The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Monday, September 28, 2026

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:13 – 09:38)That’s a Wrap on President Trump’s Visit with Xi Jinping: What Happened? What Do We Now Know?Part II (09:38 – 16:51)Bill Gates on A.I.: The Founder of Microsoft Just Made One of the Biggest Category Errors PossiblePart III (16:51 – 19:58)The Morality of the Terminator: Who is the Moral Agent Responsible If A.I. Terminates Humanity?How Three Times Tech Journalists Make Sense of A.I.’s Promise and Peril by The New York Times (Megan DiTrolio)Part IV (19:58 – 25:40)King Charles III Weighs in on A.I.: This Was a PseudoeventKing Charles III Urges AI Chiefs to Stop Tech Going Rogue by The Wall Street Journal (Max Colchester and Jenny Strasburg)Sign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Monday, September 28, 2006. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. So much going on as we come out of the weekend, much speculation, of course, much conversation about the summit meeting that was held in Washington, D.C. between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, it was, in effect, a state visit. It was a very formal state visit. It came with all the trappings of a state visit. And one of the most important things to recognize is that President Trump, and he went overboard on this, really sought to make very clear that the United States sees China as a pure nation. Now, that is really, really important when it comes to the Chinese, Chinese pride, China's understanding of its place in history. What we now know that we did not go into the weekend is how the Chinese press has been responding to all of this. one of the biggest issues that has caught the attention of the Chinese press. And remember,

this is a government-controlled press. So this is, in effect, government propaganda. One of the big things they have talked about is the fact that President Trump, for the first time, went to the tarmac in order to greet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president when he arrived. We talked about the fact that that was very rare in American diplomacy. Previously, only some presidents in the past who did such things, for instance, when the Pope visited. When a president goes and greets a president goes and greets a a visiting head of state at the tarmac. This is a seismic event. Now, one of the things to keep in mind is that in the business, in the craft of state craft, a part of what you have to do is figure out exactly how to use this particular asset and when to use this particular asset. The point is

President Trump gave President Xi Jinping and his wife one of the most historic state visits in terms of just pulling out all the stops. And in the American diplomatic, toolkit, there really isn't much left. Now, that's very interesting because the biggest headlines coming out of this meeting is the fact that the meetings were basically inconclusive. There were some trade arrangements and some other things. But when it comes to the big issues where you have the United States and China facing off, it doesn't appear there was much progress made at all. Now, in the business of diplomacy and in the business of statecraft, one of the things that, from an historical perspective, you have to recognize is that sometimes nothing is better

than something. When you think of what comes out of a meeting, nothing is sometimes better than something. Better, no deal on many issues rather than a bad deal. And what we really don't know, we're not privy to the private conversations between the president of the United States and the president of China, who of course is also ahead of the Communist Party there, you can bet on the fact that once again, as we discussed last week, China really always believes that time is on its side. If China feels an urgency, that's a very rare historic occasion. China takes a very long view of history. And they look at the United States as a very young nation, indeed, an infant or a toddler

nation at best, and they look at their long centuries, very long centuries, over a millennium of history, and they compare that to the United States. And we look like a young upstart, a usurper of sorts. China sees itself as the center of the world's system. and it is not going to be satisfied until the rest of the world comes to share that conclusion. Needless to say, the United States of America is not going to be in agreement with that thesis. Furthermore, when you look at other nations around the world, one of the things we see is that when you consider foreign policy, you consider the power, national power, there are, and I'm sure you've heard this before, two forms of power. Hard power, that's basic military and economic power, but then also soft power, cultural power.

In cultural power, there is no power like the United States of America. Now, Christians looking at that recognize that's not always something we're proud of, but when it comes to cultural power, the United States has that cultural power on the world stage. And by the way, that was one of the major issues, even during the time of the Cold War, with the United States facing off against communism in the form of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union contributed virtually nothing to popular culture worldwide. And you had even young people on Russian streets at least trying to listen to American music. Again, a very mixed concern when it comes to Christians in the United States. Much of that was rock and roll. And you could say worse when it comes to some of the things that

America exports in public culture and public products. But the fact is that this is one of the big issues. When you look at the relationship now between the United States and China, you don't have a lot of, let's just say Chinese cultural influence in the United States. You have a lot of American cultural influence in China. But when it comes to hard power, that's where China has been really investing in all kinds of new technologies, new missile systems, new defense systems, new aircraft, new aircraft carriers, the whole thing. And so we're also looking at the fact that one of the big issues that is coming out of this, and we'll be talking about this later this week, is that what had been a major contest between the United States and China,

when it comes to influence on planet Earth, that battle for influence is now being extended into outer space. And there is some very interesting background material to that. We'll be talking about later this week. Some big headlines that have come and certainly will be coming in days and months ahead. All right. The other big issue is connected to the Chinese president's visit, and that's the issue of artificial intelligence. Now, just playing out the issue, the way it plays out right now, the United States, and you have the technology giants here in the United States in the field of artificial intelligence. I'm not going to name them. You basically know who they are. You know the controversies here over whether artificial intelligence are going to kill humanity. But let's just

put as if it makes any sense. Just put a pause on that for a moment. When it comes to the juxtaposition between the United States and China, you have most analysts believing that China is behind. And as a matter of fact, if you look at the kinds of estimates that are made, there are, a lot of claims that China's basically a year behind, but that could be just a matter of months behind. And we're looking at a field that is being transformed so fast that a month can seem like a decade. And so one of the big dangers for the United States is that we would lose the lead. And in this case, the lead's not just about commercial products being sold. It's not just about artificial intelligence platforms.

It is about world power and about who will control or who will try to control artificial intelligence. And this is where you have the Chinese and the... Americans not only left as the only two rivals in this. And so, by the way, a lot of the conversation, I looked pretty carefully at the European press over the course of the last several days. And the frustration in European capitals is that the conversation about artificial intelligence really is between the United States and China. Not so much the rest of the world. The rest of the world peripheral when it comes to much of this issue. I don't say that as an insult to the rest of the world. It is just a fact that what you have are these private firms in the United States,

sometimes with a lot of government support. And then in China, you have state industries that are pushing this so hard. And so you also have some other things that come into play. The United States has chips. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but has processing chips that are absolutely able to power some of these modern platforms and in a way that Chinese chips cannot. And so China wants access to those highly powered chips. On the other hand, China has a lot of control over rare earths, and that also is very much a part just to the fact that these chips themselves have to have some of these elements and some of these materials in them.

And so you really do have kind of a classic face-off. And the face-off, the conversations between the Chinese president and the American president, didn't appear to reach any kind of conclusion on this whatsoever. And it was interesting, by the way, that no tech executives from China accompanied the Chinese president on the state visit to the United States. But President Trump invited the Titans of Silicon Valley to attend the state dinner and other events. That just tells you something of how the two cultures are very different. All right. But on the issue of artificial intelligence, you know, there is so much coming out right now. And a lot of it has to do with whether or not artificial intelligence poses a threat to the very existence of humanity.

And as you know, this has been a discussion point over the last two or three weeks now. And by the time we get to, say, Sunday's weekend editions for the big newspapers and all the rest of the Sunday morning talk shows, this is now just a part of the cultural conversation. Now, there are some interesting observations being made. One of them is that a similar kind of warning came just a matter of about 18 months ago. And before that, a similar kind of warning came about five years ago. And a similar kind of warning came about 10 years ago. that's not to discount the warning. It is to say, you know, things like this have been heard before. And as a matter of fact, I have documented some of this in a book project already.

But you also have other people, including insiders who are saying, no, this is different. And we've said it was different before, but it's really different now. And so with warnings such as we had in the past, with people saying that, you know, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. And then with, you know, people leaving the field and saying that there's at least a 10% chance that artificial intelligence will lead to the demise of humanity, the extinction, some are saying of humanity. I want to turn to something else. There's just so much confusion here, and this is such an important issue. I don't want to talk about it every day, but right now it's very much a part of the daily conversation. And what I want us to look at is when something really significant happens,

when something is said that matters. And so I want to point to something that was said Sunday morning, and I think this really matters. I was able to get a transcript of Meet the Press, the addition from Sunday morning, September 27, 2006. Of course, this is the venerable program, part of television history, and it, of course, is part of NBC News. And it was a conversation between the program's host, Kristen Welker, and Bill Gates,

the founder of Microsoft, of course, in the headlines for all kinds of reasons over the course of recent years. All right, she asked Bill Gates, how serious are the risks posed by AI, do you believe? Okay, now, it's not so much the risk of AI that's a part of Bill Gates' answer

that I want you to hear. I want you to hear exactly what he said. He said, quote, well, AI is not just a new technology, and that's why people who say, okay, past technologies, there was all this worry, and you know, by and large, it all worked out. So maybe this time all the warnings that we have to shape it intentionally are unnecessary. Then he said this, quote, this is truly an evolutionary event. You know, we have created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are, And over the next several years, at kind of exponentially improving level, will be insanely smarter than we are. You know, the ability to transfer knowledge, there's no sort of individual boundaries like humans having to educate each other. He continues, so I can't say strongly enough how much society, not just the companies, but every academic think tank, voter, policymaker, need to really engage on how we want to shape this technology.

You know, there's no such thing as being too focused on accelerating the good potential and minimizing some truly horrific bad things that could happen. Okay, he says that the bad things that could happen, he doesn't think it's a total extinction event for humanity, because he said it's pretty hard to get to 100%. But he said, still, it could kill over a billion people and that's significant. I'm not discounting that at all. But what I want to point to is the statement in the middle of what Bill Gates had to say there, quote, you know we have created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are. Okay, this is a category error. and it is one of the worst category errors of which human beings can ever be guilty. What you have here is the category error of talking about artificial intelligence as a species.

Bill Gates said it out loud. I heard it. I was so concerned about it. I got a transcript. Quote, this is truly an evolutionary event. You know, we have created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are. Now, the word species is most commonly used and has been for the last three or 400 years about biological realities. The definition of a species biologically is that it is a being that is able to reproduce. And in general, that means male-female reproduction. So we're talking about animals mostly when we talk about species. But the term can be used a little more loosely.

But still, when you're talking about species here, you're talking, as almost every major dictionary will say you're talking about biosis. you're talking about biology. So you're talking about the species dog, but you're not talking about the species electric drill. And now you're talking, of course, about the digital revolution, and we have these machines. We call smart machines,

but they're highly developed when it comes to processing and analysis and all the things that computers can do. Well, the most important thing is they compute. And all these platforms, of course, are multiplying this beyond anything that we could have imagined in previous generations. But I just want to say that there are two terms that Bill Gates used, and we should look at that with tremendous concern.

Number one, quote, this is truly an evolutionary event. He then follows the statement about an evolutionary event with, you know, we've created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are. Okay, you put those two things together, gets a lot worse. And it's not just because Bill Gates, in terms of his worldview, attributes evidently, biosis to evolution. It is the fact that he says right out loud here that artificial intelligence is now a species that we created. That's what he says. It's a species we created. We have created an intelligent species. He says this is truly an evolutionary event. He is clearly saying that this

species, artificial intelligence, threatens basically to decenter, to dethrone, you might say, human beings in terms of being, well, at the top of the creational order. But of course, he doesn't believe in a creational order, the top of the evolutionary picture. And so that's the thing. If you hold to a materialist worldview and you hold to the theory of evolution as the primary factor here, you are talking about the fact that you see anything that comes out of this that you will call intelligence as something that could be a superior species to us. But then with Bill Gates, he says we've already created an intelligent species.

that is smarter than we are. Now, I could tell you that my concern here is that Bill Gates really doesn't mean what he says, but I think you already know my concern is he does believe what he says. I think you already have much of this in the conversation about whether and when artificial intelligence can achieve consciousness. And I put quotation marks scare quotes around that because I don't believe that any kind of machine can actually achieve consciousness. But nonetheless, the way that so many people in the materialist worldview, the secular worldview, the Silicon Valley worldview, the way they define consciousness, they could well say, as Bill Gates just said Sunday morning, or what was broadcast Sunday morning, he said, this is now an evolutionary event and intelligent species smarter than we are. Okay. Now, what about morality? You see, this is the other thing that is really interesting right now. Let's just put it this way. If indeed there is something that is an agent of artificial intelligence and it decides, let's just say, to terminate humanity, would that be a moral or immoral act?

Well, here's where once again we have to look at artificial intelligence and say, everything we know about it is that it is the process of a machine. It is the process of a technology. It is not a person. It's actually not even a species. And so the moral responsibility has to reside somewhere. Where would that moral responsibility lie? Well, let's just put it in the simplest terms. If you set as a human being, as a moral agent, you're made in the image of God, you're a moral creature, you have the capacity to do right or wrong, to serve good or evil. Let's say you serve evil. You create something that harms people.

You don't blame the thing for being the moral issue. You blame the person who has in or set loose or deployed this thing with evil intent. And so as Christians, we just have to confront this. It's a very slippery issue. We have to keep, you know, making plain. We have to keep defining the issues. A very interesting article appeared in the New York Times Sunday edition just yesterday. Headline, making sense of AI's promise and peril. It's interesting, mostly because one of the New York Times team members here says this, quote, I'm also curious about whether threats are because of AI misbehaving or humans misbehaving, end quote. Okay, that's actually a very crucial insight. I wasn't expecting it when I looked at this column, but here you have someone who covers these

issues for the New York Times saying, you know, I'm really curious about where the moral responsibility lies. If something bad were to happen by artificial intelligence, who would be responsible? Would it be the artificial intelligence? Well, this is where Christians have to say, No, they're not moral agents. Moral agents may create the platforms and all the rest, but the moral responsibility resides somewhere with a human being. Rather than talking about human extinction, let's just talk about, say, embezzling money or something like that.

You know, if artificial intelligence is deployed in such a way, it would still be some matter of some personal responsibility. Some human being would be responsible. Very recently, just in the last week, we heard the Prime Minister of Australia complained about the fact that government sites in Australia had been invaded and penetrated by American artificial intelligence agents.

And that's the word that was used. And I'll simply say that they did not make a call to the artificial intelligence agents, put that in quotation marks, scare quotes once again. They made a call to the human leaders of these companies. And you know, that really tells you something. It tells you that if the Prime Minister of Australia is mad about this, he can't call chat GPT.

He can't call whatever I'm not going to use the term. They might be the latest product on these advanced platforms. Instead, he calls whoever is in charge of the company. And, you know, I think that's where the American government, the government of the United States of America and other governments are going to have to turn here. And they're going to have to turn here pretty quickly. I think they're going to have to make these terms pretty plain to those who are behind

these technologies. Okay, you're warning us about all the awful things these technologies could do. well, they did not create themselves. So all this is going to be very, very interesting. The Wall Street Journal also ran a very interesting article by Christopher Mems with the title, The Real AI Threats are actually already here. The subhead shift the safety debate to what AI can do now, not its future potential. And, you know, he's talking here about the fact that already you have AI companies who are saying,

stop us before we do it again. And nobody really believes they mean that seriously. And so what are they doing? Well, some people are saying they're just trying to draw attention to themselves. It does appear to be something a little more complicated than that, but you also have something else coming up. And that is the fact that if you have this level of public interest in an issue, such as will artificial intelligence lead to human extinction, then you just can't turn that off with your communications department and your Silicon Valley company. You have set something loose. It's going to be very interesting to see where we go from here.

Okay, one final issue related to all this. In recent days, Britain's King Charles III held a meeting with some of these top tech leaders to express his own concern about the issue. The Wall Street Journal reports, quote, King Charles III waited into the artificial intelligence debate on Thursday, gathering top tech executives in Scotland to urge them to hash out guidelines to keep the technology from spinning out of control. The British monarch hosted executives from Nvidia, Anthropic, Google Deep Mind,

an open AI, along with an AI advisor to the Vatican, and tasked them with building consensus to ensure the future of mankind is protected. King Charles made this declaration, quote, those in our world who value our humanity and its vital moral component are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny. End quote. Now, I'm not going to say that what the king said there is wrong. It's just not all that insightful.

As a matter of fact, the story here is the fact that this is a story. here's how some of the things that happen in the world happen. When you look at an event like this, this is what the late Daniel Borsdon, who was librarian of Congress for years, a very prominent American historian, he said there's a difference between events and pseudo events. Events are where something of historic occurrence has happened. Pseudo events is where it looks like something happened, but nothing actually happened. And my point is this. King Charles III is the head of state of Britain. and he held this meeting, and I have been invited to a similar meeting with, I'll say, Prince Charles, when he was the Prince of Wales, and what you do is you sit in a table and you go around and everybody says a certain something.

And then at the end of it, Prince Charles, as he was then, says, this was all very interesting. And I will tell you, it's just a thing when you get invited to one of these meetings. And I'm not at all surprised that now that King Charles invited the civil. and Valley Titans to come to a meeting about this. I'm not at all surprised they went. I mean, just think the history, the pageantry, and all the rest. But at the end of the day, King Charles is ahead of state. He's not even ahead of government. At the end of the day, King Charles is actually in very, well, he's not in a very good position to do anything about all of this. And furthermore, he himself has a very confused worldview. And that worldviews

very, the term several years ago would have been new agey. And he's very third, millennium in terms of his thinking. And you'll notice here that he just says the obvious. We're counting on you. And what he said was that you will not lose control of our destiny. Well, you know, I guess they told him they won't. An observer from a university said, quote, Charles is bringing the voice of reason into what has become a very inflammatory polarized debate. So far as I can see, he said nothing of importance, nothing but the obvious. We don't want this thing to kill us. Please don't make this thing kill us. Please assure us you're not going to set this thing loose with grave damage to humanity. And this is, of course, a reference to the so-called

alignment problem, whether or not the new technologies will align with human values. But my point is this. Here you have these tech leaders who, by the way, we're meeting with the president of the United States, several of them at least, were present with the president of the United States and the president of China for that meeting. And several of them were at the state dinner and other occasions, but they took the invitation from King Charles III to Britain because that's just what you do. When the king says come, you come. And when the king says something, you say, that's fascinating. The politics of it came in later in the Wall Street Journal article, quote, the UK that's Britain is trying to position itself as an honest broker

between the two AI superpowers that would be China and the United States. Quote, the country, which is holding the G20 presidency next year, is hoping it can help coales support for how best to regulate the technology. Deploying King Charles is part of that effort. End quote. Well, okay, I guess if you have a king, you deploy him. But just notice they're talking about something that would be held something in the indefinite future in a meeting that might come up over the next year. And the hope is that maybe there can at this point be some kind of approach to this that might help to bring him out world peace and the protection of humanity and all the rest. My point is, if you take this problem seriously, if the warnings are accurate, and if all of this is as some of the very

people in the room have been warning, then what in the world are they doing, meeting with the king of Britain, the monarch of the United Kingdom, and then saying, you know, we hope next year maybe we can come up with a plan. All right, on this, you understand there are some really big issues. There's also just a lot of nonsense. All right. In coming days, we're going to talk about some of the issues related in news from the WNBA. We're going to be talking about other issues related. For example, to the claim that theological liberalism, liberal Christianity is showing up in a big way in the 2006 midterm elections. There are some very interesting developments. And Pope Leo went to France. What could go wrong? We'll have interesting things to talk about in days to come. But for now, thanks for listening to the briefing.

For more information, go to my website at Albertmohor.com. You can follow me at X or Twitter, by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moeller for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbtsk.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com.

I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.