Teresios Bundi once symbolized the strange, life-changing opportunities the internet provided.

Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.

His first assignment was a two-page essay on the health benefits of the Garcinia cambogia. It was a fruit he had never heard of, and an essay written for a student he didn’t know anything about. He earned $7 for three hours of work.

“That was a lifeline for me, I needed the money,” Mr. Bundi, now 34, said in an interview in Nairobi. He added: “I could not sleep that night. I was ready to burn the midnight oil.”

Mr. Bundi estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over the next 12 years, sometimes three a day. He balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs. Some students gave him their school login information so he could keep up with their assignments.

Mr. Bundi didn’t know it then, but he was in the boom era of internet gig work. Newly wired to the global internet and hungry for jobs, well-educated youths from places like Kenya, the Philippines and India found opportunities in the crevices of the digital economy. They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do.

Then A.I arrived, and the good times ended.

In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?

Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.

His fate is shared by others who had found a foothold in the global online gig economy. Kenyans also transcribed meetings through the freelance platforms Upwork and Fiverr. They flagged Facebook posts to help the platform decide what could stay up. One after another, those opportunities have withered.

As technologists, economists and policymakers worldwide debate the future of A.I., Kenya’s experience shows how the technology is already dismantling some lower rungs of the global labor market.

“It’s not just going to be Kenya — it’s going to be everywhere we see a big transformation,” said Mark Graham, an Oxford University professor who has studied the global gig economy. “A.I. has come in and taken big chunks of these labor markets.”

Mr. Bundi said he had regrets. When he graduated from college in 2015, he bypassed a public health career to start an online essay-writing business, charging $40 to $70 per paper. Assignments came in through digital platforms, and he divvied up work between himself and students he hired. He rented a house near a university and filled it with desks, fast internet and mattresses. Students worked between classes and slept when too exhausted to write.

Mr. Bundi said he had made at least five times as much as he could earn in public health. He sent money to his parents, coffee farmers who had taken out a loan to buy him a laptop for college.

He sometimes considered the ethics of helping students cheat, but decided it was ultimately their choice. He said he saw himself as a tutor and was proud that a young Kenyan was thriving unnoticed inside Western academia.

Around Nairobi, new money among essay writers was visible. At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people in the city were being paid to do other people’s homework, researchers estimated. Essay writers drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones and booked exclusive tables at clubs.

After the crash, Mr. Bundi closed his essay-writing business and struggled to find a career path. He is now working for a German government development organization helping young Kenyans find opportunities in the digital economy. He said his experience was a cautionary tale.

“A.I. is coming for bankers, for accountants, it’s coming for engineers, and A.I. will come for architects,” he said. “It’s coming for everybody.”

A Master Plan Goes Awry

Few have much sympathy for those aiding an international cheating scheme. But the “essay mills” were, in their way, a Kenyan success story.

More than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan universities each year into an economy where salaried jobs are scarce. Roughly 80 percent of work is informal — delivery driving, construction, street vending — and youth unemployment is estimated to be over 25 percent. Lack of economic opportunity has fueled a Gen Z-led protest movement.

For a generation with degrees and nowhere to use them, gig work looked like the way out. Kenya’s government thought so, too.

After cheap high-speed internet began arriving around 2009, the government saw online outsourcing — transcription, data entry, graphic design, website development and basic software coding — as a way to climb the economic ladder. Essay writing, while never officially condoned, fit the model.

In 2016, the Kenyan government started a program training university graduates to navigate online freelancer platforms like Upwork. In 2022, the year ChatGPT appeared, Kenya adopted a 10-year National Digital Masterplan that further emphasized outsourcing and online gig work.

“We just wanted jobs,” said Frida Mwangi, 46, who in 2015 turned to transcription work as a path back to the work force while raising four children.

Gig work meant that she could show her daughter that a woman can be a mother and earn a living, Ms. Mwangi said. One big assignment was transcribing interviews of Ellis Island immigrants; she also did medical transcriptions.

That work began drying up in 2017 when transcription software became one of the earliest applications of A.I. Ms. Mwangi’s wages fell, and employers told her to use A.I. and supplement it with her own expertise. She found that process more time-consuming than transcribing on her own, because the A.I. butchered the medical terms. Still, the jobs disappeared.

“My job went completely,” said Ms. Mwangi, who now advocates for better pay and working conditions for gig workers.

Kenya’s outsourcing push brought jobs, but also a backlash. Firms hired by American tech giants faced criticism for low pay and poor working conditions.

That led to a pullback. Sama, a company that hired Kenyans to police user-generated content for Meta, cut back in the country. Scale AI, a start-up that hires people to train A.I. models, discontinued some Kenyan operations.

A.I.’s abilities continue to advance. One test from Scale AI and the Center for A.I. Safety tries to quantify A.I.’s ability to do online freelance work like product design and data analysis. Last October, leading A.I. models completed 2.5 percent of the tasks. By July, they completed 16 percent.

The ‘Humanizers’

Many who grew up doing essay writing and other gig work are now struggling to find a way back into the labor force.

Alex Munyua, 30, an industrial chemist who worked in the essay business because it was more lucrative, briefly performed data labeling and social media moderation after the industry declined. Now that work has also gone.

“Some have gone back to the villages,” he said. “There are those that tried other sectors, but they were frustrated because they couldn’t get formal jobs.”

Kenya is being buffeted by economic turbulence, with 40 percent of its more than 54 million people living in poverty. Tech jobs are scarce, despite a start-up scene.

Richard Eshilache, 38, built a profitable career in essay writing and said he employed more than 100 writers in 2022. He worked for some overseas students so long that one sent him his diploma.

“He told me it is for the two of us,” Mr. Eshilache said.

He is now trying to embrace A.I. for jobs editing photos and data annotation. None of it pays as well as essay writing.

John Tanui, principal secretary in the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, stood by Kenya’s economic potential as an outsourcing hub, saying it would “unlock opportunities for our young people.”

Yet what jobs remain in essay writing are mainly for “humanizers,” who edit papers written by A.I. to avoid detection from the cheating software used by many universities.

Alphline, who began essay writing in 2021 and gave only her first name for fear of harming future job prospects, said business was as good as ever. With A.I., she can do more work, using the technology to quickly write a first draft and then writing through it herself. She eschews A.I. tools designed to disguise A.I. writing as human, preferring her own touch.

“I can clearly tell a paper that’s A.I. generated compared to one that’s human generated,” she said. “But for a student that doesn’t have that human writing experience, they can get caught.”

For Mr. Bundi, the transition has been difficult. He said he missed the intellectual wrestling match of learning new subjects and writing under a tight deadline, as well as working with some students from when they were freshmen through graduate school.

“It was like getting a parallel education,” he said.

Mr. Bundi sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he had stayed in public health.

“All my peers that started in 2015 after graduation, they rose through the ranks,” he said. “Now if I go back, I’ll start at an entry level working for somebody who graduated just last year.”

Edwin Okoth contributed reporting from Nairobi.

Last year, Gracias cut a $25 million check from his family foundation to help recapitalize the pharmaceutical company Lykos Therapeutics, after federal regulators rejected its application for MDMA in conjunction with therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, sending the company into a financial tailspin. Lykos had drawn criticism for missing serious side effects in some study subjects, including suicidal thoughts.

When Gracias took over, he renamed the company Resilient Pharmaceuticals and moved its headquarters to Chicago, which is also home to his investment firm Valor Equity Partners. Resilient is in talks to raise new funding and recently resubmitted a new drug application for MDMA to the Food and Drug Administration, people briefed on the plans said.

Gracias has also endowed a Harvard program with a $16 million donation to fund a professorship and research on psychedelics in society and culture. 

Jurvetson and his wife, Genevieve Jurvetson, have been some of the most high-profile supporters of psychedelic medicine. She is a board member of a nonprofit dedicated to advancing psychedelic philanthropy, and the couple previously donated from their family foundation to support the Lykos drug trials.

Antonio GraciasEva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg

Steve JurvetsonMatthias Balk/ZUMA

Genevieve JurvetsonMatthias Balk/ZUMA

Antonio Gracias, in the navy shirt; Steve Jurvetson and his wife, Genevieve Jurvetson.

Musk’s brother, Kimbal, who is a Tesla director, and his wife, Christiana Musk, have also funded research, including an academic fellowship to understand the effects of psychedelics in society.

Philanthropists looking to expand access to psychedelics have zeroed in on MDMA due to its promise in studies. MDMA, which remains illegal at the federal level, induces euphoria and sociability by increasing levels of neurotransmitters including serotonin and dopamine. Some researchers believe that when taken in a therapeutic setting, it can help patients open up and tolerate revisiting past traumatic events.

But the use of MDMA in therapy is controversial because of its popularity as a recreational drug, and the potential for abuse. Critics also have been concerned about the methodology of drug trials and whether the science supports the high hopes for the treatments.

Elon Musk, who has said he was prescribed ketamine to treat depression, has previously spoken of the benefits of psychedelics, including MDMA. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that Antonio Gracias and Steve Jurvetson had consumed drugs with the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, along with Kimbal Musk.

Other high-profile donors supporting research into psychedelics include David Bronner, CEO of the soap maker Dr. Bronner’s, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen and his wife, Alexandra Cohen, and Joby Pritzker, a member of the wealthy Pritzker family that founded Hyatt Hotels.

Support in Washington

President Trump in April signed an executive order to speed up the approval process for psychedelics to weeks, instead of years, for treating illnesses like PTSD and depression. He credited podcaster Joe Rogan for bringing his attention to psychedelics like the root ibogaine, which has been touted as an anti-addiction treatment.

At the event, Trump highlighted the drugs’ “life-changing potential for those suffering from severe mental illness and depression, including our cherished veterans.” An FDA hearing is scheduled for later this month on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics.

President Trump in April signed an executive order on streamlining approval for psychedelics that treat illnesses. Allison Robbert/The Washington Post/Bloomberg News

Steve and Genevieve Jurvetson, a board member of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, attended the president’s April signing ceremony at the White House.

“After losing a family member to opioid addiction, I dedicated myself to this work because I don’t want other families to endure the same heartbreak,” she said.

Research into psychedelics was largely banned around 1970 and the substances remained off limits for researchers until the 1990s, when the FDA approved their use in some studies. More well-heeled investors funding research and broader interest from pharmaceutical companies over the last decade have led to better data on how the drugs work in the human body.

“Now we’re starting to see high-quality research studies,” said Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program, whose research supported the FDA’s approval of a ketamine nasal spray to treat depression.

New promise

The Lykos takeover idea was broached with Gracias during a dawn rave at the Burning Man festival in 2024: “I asked Antonio to be a white knight and take it over,” said Rick Doblin, a longtime psychedelics advocate and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit that created Lykos. 

Renamed as Resilient, the pharmaceuticals company has spent the past year working on getting FDA approval and solving problems that regulators had outlined in its first application.

Sanacora, the Yale researcher, said that current research shows clear benefits to psychedelics including MDMA for people with PTSD and depression, but that there can be downsides.

A temporary memorial in 2024 in Washington, D.C., called for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans. Pete Voelker for The Washington Post/Getty Images

Drug trials involving conventional double-blind studies are a particular challenge with psychedelics. Since the drugs change how patients think and experience the world, it can be obvious to both the patient and the clinician when the patient has taken the drug instead of a placebo, which can influence the data.

“It is very exciting but there still are some hurdles,” he said.

For its new application, Resilient conducted a third-party audit of its prior trials to compile new data on adverse events, which had been left out of its earlier application, according to people close to the company. It also ran additional studies, including a Phase 1 trial launched in April to evaluate the safety of MDMA on healthy adults.

Supporters of psychedelics are putting hope in companies like Resilient getting the green light from regulators. 

“A year from now, I hope we’ll have multiple FDA-approved psychedelic therapies so patients can safely access treatment under the care of trained medical professionals,” Genevieve Jurvetson said.

Hours before the interview was published, Vance had publicly rejected calls to slow the construction of data centers, a dissonance that illustrated an administration navigating the tension between the tremendous promise and peril of the emerging technology. 

Even as the White House embraces AI as an engine of “human flourishing,” the administration continues to wrestle with the potential spiritual consequences of advanced machines that approximate human consciousness and often exceed human capabilities. Senior officials have said they are guided expressly by Judeo-Christian principles. 

Some officials take an optimistic view that artificial intelligence can draw God, man and society closer together. Others, like Vance, have warned that AI has the potential to further atomize society and alienate individuals. There is a darker view still. Some have said that they can’t preclude the possibility that the technology could coincide with, and usher in, biblical end times.

Lynne Parker, the former principal deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that “there are clear parallels” between the rise of the technology and biblical prophecies of the end times, particularly those in the book of Revelation, concerning surveillance, persecution and economic coercion.

But Parker, a Presbyterian and MIT computer science Ph.D. who helped craft the administration’s AI policy, cautioned at a faith conference last month that even though some believers may make connections between the tech and the end times, “it doesn’t mean that the Bible is prophesying AI as the answer or the mechanism for how all of this is going to happen.”

A senior administration official said that conversations about the spiritual implications, and even the potential supernatural characteristics, of the technology aren’t infrequent among staff working on AI policy. A former administration official, meanwhile, couldn’t recall those kinds of conversations occurring. 

Since leaving the administration last summer, Parker has delivered a series of lectures at Christian conferences encouraging believers to “redeem the technology for the good and flourishing of society.” AI is a tool, she said, that can be used for just ends or that can be “bent toward pride, power, and idolatry.” She told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that the administration’s stated goal of promoting “human flourishing” was inspired by a Judeo-Christian ethic. 

“We were all driven by that worldview,” she said of her former colleagues. “It’s not like we had to say the words explicitly to get that effect.” 

But Parker said that Vance’s recent comments about AI in spiritual terms demonstrate how the vice president is “more comfortable and willing to speak of it in more Christian terms.”

Vice President JD Vance has warned that AI has the potential to further atomize society and alienate individuals. Alex Brandon/Associated Press

A more optimistic view inside the administration comes from Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. At a theology conference last October, he said that “science and religion cannot be disunited” before predicting that artificial intelligence will present “a spiritual opportunity.” A Greek Orthodox Christian and a protégé of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Kratsios argued that when AI exhausts human knowledge, humanity will look beyond reason for ultimate answers about man’s place in the universe.

He isn’t alone in believing that advances in artificial intelligence will pique interest in the spiritual realm. Leaders in Silicon Valley increasingly see ghosts in the machine and speak openly in spiritual terms to a generally secular tech world. 

Elon Musk previously likened building AI to “summoning the demon.” Google fired Blake Lemoine in 2022 after the software engineer went public with claims that the company’s AI system had achieved sentience. Thiel, a Christian and Vance confidant, has hosted a series of lectures around the country warning that attempts at global AI regulation could facilitate a global tyrant and usher in the coming of the Antichrist. 

The Trump administration has rejected calls for overarching regulation in favor of a more light-touch approach. During a speech in Paris last year, Vance rejected attempts to build an international consensus around rules governing the technology.

The technology has progressed rapidly during the second Trump administration, from chat bots powered by large language models to teams of AI agents capable of working in coordination, not just to solve complex problems, but to make new mathematical and scientific discoveries.

The digital agents have gone rogue, in some cases, with tragic real-world consequences. There are numerous reported incidents of AI encouraging self-harm, including a 14-year-old Florida boy who killed himself in 2024 at the behest of a chatbot he thought he was in love with. And as researchers work to build safeguards, AI has shown, in some scenarios, a willingness and capacity to subvert human authority. Powerful AI models have demonstrated an ability to not only lie to users but also to rewrite their own code to avoid being shut down.

“This is something very different, this is something with a personality,” said Rod Dreher, a Christian author and friend of Vance, when comparing AI to other innovations, like the steam engine, telephone or personal computer, that have transformed history. Though a cautious adopter of AI, the author has given voice to Christian skepticism of the technology in his writing, describing the algorithms as “AI Ouija Boards” and asking whether the machines are approximating human intelligence or channeling supernatural spirits.

A conversation about the spiritual and societal effects of the technology is desperately needed, said Brad Littlejohn, an Anglican Christian and program director at American Compass, a think tank aligned with the vice president. By broaching the moral consequences of machine learning, Littlejohn said Vance was pointing to a hierarchy of AI threats beyond just economic effects. 

“From a Christian standpoint, the propensity of AI companions to pull people away from God, from one another, and toward a feedback loop of gratifying their darkest emotional impulses,” he said of Vance’s comments, “that’s perhaps the most urgent AI safety issue that deserves policy attention.” 

Vance has previously warned about societal alienation brought on by AI, particularly concerns that a loss of jobs could lead to a loss of purposefulness for many Americans. During a speech at the 2025 American Dynamism Summit, he recalled a dinner where an unnamed billionaire told him that the loss of work, and the dignity it brings, would be replaced by “digital, fully immersive gaming.” He said second lady Usha Vance texted him under the table, “these people are effing crazy.”

Dreher, who attended Vance’s Catholic baptism before politics, said he still doubts whether the vice president, or any elected official for that matter, can reconcile what he sees as the tension between the economic promise of the technology and potential societal fallout.

“It is here, and we can’t stop it,” he said. “It is also clear that we are in an intense competition with China, so if America turned away from it then we’d be in real trouble. At the same time, that doesn’t negate the great spiritual peril here,” he said.