Peter Thiel Attacks Obama and the Pope Over A.I. Regulation
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Anyone who wants to slow down A.I. is on the side of evil, at least in Peter Thiel’s view: In his lecture series on the Antichrist, the billionaire and Palantir co-founder railed against regulating artificial intelligence and accused Pope Leo XIV and Barack Obama of exploiting fears about A.I. for their own ends. That is according to recordings of the first two lectures in Nashville obtained by Politico.
A.I. as the Threat “Über Alles”
The series consists of four parts, tickets cost $100 (about €89), and Mr. Thiel’s team is trying to keep the content secret. The central thesis, according to Politico: Government attempts to regulate A.I. are evil. “Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Mr. Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category.” Mr. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, he added, “but they can at least oppose AI.”
Mr. Thiel accused the pope of writing his first encyclical to distract from the church’s sexual abuse scandals and of finding A.I. as the subject to do so. A.I., he said, is “the threat über alles of late modernity,” using the German phrase in his English remarks. He also took aim at the effective altruism movement: “The effective altruist ideology has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI.”
The Antichrist as a World Government
Behind the attacks lies Mr. Thiel’s idiosyncratic theology. His lecture series on the Antichrist began in San Francisco in 2025 and later stopped in Paris and Rome. Mr. Thiel does not commit to a single definition, but he most often describes the Antichrist as a tyrannical figure whose rise to power triggers the apocalypse. In the 21st century, he has argued, that would be someone who wants to stop science; in San Francisco, he named the climate activist Greta Thunberg and the A.I. critic Eliezer Yudkowsky as examples. In Nashville, he warned that a near-totalitarian world government created to prevent dangerous research would be hard to undo.
Criticism From the Vatican
The other side naturally sees things differently. In his encyclical, Pope Leo XIV warns of “new forms of dehumanization” in the age of A.I. and of an “idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak,” and in the spring he had already called for A.I. to be “disarmed.” Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the Vatican, responded to Mr. Thiel’s ideas in March with an essay in which he provocatively asked whether Mr. Thiel should be burned at the stake as a heretic.
Then there is Mr. Thiel’s own stake: A large part of his fortune is invested in A.I., through Palantir, through start-ups in the portfolio of his Founders Fund and through a $418 million (about €372 million) A.I.-focused portfolio at his hedge fund, Thiel Macro. Mr. Thiel’s representatives did not respond to Politico’s request for comment.
