Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a collection of provocative warnings and predictions about the way forward for synthetic intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he additionally warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party.
Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, was an early supporter of President Donald Trump in Silicon Valley. He additionally helped launch Vice President JD Vance’s profession: Vance labored at Mithril Capital, an funding agency Thiel co-founded, earlier than Thiel backed his transition into politics. He delivered his remarks at a nonrecorded panel alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Reporters had been allowed to take notes on the proceedings.
The Vatican, AI, and world domination
During the occasion, Thiel took direct intention at the Vatican, accusing Pope Leo XIV — the first pope from the United States — of unintentionally advancing Chinese pursuits by pushing for stronger worldwide oversight of synthetic intelligence.
In May, Leo used his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), to declare that synthetic intelligence “must be disarmed” and name for better worldwide regulation of the expertise.
Because the pope’s message might affect some Americans, however is unlikely to be heeded by folks in China, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatened to decelerate just one aspect of the “race between the US and China” to advance AI.
In his personal view, Thiel stated, meaning Leo is “working for the Chinese Communists.” The Aspen viewers obtained his characterization of the pope as a Chinese agent with laughter.
The Vatican didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Friction between the tech billionaire and the Vatican is not new. In March, Thiel gave an invitation-only lecture series on the Antichrist in Rome, simply blocks away from the Holy See. The lectures reportedly unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to publicly state that they weren’t concerned in internet hosting the occasions.
Thiel has argued that the Antichrist might manifest not as a person however as a world authorities that seizes energy by promising to guard humanity towards existential threats reminiscent of AI or international warming.
Thiel and Fukuyama’s dialogue, entitled “Humanity at the End of History,” marked a notable departure from the final time the pair debated 14 years in the past.
In 2012, the two targeted largely on the causes of what Thiel sees as “technological stagnation,” debating revenue inequality, the failures of unpolluted power expertise, and the gridlock of US infrastructure tasks like high-speed rail.
But whereas their earlier speak centered on financial questions, this time, the pair framed the broader destiny of Western democracy in additional drastic phrases. Fukuyama is identified for his “End of History” thesis, during which he proposed that, after the Cold War, liberal democracy would possibly signify the closing type of authorities. During the Aspen panel, Fukuyama argued that the best hazard is abandoning establishments which have sustained democracy.
Thiel countered this by arguing that these establishments themselves have develop into engines of paralysis, and that many years of technological stagnation have pushed Western politics towards better instability: “The weird ways that politics has gone haywire is telling me something very deep.”
Thiel’s political beliefs have drawn criticism from some writers and thinkers, who say his mistrust in democratic establishments and enthusiasm for elite-led governance quantity to a type of “techno-authoritarianism.”
Responding to Fukuyama’s argument that, regardless of rising extremism, liberal democracy stays humanity’s greatest political system, Thiel warned that far-left forces are more and more dominating American politics.
“I think there’s going to be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” Thiel stated.
His feedback come as self-identified democratic socialists have gained affect inside the Democratic Party, most notably with final 12 months’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, adopted this 12 months by a collection of victories by democratic socialist candidates in mayoral and congressional primaries.
“The Republican Party doesn’t matter that much. It’s the less important one,” Thiel stated. “When the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.”
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thiel additionally argued that the American Revolution has been essentially misunderstood.
“There are all these anti-Trump protests: we don’t want kings, we want rule of law,” Thiel stated. He framed the American Revolution not as a marketing campaign towards King George III, however as a revolt towards an omnipotent British parliament, whose lawmakers exercised “totalitarian” management.
In Thiel’s telling, the US Constitution was designed as a corrective to Britain’s “tyrannical rule of lawyers,” with a presidency, he stated, constructed to be “more powerful than King George III.”
He contrasted the United States’s constitutional system with that of in the present day’s European Union, which he described as a stagnant, rule-bound forms, beneath which individuals are “NPCs” — non-player characters in video video games — with no energy to make selections.
“The EU is rule of law,” Thiel stated. “It is like bad AI.”
Palantir and the Deep State
Thiel spoke about Palantir, the software program firm he co-founded, and its shut contracting relationship with US federal companies together with the Pentagon and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Despite doing billions of {dollars} of enterprise with the nationwide safety institution, the firm is “not joined at the hip” with the “US deep state,” Thiel stated. He referred to as the firm’s leaders “loyal-dissident-type people” and stated that neither he nor Palantir’s present CEO, Alex Karp, maintain authorities safety clearances. Palantir didn’t reply to a request for remark.
The formidable affect wielded by tech firms, Thiel stated, is “one of the things that’s really healthy about the US,” as a result of it means “the power centers are distributed in this country.”
As an instance of the a number of energy facilities, he provided an unsupported conspiratorial declare that the AI agency Anthropic — a “woke liberal company” that he credited with “winning the AI race” — would “rig the elections in 2028” in assist of Democrats. Anthropic, Thiel stated, would use its industry-leading AI fashions to “completely outwit” any ideological efforts Elon Musk would possibly make in the other way by X.
Anthropic declined to remark, pointing as a substitute to one in all its current blog posts on election integrity and political bias.
Despite his personal right-wing libertarian politics, Thiel stated he most well-liked the thought of the US having competing energy facilities to a state of affairs like “Rome or Russia,” since “you don’t want this whole thing to be fused in DC.”
Thiel additionally mentioned Palantir’s identify, which was impressed by the magical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Critics have famous that characters who attempt to use the powers of the palantír find yourself being manipulated by the story’s archvillain, Sauron.
Thiel argued that these folks misunderstand Tolkien’s story. “Toward the end, it gets used by the good guys,” Thiel stated. The hero and king-to-be, Aragorn, makes use of a palantír to confront Sauron, exhibiting him he now possesses the reforged sword of his ancestors. (Sauron then misinterprets this intelligence, main him to make a deadly strategic blunder.)
“Anybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien,” Thiel stated, “doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, on the level of literature.”