Peter Thiel in Aspen: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’
By Tommy Walters
(CNN) — Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial 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 also 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 also helped launch Vice President JD Vance’s career: Vance worked at Mithril Capital, an investment firm Thiel co-founded, before Thiel backed his transition into politics. He delivered his remarks at a nonrecorded panel alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Reporters were allowed to take notes on the proceedings.
The Vatican, AI, and world domination
During the event, Thiel took direct aim at the Vatican, accusing Pope Leo XIV — the first pope from the United States — of unintentionally advancing Chinese interests by pushing for stronger international oversight of artificial intelligence.
In May, Leo used his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), to declare that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and call for greater international regulation of the technology.
Because the pope’s message could influence some Americans, but is unlikely to be heeded by people in China, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatened to slow down only one side of the “race between the US and China” to advance AI.
In his own view, Thiel said, that means Leo is “working for the Chinese Communists.” The Aspen audience received his characterization of the pope as a Chinese agent with laughter.
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.
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, just blocks away from the Holy See. The lectures reportedly unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to publicly state that they were not involved in hosting the events.
Thiel has argued that the Antichrist could manifest not as an individual but as a world government that seizes power by promising to protect humanity against existential threats such as AI or global warming.
The end of history
Thiel and Fukuyama’s discussion, entitled “Humanity at the End of History,” marked a notable departure from the last time the pair debated 14 years ago.
In 2012, the two focused largely on the causes of what Thiel sees as “technological stagnation,” debating income inequality, the failures of clean energy technology, and the gridlock of US infrastructure projects like high-speed rail.
But while their previous talk centered on economic questions, this time, the pair framed the broader fate of Western democracy in more drastic terms. Fukuyama is known for his “End of History” thesis, in which he proposed that, after the Cold War, liberal democracy might represent the final form of government. During the Aspen panel, Fukuyama argued that the greatest danger is abandoning institutions that have sustained democracy.
Thiel countered this by arguing that those institutions themselves have become engines of paralysis, and that decades of technological stagnation have pushed Western politics toward greater instability: “The weird ways that politics has gone haywire is telling me something very deep.”
Thiel’s political views have drawn criticism from some writers and thinkers, who say his distrust in democratic institutions and enthusiasm for elite-led governance amount to a form of “techno-authoritarianism.”
A democratic-socialist ‘takeover’
Responding to Fukuyama’s argument that, despite growing extremism, liberal democracy remains humanity’s best political system, Thiel warned that far-left forces are increasingly dominating American politics.
“I think there’s going to be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” Thiel said.
His comments come as self-identified democratic socialists have gained influence within the Democratic Party, most notably with last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, followed this year by a series 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 said. “When the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.”
The tyranny of the law
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thiel also argued that the American Revolution has been fundamentally misunderstood.
“There are all these anti-Trump protests: we don’t want kings, we want rule of law,” Thiel said. He framed the American Revolution not as a campaign against King George III, but as a revolt against an all-powerful British parliament, whose lawmakers exercised “totalitarian” control.
In Thiel’s telling, the US Constitution was designed as a corrective to Britain’s “tyrannical rule of lawyers,” with a presidency, he said, built to be “more powerful than King George III.”
He contrasted the United States’s constitutional system with that of today’s European Union, which he described as a stagnant, rule-bound bureaucracy, under which people are “NPCs” — non-player characters in video games — with no power to make decisions.
“The EU is rule of law,” Thiel said. “It is like bad AI.”
Palantir and the Deep State
Thiel spoke about Palantir, the software company he co-founded, and its close contracting relationship with US federal agencies including the Pentagon and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Despite doing billions of dollars of business with the national security establishment, the company is “not joined at the hip” with the “US deep state,” Thiel said. He called the company’s leaders “loyal-dissident-type people” and said that neither he nor Palantir’s current CEO, Alex Karp, hold government security clearances. Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.
The formidable influence wielded by tech companies, Thiel said, is “one of the things that’s really healthy about the US,” because it means “the power centers are distributed in this country.”
As an example of the multiple power centers, he offered an unsupported conspiratorial claim that the AI firm Anthropic — a “woke liberal company” that he credited with “winning the AI race” — would “rig the elections in 2028” in support of Democrats. Anthropic, Thiel said, would use its industry-leading AI models to “completely outwit” any ideological efforts Elon Musk might make in the opposite direction through X.
Anthropic declined to comment, pointing instead to one of its recent blog posts on election integrity and political bias.
Despite his own right-wing libertarian politics, Thiel said he preferred the idea of the US having competing power centers to a situation like “Rome or Russia,” since “you don’t want this whole thing to be fused in DC.”
Thiel also discussed Palantir’s name, which was inspired by the magical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Critics have noted that characters who try to use the powers of the palantír end up being manipulated by the story’s archvillain, Sauron.
Thiel argued that those people misunderstand Tolkien’s story. “Toward the end, it gets used by the good guys,” Thiel said. The hero and king-to-be, Aragorn, uses a palantír to confront Sauron, showing him he now possesses the reforged sword of his ancestors. (Sauron then misinterprets this intelligence, leading him to make a fatal strategic blunder.)
“Anybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien,” Thiel said, “doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, on the level of literature.”
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