Peter Thiel says the pope’s AI criticism benefits “Chinese communists”
The pope said AI shouldn’t be concentrated in the hands of the few.
Peter Thiel. Nordin Catic/Getty Images/The Cambridge Union.
- Peter Thiel has said that Pope Leo XIV inadvertently serves as a “Chinese communist agent” because of his calls for stronger AI regulation.
- Thiel believes that the pope’s message may slow down Americans, but not the Chinese, in the race for AI advancement.
- The pope previously urged to “disarm AI” and warned against concentrating the technology in the hands of only a few people.
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has accused Pope Leo XIV of unintentionally serving as a “Chinese communist agent” after the pontiff called for tougher AI regulation.
Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and PayPal, Thiel, criticized Leo’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which called for disarming AI so the technology could serve humanity, CNN reports.
The message of Leo, the first American pope, could influence people in the US but not in China, slowing only the American side’s advancement in AI, according to Thiel.
As a result, the billionaire continued, Leo is “working for the Chinese Communists,” provoking laughter in the audience.
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In the encyclical, Leo emphasized that technology is not a force antagonistic to humanity, nor inherently evil, but never neutral.
He called for ensuring that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, which could further widen the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution.
This isn’t the first clash between Thiel and the Vatican.
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The tech billionaire held a series of closed-door lectures in Rome in March 2026, where he explored the concept of Antichrist. He then warned that an Antichrist may emerge to create a one-world government on the promise of stopping AI or nuclear energy, among others.
The remarks didn’t go unnoticed by the Vatican.
Father Paolo Benanti, who advises the pope on AI, wrote in an essay that Thiel operated as a "political theologian" within Silicon Valley.
"Thiel’s entire action can... be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated," Benanti wrote on Le Grand Continent website.