At the height of the Cold War, the conservative magazine National Review, sold buttons that read “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” The catchphrase, adapted from the philosopher Eric Voegelin, enjoined Americans to look askance at utopian promises and grand projects of social transformation.
Half a century later, the Republican Party has placed itself at the forefront of a project aimed at immanentizing a digital eschaton. On May 22, 2025, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives quietly voted to bar US states from regulating artificial intelligence. Buried in the “Big Beautiful Bill” was a 10-year moratorium on enforcing state AI regulations, in effect preventing states from regulating or restricting AI. Before that, New York and half a dozen other states had been gearing up to pass transparency regulations. If the clause survives the Senate, these will be blocked by the federal government with hardly any congressional debate.
This embrace of unregulated AI points to an intellectual contradiction on the contemporary right. While some conservatives are skeptical of AI, the Tech Right has in its ranks a number of AI millenarians who assure us that accelerating technological progress will bring about heaven on earth. They welcome the future envisioned by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who suggests that it might be optimal to strike a bargain in which 99.99 percent of resources are given over to digital minds, since the latter’s intellectual superiority over mere humans ensures they will dispose of those resources more prudently. Bostrom isn’t a fringe figure. His Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University received donations from Elon Musk and other industry notables. Sam Altman of OpenAI, who earlier this year joined forces with President Trump to launch the $500 billion Stargate Initiative, promises to build a “magic intelligence in the sky.”
Even more radical ideas are being floated by AI successionists, who go so far as to propose that AI should replace humanity altogether. Prominent figures in tech have endorsed this view. In a talk at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2023, Rich Sutton, the first advisor of Google Deepmind, declared, “I don’t think we should fear succession. I think we should not resist it. We should embrace it and prepare for it.” Former Google CEO Larry Page has likewise claimed that the replacement of humans with artificial intelligence “would simply be the next stage of evolution.”
A conservative disposition should—to say the least—incline one to be wary of this sort of secular eschatology. Conservative sage Russell Kirk cautioned against embracing the “cult of Progress” that venerates the new simply because of its novelty. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott similarly reminded conservatives to prefer “present laughter to utopian bliss.” What would these thinkers say to today’s GOP, which is coming to the aid of technologists who openly pursue millenarian goals?
“AI models are doubling in scale roughly every nine months.”
At current rates, AI models are doubling in scale roughly every nine months. Under the moratorium in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” states will have no power to touch systems potentially a thousand times more potent than GPT-4 until at least 2035. And conservatives should know better than anyone the risks of leaving the power to respond politically to this evolving situation solely in the hands of the federal government.
Republicans rightfully fear the red-tape and regulatory capture that often follow broad interventions into the market, but they have always been willing to support targeted regulations on emerging technologies in the interest of prudence. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prevented this new technology from being used to discriminate against individuals in the workplace and insurance market. In the early days of the internet, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to regulate the data that websites collected from children under the age of 13. And in 2018, when foreign capital began quietly buying stakes in American firms working on AI chips and quantum technology, President Trump signed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act which expanded CFIUS’s authority to block deals involving “critical technologies,” imposing prudent restrictions without enfeebling the entire sector.
Even Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, has called the moratorium “far too blunt an instrument,” because “AI is advancing too head-spinningly fast.” Amodei has impeccable pro-AI credentials: He has predicted that “AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.” What does it mean that the Republican Party’s AI stance is more extreme than Amodei’s?
Congress could easily correct course by rewriting the clause so the moratorium expires after two years. If AI progress really moves as quickly as its boosters claim—and as some of its detractors fear—lawmakers should be forced to keep pace. Republicans can preserve corporate freedoms and keep America’s lead in AI, while also addressing real concerns about safety.
But slowing the reckless march toward the digital eschaton also requires that traditional conservatives reclaim their own heritage of endorsing measured and incremental progress guided by tradition. They should consider Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1867—while defending the Second Reform Act amid the wider social turmoil of industrial Britain—observed that “change is constant; the great question is not whether we resist the inevitable, but whether that change is carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people.” These may be old words, but they are perfectly suited to the age of artificial intelligence.