The US tech billionaire and MAGA donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the Antichrist in Rome on Sunday, landing him in Pope Leo XIV’s orbit.
Thiel, the founder of data intelligence company Palantir Technologies, is fixated on the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” blocking scientific and technological progress.
His hobbyhorse is that tech regulation is a spiritual con, with the lobbyists cast as heralds of the antichrist and everyone else told to panic responsibly.
Palantir Technologies founder Peter Thiel told the New York Times last year, “The way the antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop.”
“You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate… The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”
Those views clash with those of Pope Leo, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff, who has warned about the dangers of AI and called for stronger regulation to minimise risks.
The four-day lecture series is not at the Vatican; its location in Rome is secret, and it is co-organised by a new fringe Italian group linked to Italy’s far right and Catholic conservatives in the UK.
In the run-up, Italian bishops’ conference newspaper Avvenire took aim at Thiel and Palantir, saying that “to save humanity… he proposes devices that ultimately restrict what is most human in humanity”.
Pope Leo said earlier this year his call for AI regulation was not aimed at stopping innovation, “but rather to guide it and be aware of its ambivalent nature”.
The pontiff and US bishops have been highly critical of US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which Palantir has benefited from via services used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track migrants.
Trinity College Dublin professor of ecclesiology Massimo Faggioli said, “This is an operation that I see as hostile to the papacy.”
“This pope is very critical of AI and Thiel is one of the Mr AIs. This is part of an attempt to create an alternative American circle in Rome in competition with what Pope Leo is saying.” Faggioli said.
Le Grand Continent website Vatican AI adviser Father Paolo Benanti wrote on Saturday that Thiel’s career “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heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.”
