Why We Need a Separation of AI Church and State

Professor Margaret Hu of William & Mary Law School argues for a separation of AI and state, drawing parallels between medieval church coinage and modern AI tokens. She warns that AI labs, like the medieval church, control minting, salvation, and morality, creating a dangerous trinity that requires external intervention to disestablish.

Margaret Hu https://law2.wm.edu/faculty/bios/fulltime/mhu05.php has been making this argument for years, before I caught up to it. She is a professor of law at William and Mary, directs the Digital Democracy Lab, and has testified before Congress https://law.wm.edu/news/stories/2025/william-mary-professor-margaret-hu-serves-as-expert-witness-on-national-security-data-privacy-and-ai-before-u.s-house-committee.php on AI regulation. She just mentioned the separation of AI Church and State has been a rising topic for several years, most recently on the Federal Newswire podcast. She pointed out separation of Church and State rhymes with separation of AI and State. The Church minted the coin and then charged for salvation. The labs mint the token and charge for salvation. Same institutional makeup, eight centuries apart. That got me thinking: | Church Coin | AI Token | | |---|---|---| The instrument | Placed on the altar | Submitted via API | Who mints | Empire grants it, commune holds it, the Church absorbs it and the ius monetae | Booked twice The salvation sold The half you can audit 70,000 coins https://www.khm.uio.no/english/research/projects/previous-projects/religion-and-money/church-and-money/ found beneath Scandinavian church floors Amazon’s 16.8 billion dollar mark https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-ai-money-loop-where-one-dollar-can-be-booked-twice/ , booked in the open The half you cannot The trinity Where This Ends is Ugly An institution that mints the money, sells the salvation, and writes the morality of money holds all three levers with no independence or separation. Nothing inside would work to pry them apart. The medieval version did not reform by memo. It was Luther who nailed the indulgence https://www.britannica.com/event/Ninety-five-Theses the AI double-booking of his day to a door in 1517. Then a brutal correction unfolded over the next hundred and thirty years. Princes seized the mints and the monastery lands. The wars of religion ran into the Thirty Years War https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War , which emptied as much as a third of the German lands in the worst regions. The act of “disestablishment” prying mint and salvation away from the sword was Westphalia in 1648 https://www.britannica.com/event/Peace-of-Westphalia . The AI labs clearly are bringing back the trinity and infusing it into the state: we just saw an export ban on who may run a model https://www.flyingpenguin.com/trump-abruptly-bans-foreigners-using-anthropics-top-models/ , we just saw empty warehouses permitted as datacenters and ruled as critical infrastructure https://www.flyingpenguin.com/paid-in-full-the-data-center-economy-and-the-criminalized-protester/ , with the national-security frame doing all the consecrating. They may as well say national holiness. Elon Musk may as well be called the holy emperor of SpaceX. History is blunt about the very high price of undoing the collapse. Elon Musk isn’t going to disestablish himself any sooner than he will admit he isn’t going to achieve driverless by 2017 or land on Mars by 2018. Someone has to seize the AI token dies, before more people die from AI.