Consider two snapshots of America in 2026. Sam Altman — CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT — holds a personal fortune estimated at $3.3 billion, a 21-acre Hawaii estate listed at $49 million, a $27 million San Francisco mansion, and a 950-acre Napa Valley ranch. His company recently raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. Standing before BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit, Altman declared that intelligence is now “a utility, like electricity or water” — and that people will buy it from his company on a meter.

Now consider a different American. In a BuzzFeed account published last October, one of hundreds of workers described the fallout in eleven words that say more than any policy brief could: “They automated my job for less than $1,000 a year. Now, I bartend and drive school buses to make ends meet.”

That gap — between the man pricing intelligence like a utility from his Napa ranch and the man driving a school bus to pay rent — is not an accident of the market. It is a design feature of an industry that has accumulated staggering wealth while offloading its consequences onto Americans who had no seat at the table when the decisions were made. The backlash building across this country should surprise no one.

The numbers confirm what kitchen tables have known for months. An Economist/YouGov survey finds that more than 70% of Americans believe AI is advancing too fast — including 68% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats. That is not an ideological grievance. It is a national verdict. Gallup reports that only 18% of young people ages 14 to 29 say they feel hopeful about AI. Negative views have surged from 34 percent three years ago to over 50% today. In Hill County, Texas, commissioners voted 3–2 to place a one-year moratorium on data center construction after eight facilities were slated for unincorporated areas. Morgan Stanley analysts now identify public pushback as a “binding constraint” on the industry’s buildout. Ordinary Americans showing up at county commission meetings are materially slowing the juggernaut.

In my 2025 book “AI for Mankind’s Future,” I warned that the pace of AI development was outrunning the public’s ability to evaluate its long-term consequences — that the industry’s promotional language conceals deep human costs: social fragmentation, economic disruption, and the concentration of power into fewer hands. That warning no longer reads like a warning. Americans are living it.

America has seen this before. The original Gilded Age robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — built infrastructure that transformed the country while concentrating wealth with minimal accountability and reshaping communities without consent. They required decades of political correction before ordinary Americans recovered meaningful ground. The AI elite are repeating that pattern at digital speed, with larger reach and less transparency.

The Klarna story is the parable the industry does not want to tell. In 2024, Klarna’s CEO publicly boasted that AI was doing the work of 700 employees, saving the company millions. By early 2026, Klarna was quietly reversing course — rehiring human workers after customer satisfaction collapsed. The CEO admitted: “Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor… what you end up having is lower quality.” The 700 displaced workers had no option for a quiet reversal. Their wages were gone. Their careers were disrupted. The CEO’s balance sheet recovered. Theirs did not. That is not a business problem. It is a moral one.

A federal trial over OpenAI’s internal conduct revealed something no corporate spin can fix: some of the men leading the future of artificial intelligence appear unable to govern themselves with basic honesty and transparency. The issue goes beyond legality. Why are people of this character leading a trillion-dollar industry that could reshape the lives of hundreds of millions? No regulatory framework can enforce character. This one demands it.

In “The New AI Cold War,” published this year, I argued that the gravest domestic danger from artificial intelligence is not malfunction — it is the concentration of cognitive infrastructure in private hands that answer to shareholders, not citizens. What Altman describes as selling intelligence “on a meter” is, stripped of its Silicon Valley framing, a feudal arrangement: access to the basic tools of economic participation controlled by men who answer to no one.

Scripture does not blink at this. James 5:1–6 speaks with the precision of a prophet who has seen this pattern before: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. … Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.” James was not writing to subsistence farmers. He was writing to a generation that watched concentrated wealth extract value from ordinary labor while insulating itself from accountability. When a career is automated away for under $1,000 a year, and the CEO reports the savings to analysts without visible concern, those withheld wages cry out. Scripture says they reach the ears of the Lord of hosts. That is not poetry. It is theology with consequences.

Jeremiah 22:13 delivers the verdict: “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages.” The prophet addressed a king who built grandly while laborers went uncompensated. The architecture has changed. The principle has not.

The church cannot watch this moment from the sidelines. When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a 2026 commencement address by students inheriting his industry’s consequences, he acknowledged it plainly: “There is a fear in your generation that you are inheriting a mess you did not create.” That instinct is a moral signal. Christians have an obligation to name what it signals — and act on it. Attend the public meetings where AI contracts and infrastructure decisions are made. Press elected officials for honest answers about who bears costs and who captures benefits. Speak the language of human dignity in every venue. The AI industry’s growth projections treat people as variables. Scripture does not.

Technology is not going away, and neither is the image of God in every human life. When the two collide, those who stand on Scripture know which has eternal value — and which does not.