Humankind reckoning: Cox announces Utah’s ‘pro-human’ AI initiative

SALT LAKE CITY — Long before he was Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox spent a lot of time on college campuses championing the rise of technology as a self-described “true tech optimist.”

“I was talking to young people about the Arab Spring, about how the rise of social media was going to solve all of our problems and bring us together as a nation, as a world,” Cox said Tuesday while addressing the crowd at the 2025 Utah AI Summit in Salt Lake City.

As he’ll tell you now, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“In fact, it’s been the exact opposite. Those very tools that I believed would lead to human flourishing and human connection … have been used to manipulate us, to divide us and to do significant harm,” Cox said.

He called out social media specifically — something he has repeatedly done throughout his governorship — lamenting the efforts of some of the most powerful companies in the world to “strip mine our souls.”

Even speaking to a crowd that likely still leans into the category of tech-optimistic, Cox didn’t mince words.

“However much you hate social media, you do not hate it enough. You do not hate these companies enough, and what they’ve done to us intentionally … understanding the devastation that they were wreaking on our kids,” Cox said. “They gave your daughter an eating disorder, and they gave your son a pornography addiction, and they gave our grandkids anxiety and depression, and many of them took their own lives. And they did it knowingly. They had studied the results. We’re finding this out now through lawsuits that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.”

From a self-described tech optimist to a tech pessimist, Cox said humankind is at a moment of reckoning where it’s aware of the good that can come from technology, while also intimately understanding its pitfalls.

With that in mind, Cox on Tuesday announced the launch of Utah’s “pro-human” AI initiative.

“What we want is that every decision that we make related to AI, wherever it exists, is it serving humankind? Is it promoting human flourishing, or is it making us dumber and worse? I think if we look through things in that lens, we’ll end up in a better place,” Cox said.

Initiative specifics

The initiative is approaching pro-human AI through six different pillars:

1. Workforce
2. Industry
3. State government
4. Academia
5. Public policy
6. Learning

The guiding principle of the initiative, Cox said, is that AI must always be human-guided.

“Pro-human AI empowers workers with better tools. It strengthens communities through accessible innovation and enables problem-solving at an unprecedented scale,” Cox said. “It deepens human interaction by connecting people and ideas in more meaningful ways, not just connecting people with robots or machines.”

The initiative includes the launch of a statewide “pro-human AI academic consortium” network that Cox said will be leveraged to launch moonshot challenges — a focused pitch challenge that asks students to pitch an idea that solves a real-world problem — to “drive breakthroughs in human-centered innovation and advance human flourishing.”

Also in the academic realm, the recently established Nucleus Institute will connect Utah’s brightest researchers and students with the state’s most promising startups to “accelerate pro-human, high-impact AI development,” Cox said.

Further in line with the initiative, the Utah Board of Higher Education on Monday approved a resolution establishing a statewide strategic direction for integrating artificial intelligence across the state’s public higher education institutions.

The state is also launching an award for the best “pro-human” AI companies, with three inaugural winners to be announced at the 2026 Utah AI Summit.

When it comes to workforce development, Cox said the state has allocated $10 million for Talent Ready Utah’s target workforce accelerator initiative.

“Through this accelerator, the state is investing money in three high-impact sectors, each of which directly supports and accelerates Utah’s AI economy,” Cox said.

Some of the ventures include:

• Expanding AI curriculum, applied research and experiential learning to build an AI-ready workforce.
• Developing talent in advanced manufacturing and clean tech sectors that increasingly rely on AI-driven optimization, automation and predictive analytics.
• Investing in deep tech, strengthening Utah’s competitiveness in semiconductors, quantum computing and advanced materials — all of which are foundational infrastructure for modern AI systems.

“We’re excited for what the future can be, but we have to be sober. I think we have to be wide-eyed about where we are, about where we’re going, and about who we are,” Cox said.

“We have to apply Utah values to this new technology. And if we do this right, Utah can continue to lead not just the country, but the entire world when it comes to the adoption of these tools in ways that make us better human beings.”

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