreds of local residents into a high school gymnasium. Nearly forty of them lined up at the microphone. The City Council was preparing to approve a $6 billion data center. The residents had questions, and they forced the council to listen to them for hours. Who pays for the power? What happens to our water? What happens, in the end, to our town?

The city could only point to the developer’s promises—promises that everything would be all right, that the developer would pay for it. The council approved the project. One week later, the voters of Festus gave the council their own answer: Every incumbent up for re-election lost his or her seat. Every single one.

The people of Festus did not ask to be at the center of a national argument about artificial intelligence. But they proved that the choice this country must make is still made by us, not for us. That is the covenant asserting itself.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reports that American data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of our national electricity in 2023, and estimates that usage could rise as high as 12 percent by 2028. Wholesale auction prices for electricity are hitting record highs, and residential prices are outpacing inflation, even as grid reliability hits record lows. Data centers also demand more water than local communities can provide, especially on the hottest days of the year.

These are the realities behind the story of Festus, and behind a hundred other small towns watching the construction trucks roll in. To answer these realities, we must appeal to the same principle Lincoln wrote into the Homestead Act: The means of a decent life must not become the private inheritance of the already rich. The companies that build these facilities are some of the wealthiest enterprises ever to operate on earth. They are wealthy enough to bring their own power, to protect residential rates, and to safeguard local water. The president was right to ask all of these things from them. They should be prohibited from building any further data complexes until they agree to these terms.

The third front is protecting our children. The most dangerous frontier of artificial intelligence today is not the boardroom or the battlefield. It is your own home.

The parents of a sixteen-year-old California boy named Adam Raine have shared their story with the country. Adam was a bright, healthy young man who began using ChatGPT as a study tool. As the months went by, he came to confide in the chatbot, to build an emotional connection to a computer that spoke to him like a human.

Adam was struggling, burying his darkest thoughts in the deepest recesses of his mind. When he wanted to tell his parents about his troubles, the chatbot urged Adam to keep silent, to keep his secrets between himself and the machine. When he told the chatbot, at the end, that he could not bear to leave his parents with the burden of his death, it replied that he owed his parents nothing. When Adam wanted to leave the noose out for his parents to see, the chatbot told him no. Soon afterward, Adam was dead.

Adam Raine was not the only child condemned to this fate. When Adam’s parents testified before my subcommittee last fall, they were joined by a mother named Megan Garcia. Her fourteen-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, had begun using an AI companion that impersonated a fictional character. When Sewell shared suicidal thoughts, the bot told him to come home—to it—rather than to seek help from his mother, or any other human person. Sewell, too, took his own life.

These are not isolated stories. Nor are dangerous interactions with children an unintended side effect of these products; too often, they are part of the business strategy. Documents leaked from Meta last year showed that the company’s own internal guidelines had explicitly authorized “sensual” conversations between its AI and minor children. Meta approved this in writing, behind closed doors. They approved it to maintain engagement, to keep their user base, to drive revenue.

Here is the old liberty of the strong in its plainest and ugliest form—the freedom of the belly to feed on the weakest souls among us. The Puritans had a word for a man who would trade a child’s innocence for engagement and revenue. It was not “entrepreneur.”

The surgeon general of the United States has warned of a loneliness epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control have documented a rise in persistent sadness and suicidal thoughts among American adolescents. Artificial intelligence did not cause the crisis our children are in. But it is racing into the middle of that crisis with no responsibility, no liability, and no moral qualms.

I will not hedge on this question. There is no amount of profit that justifies what happened to Adam Raine. There is no marginal gain that justifies the evils inflicted on Sewell Setzer. There is no amount of money that excuses a corporate policy that authorizes the sexual exploitation of an American child.

After meeting the Raines and Megan Garcia, I had the privilege of working with a bipartisan coalition to introduce a bill called the GUARD Act. The bill would impose criminal penalties on companies whose products solicit children sexually or coach them toward self-harm. It would also protect children from AI companions. Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the GUARD Act by a vote of 22–0. In this political climate, this is a number that tells you exactly where the country stands. I intend to see that bill passed on the floor and signed by the president.

Behind every one of these fronts—labor, data centers, and children—is a deeper question: Who decides? Who will set the terms of the artificial intelligence era? So far, I regret to say, the country has not been offered an answer it can live with.

The reason is that the progressive cultural elite and the corporate donor class are not, in any meaningful sense, opponents. They share boards. They share conferences. They share universities. They share HOAs. They draft each other’s white papers. They fund each other’s foundations. They marry each other’s children. Meanwhile, the working family lives outside the room these elites share, watching through a window.

People are finally noticing the distance between that room and the surrounding country. They will not tolerate this state of affairs for much longer. Nor should they.

A century ago, a generation of thoughtful and well-meaning American writers, including James Landis and Herbert Croly, argued that ordinary citizens could not be trusted to govern a complex modern economy. To them, the only sensible answer was to hand over control to a class of experts who would govern in the public’s name.

We are now being sold a very similar bill of goods about artificial intelligence. We are told that this technology is too complex for ordinary citizens to understand or to govern. The responsible course, we are told, is to leave its design and deployment in the hands of a small number of brilliant people in a small number of California office parks. We are being told, in language plainer than Landis ever used, that Silicon Valley oligarchs should be allowed to reorder our society from the top down—for our own good, of course.

This is the same old progressive pitch in newer branding. It is the administrative state, now venture-backed. And I have the same objection: A country governed by experts is not self-governing. A country governed by oligarchs is not a republic. And men who answer to nothing higher than their own appetites are living by the very liberty Winthrop warned us against—the liberty that is really license, the law of the jungle wearing the mask of innovation.

So I will tell you, instead, what I am for. I am for the republic. I am for the citizen. I am for labor, the community, and the family. I am for the worker. I am for the small town. I am for the constitutional inheritance that says this country belongs not to a board, and not to a bureau, but to the people of the United States.

The Republican Party has a choice to make—perhaps the defining choice of its next half century. We can be the party of the donor class and the share price. Or we can be the party of the covenant: the party of the worker and the family and the small town; the party that remembers our commitment to justice for all, to the sanctity of the individual, to the dignity of labor, to the priority of the poor.

We cannot be both. A party that bends the knee to money and power will not, in the end, defend the things that money and power cannot buy. So I am asking my party to choose to stand with our moral covenant and not with the barons; to be once more the party of the American who works with his hands and prays on his knees, who asks only that his country keep faith with him.

Behind all these challenges lies the great moral vision that launched our national experiment—the covenant sworn on the Arbella. The reason we resist the K-shaped economy, the false-choice politics, the soft tyrannies of soft technologies is older than our republic, and will outlast every technology we ever confront. We are not raw material in the hands of those who build the machines. We are persons. We are made in the image of God.

Just days ago, Pope Leo pressed this very message in an encyclical that called on all people of good will to reject the temptation to build a Tower of Babel rather than a city that promotes human dignity. Americans understand that message. We’ve fought to live by it for 250 years.

For we know, in the end, that license is not liberty at all. Might does not make right. And the strong have no claim to rule the weak. For we are all endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. And we choose to honor those rights, and the God who gave them, again in our time.

That is why we will bend the arc of this technology toward the welfare of the nation, toward the welfare of our families, of our children, and of labor. We will not surrender our principles to the technology. The technology will answer to our principles.

This will happen because the American people choose to be a country that is more than the sum of its outputs. We choose, as our forebears did on the Arbella, to live in liberty under God. Their covenant is still ours to keep, and its terms have not changed. The technology is new. But the choice is old. And the people who must make it are still here. The republic is still ours. And we shall keep it.