Overview
- Thiel, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday, accused Pope Leo XIV of “working for the Chinese Communists,” drew laughter from the audience, and made the remarks during a nonrecorded panel with Francis Fukuyama.
- The remarks directly respond to the pope’s May encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which called for AI to be “disarmed,” stronger international oversight, limits on lethal autonomous systems, and a Vatican pontifical commission to follow up.
- Thiel also made unsupported claims at the panel that Anthropic would “rig the elections in 2028,” and he defended Palantir’s independence from the U.S. national security establishment while noting the company’s large federal contracts.
- The Vatican has not issued an immediate public rebuttal, and the exchange deepens a months‑long public friction that includes Thiel’s earlier private lectures in Rome that unsettled Vatican officials.
- Coverage has split along political lines and the episode could shape policy debates by tying moral arguments about AI to geopolitics and election trust, a dynamic likely to push regulators, tech firms, and religious leaders into sharper public conflict.