In this week’s edition of “Peter Thiel is an insufferable pr*ck”, the co-founder of Palantir and PayPal and a man who appears to regard the film Minority Report as a product roadmap, stood on a stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival and accused the literal Pope of “working for the Chinese Communists.”
The pontiff’s alleged crime, in case you were wondering what earns you a communist-agent designation from Silicon Valley’s ‘finest’ doomsday prophet these days: back in May, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which called for stronger international regulation of artificial intelligence. What he didn’t account for was that this might end up hurting poor Peter’s feelings.
Thiel’s reasoning, and I want to be crystal clear that I am not embellishing a word of this, runs as follows:
The pope’s plea for AI guardrails might reach some Americans but would be roundly ignored in China, so it would only ever slow down the American side of the great US-versus-China AI race, which therefore makes His Holiness a de facto asset of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Aspen audience, to its eternal credit, reportedly greeted this theory with derisive laughter, which is more or less the exact response it has earned elsewhere. Thiel also used his time on stage to warn of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the Democratic Party, so it is safe to say he was having quite the afternoon. Apropos of nothing, solvent abuse, including sniffing your own farts, can cause brain damage.
The playbook underneath the punchline
It would be easy, and pretty enjoyable, to file this under “billionaire says deranged thing at conference” and move on. But it is worth noticing the actual move being made here, because it is not new and it is not harmless. The rhetorical trick is to reframe any call for AI oversight, however mild, as objectively pro-China and therefore borderline treasonous. Once “maybe we should have some rules” becomes “you are helping our geopolitical enemy,” you have neatly delegitimised every critic, every regulator, and, apparently, the Bishop of Rome, without having to engage a single one of their arguments. It is a phenomenally convenient framework for a man whose company, Palantir, sells surveillance and defence software and profits handsomely from an unregulated, full-speed-ahead AI race.
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What the Pope actually said
The genuinely funny part is that the encyclical Thiel is so worked up about is not some radical manifesto. Calling for international coordination on a powerful, fast-moving technology so that it serves human dignity rather than trampling it is, historically, the sort of thing popes are more or less contractually obliged to say. You do not have to be Catholic, or religious at all, to notice that “let us make sure this enormously disruptive technology does not chew up ordinary people” is a more defensible position than “anyone who suggests guardrails is a communist agent.”
None of this will trouble Thiel, of course, who has made a career and a fortune out of being confidently, expensively wrong in public and facing precisely zero consequences for it. But it is a useful reminder of how the people with the most to gain from unregulated AI intend to argue against oversight: not on the merits, but by branding anyone who disagrees as an enemy of the state. Keep an eye out for it, because you are going to be hearing a lot more of it.