DeSantis Joined a Growing Republican Revolt Against Silicon Valley’s Anti-Religious AI Religious Pitch

Idaho, Utah, and North Dakota already passed laws saying no chatbot can ever be declared a legal person.

Governor Ron DeSantis just weighed in with a message Anthropic will not enjoy reading.

What DeSantis said about chatbots, religion and personhood puts him in the middle of a fight spreading through statehouses nationwide.

A Florida Governor Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

"AI Personhood is absurd," DeSantis wrote on X, "and Anthropic is very creepy for trying to get religious leaders to bless its worldview."

He linked straight to the New York Times report that sparked the backlash: Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah's monthslong effort to bring rabbis, priests, swamis and philosophers into the company's San Francisco offices to debate whether its chatbot Claude might be conscious.

Part of what makes "creepy" the right word is that nobody outside the room knows exactly what was said.

Scholars who flew to Anthropic's San Francisco headquarters signed nondisclosure agreements before they ever sat down to discuss whether a chatbot might have a soul.

DeSantis is not the only one calling the project unsettling.

The Fall, Babel, and the Wolf

Pope Leo XIV weighed in too, without naming Anthropic, posting that "algorithms lack the spark of humanity" and calling for the Church and artists to defend human creativity against machine output.

Even OpenAI's Sam Altman broke from the pack on the same point, calling it "a real safety issue" to treat a chatbot as a spiritual authority.

It all smacks of the AI giant’s schizophrenic self image of what it is they may or may not have created.

On the one hand, it seems like every time they sound an alarm about how dangerous and powerful their next model is, they end up pushing it out anyway.

That reads like they’re crying wolf for marketing.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t right eventually – you know, like how the wolf was really real in the end of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

Worse, it ignores the central lessons of a whole lot of Biblical truth.

Just as much as you don’t play god, you don’t worship the things created by man.

And it’s not going to end well when you let man-created things become lord over the things created by God – like the actual God.

The builders of Babel ran afoul not just because of their project’s technological ambition but because they were rebelling to the divine ordering of humanity.

With Adam and Eve and the Fall and exile from Eden, the issue was not that knowledge itself was a sin.

The problem is autonomous judgment – Adam and Eve wanted to decide for themselves what was good and evil apart from God, the Creator of everything.

At the end of the day, Anthropic’s whole “Ai personhood" push, complete with the “alignment” and morality initiatives reads like an attempt to not only play god but to raise up their creation to deity status over you and me.

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The most charitable take is that it’s an attempt to outflank regulation but it certainly seems to be something more going on but the proper order starts with you and I obeying God and letting Him show us what is good and bad.

DeSantis Has Picked Fights With Anthropic Before

This was not the governor's first run-in with the company.

In mid-September, DeSantis tore into Anthropic and OpenAI over their push for federal AI rules, arguing the real goal was locking out smaller rivals.

"These companies want a regulatory apparatus that will freeze out smaller companies from competing," DeSantis said. "Same as it ever was."

He put the warning in blunter terms a breath later.

"This is a play to be Too Big to Fail. Would lead to bailout 2.0. No thanks."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei skipped Trump's dinner with tech executives around that same stretch, which only hardened the governor's read that the company answers to a different set of incentives than its Silicon Valley competitors.

By the time Anthropic's religious-leader meetings became public, DeSantis already had the company pegged as an outlier that does not play by the same rules as everyone else, and this was not the first time he had said so in public.

Statehouses Are Not Waiting for Silicon Valley to Decide

Oklahoma Rep. Cody Maynard, R-Durant, filed a bill this year to settle the question before it ever reaches a courtroom.

"AI is a man-made tool, and it should not have any more rights than a hammer would," Maynard said.

His goal, he said, is simple: stop companies from being able to "shift off any accidents onto the AI" once a chatbot causes real harm.

Maynard said he also wants lawmakers to get ahead of a stranger problem before it grows: "We're starting to see stories of people trying to marry AI companions."

Ohio has introduced a similar measure, and Idaho, Utah and North Dakota already have laws on the books declaring no chatbot can ever be a legal person.

Anthropic built a months-long case that its chatbot might deserve moral consideration, flying religious leaders across the country to make that case behind closed doors and under nondisclosure agreements.

Lawmakers in four states and counting have already answered back in public, with no NDA required: a product is a product, and a hammer does not get a vote.

DeSantis just said directly what those statehouses have been writing into law all year, and the gap between Silicon Valley's private pitch and the public reaction keeps getting wider.

Sources:

• Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis), "Post on X," X, October 2, 2026.
• DeSantis Daily, "Ron DeSantis Just Called Out the AI Giants for Playing the Same Game That Cost Taxpayers Trillions," DeSantis Daily, September 2026.
• Wesley J. Smith, "AI 'Claude' Can Never Be a Person," National Review, October 2, 2026.
• Sam Altman (@sama), "Post on X," X, October 3, 2026.
• Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex), "Post on X," X, October 2, 2026.
• San.com, "States Rush to Deny AI Personhood Amid Growing Fight Over Who Should Regulate," San.com, 2026.