Thiel Calls Obama and Pope Leo Exploiters of AI Fear in Nashville Talks

Peter Thiel told closed-door audiences in Nashville that Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV are exploiting public fear of artificial intelligence to lift their own standing, according to recordings obtained by Decoded by Politico. The lectures took place on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5.

The talks extend Thiel's running lecture series on the Antichrist, a figure from Christian theology. Thiel casts the Antichrist as an enemy of technological progress who pushes a "one world government" of regulation. In his framework, every effort to rein in AI development is a step toward centralized control and less individual freedom. His representatives did not respond to Politico's request for comment.

The episodes mark an escalation in one of the tech industry's loudest campaigns against AI rules, and they now target two figures with enormous public reach.

What did Thiel say about Obama?

Thiel asked why so many public figures weigh in on AI at all, then named the former president and the pope.

"Many people know that AI is politically unpopular and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity," Thiel said. "Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI."

Obama has in fact pushed his party in the opposite direction from pure opposition. At a September fundraiser, he told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that Democrats should build a framework for a public conversation on AI policy if they retake the House. He also said 2028 presidential hopefuls should make the technology one of their "central agendas."

The former president's message is a call for a plan, not a ban. That distinction did not appear in Thiel's account.

How did he frame the pope's intervention?

Thiel went further on Pope Leo XIV. He suggested the pope's focus on AI serves as a distraction from the Catholic Church's record on abuse.

"He needed something politically popular to distract from the church's child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI," Thiel said, according to Politico.

The remark targeted the pope's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, released in May. The book-length teaching focuses on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI. Pope Leo has urged AI companies to build strong ethical guardrails into their models, and he has warned that society's reliance on the technology could reshape what it means to be human.

Thiel also attacked the effective altruism movement. Its ideology "has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI," he told attendees, according to Politico.

How did the lecture tour reach Nashville?

The Nashville events are the latest stop on a tour that keeps drawing scrutiny. Thiel first delivered the Antichrist lectures in a sold-out series in San Francisco last fall. He took them to Paris in January and to Rome in March, where Catholic commentators and Italian politicians pushed back.

Across every stop, the argument has stayed the same: regulating technology, and AI above all, plays into the Antichrist's hands. Critics have noted a pattern in the framing — Thiel's Antichrist looks a lot like the people who want to regulate his own businesses.

Thiel cofounded PayPal and Palantir Technologies. He remains a major voice in tech and conservative politics, with close ties to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That political position gives his theological framing practical weight in Washington's AI policy fights.

Why does Thiel now stand apart from AI's biggest CEOs?

The Nashville remarks put Thiel on the opposite side of a debate inside his own industry, and the split is unusually clean.

Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling on the industry to deliberately slow the pace at which AI models gain new capabilities, so safety work can catch up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly backed the call. Altman wrote that he agreed the industry needs to "pace the frontier." Musk posted that Amodei was right. Altman later spelled out why OpenAI would welcome safety requirements for frontier AI labs.

Musk has long warned that AI poses greater risks than other technologies, which makes his endorsement of a slowdown notable.

That rare show of unity among rivals stands in sharp contrast with Thiel's position. He treats the push to slow AI down not as caution but as something closer to evil. The gap between Thiel and the CEOs building frontier models now defines one axis of the AI policy debate, and Nashville showed the billionaire intends to fight it in theological as well as political terms.