Peter Thiel attacks Obama, Pope Leo XIV over AI regulation

Peter Thiel is casting the push to regulate artificial intelligence not as a policy debate but as a theological crisis, targeting Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV as opportunists who he claims are exploiting public unease about the technology for political gain.

The Silicon Valley billionaire leveled those accusations during two closed-door lectures in Nashville on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. Recordings of the talks, first reported by Politico’s Decoded newsletter, reveal Thiel expanding his ongoing lecture series built around the concept of the Antichrist — a figure from Christian eschatology he has reinterpreted as any force that seeks to halt technological progress through centralized global control.

Thiel told attendees that Obama and the pontiff both recognized AI had become politically unpopular and moved to capitalize on that sentiment. He characterized the former president’s recent calls for Democrats to develop an AI framework as proof that the party lacks substantive ideas beyond opposing new technology. Obama urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a September fundraiser to prepare a public conversation on AI policy should Democrats retake the chamber, and suggested 2028 presidential candidates make the issue central to their platforms.

His criticism of Pope Leo XIV was sharper. Thiel argued the pontiff’s focus on AI ethics served primarily to distract from the Catholic Church’s history of clergy sexual abuse scandals. The pope released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in May. The book-length document centers on protecting human dignity amid rapid AI deployment and urges developers to build ethical guardrails into foundational models. Leo has repeatedly warned that unchecked reliance on automated systems could fundamentally alter human identity.

Beyond individual figures, Thiel directed his ire at the effective altruism movement, a philosophy emphasizing data-driven approaches to global problems that has deeply influenced many researchers and engineers inside leading AI labs. He told the Nashville audience the ideology had “brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI.”

The Nashville sessions mark the fourth stop on a tour that began with sold-out events in San Francisco last fall before moving to Paris in January and Rome in March. In Italy, his framing drew sharp pushback from Catholic commentators and politicians who rejected the application of apocalyptic theology to modern regulatory frameworks. Throughout the tour, critics have noted that Thiel’s definition of the Antichrist closely mirrors the profiles of lawmakers and regulators attempting to oversee companies like Palantir Technologies, the defense and intelligence contractor he co-founded alongside PayPal.

Thiel’s absolutist opposition to AI governance places him in direct conflict with the executives actually building frontier models. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to deliberately slow capability advancements so safety research could keep pace. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly endorsed the proposal, writing that the sector needs to “pace the frontier” and later detailing why his company would welcome formal safety requirements for advanced labs. Elon Musk, whose companies Tesla and SpaceX rely heavily on machine learning, also backed Amodei’s call.

That rare alignment among fierce competitors underscores how far Thiel has drifted from the consensus forming within the industry he helped fund. His ties to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance give his ideological framework outsized influence in Washington, even as the builders of the technology advocate for measured oversight.

Representatives for Thiel did not respond to requests for comment regarding the Nashville recordings.