Thiel accuses Pope Leo of aiding China through AI encyclical

At the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, Peter Thiel described the pope as a Chinese communist agent, and the room reportedly laughed. The through-line running from that quip to the rest of Thiel's remarks is worth pulling out, because it is the framing several US tech investors now use to try to close down conversations about AI regulation before they start.

The trigger was Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, in which the first pope from the United States declared that artificial intelligence 'must be disarmed' and called for greater international regulation of the technology. On a nonrecorded panel with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Thiel argued that this kind of moral pressure would land on some Americans but not on Beijing, and would therefore slow down only one side of the 'race between the US and China' to advance AI. From that, CNN reported, he concluded that Leo is 'working for the Chinese Communists.'

Why this matters if you don't follow venture-capital theatre: 'the Chinese are doing it anyway' is quickly becoming the default reason to dismiss almost any AI governance proposal, whether it comes from regulators, an encyclical, or a safety-focused lab. If that framing sticks, the practical effect is that any restraint on frontier US models gets recast as unilateral surrender, which is a very convenient conclusion for the people building and funding those models. Thiel also offered, without evidence, that Anthropic would 'rig the elections in 2028' in support of Democrats, which gives you a sense of how far the arms-race lens is being stretched at the moment.

The honest caveat is that the panel was not recorded, so the quotes come through reporters' notes rather than a transcript, and the encyclical itself is a moral document, not a specific regulatory blueprint. What the reporting doesn't give you is how other frontier labs, or Republican policymakers who take Catholic social teaching seriously, actually plan to respond. Worth watching: whether Leo's 'disarmed AI' language becomes a rallying point for civil-society groups pushing for real international guardrails, or whether the arms-race framing quietly wins the argument by default.