Peter Thiel Attacks Obama and the Pope Over A.I. Regulation

Peter Thiel has turned A.I. regulation into a moral battle. In recordings of the first two lectures of his Nashville series on the Antichrist, the billionaire and Palantir co-founder attacks efforts to slow artificial intelligence and says political and religious leaders are using A.I. fears for their own advantage. Politico obtained the recordings.

Thiel’s line is blunt: government attempts to regulate A.I. are evil. He says many people already know A.I. is politically unpopular, and are trying to ride that backlash to boost themselves. In his telling, both Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV fit that pattern. He says Obama knows Democrats lack ideas but can still oppose A.I., and he accuses the pope of using A.I. as a distraction from church sexual abuse scandals.

The lecture series itself is wrapped in secrecy. It has four parts, tickets cost $100, and Thiel’s team is trying to keep the content under wraps. The Antichrist theme is not a one-off gag, either. Thiel began the series in San Francisco in 2025 and later stopped in Paris and Rome. He has described the Antichrist as a tyrannical figure whose rise would bring apocalypse, and in San Francisco he pointed to Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as examples of people who want to stop science.

In Nashville, he pushed that fear further, warning that a near-totalitarian world government built to block dangerous research would be hard to undo. He also took aim at the effective altruism movement, saying it has brainwashed a significant portion of people working on AI. The irony is hard to miss: while he warns about apocalyptic controls, a large slice of his own fortune is tied to A.I. through Palantir, Founders Fund start-ups, and a $418 million A.I.-focused portfolio at Thiel Macro.