Peter Thiel Accuses Obama and Pope Leo of Exploiting AI Fears in 'Antichrist' Lecture Series

Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir cofounder, used a pair of lectures in Nashville this fall to accuse Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV of stoking public fear of artificial intelligence for their own benefit, part of an ongoing lecture series in which Thiel frames AI regulation through the theological lens of the Antichrist. Speaking on September 28 and again on October 5, Thiel argued that prominent critics of unrestrained AI development understand the technology is politically unpopular and are using that unease to raise their own profiles. "Many people know that AI is politically unpopular and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity," he said, according to Fortune.

Thiel's target list included the former U.S. president as well as the pope, whose encyclical on AI ethics, Magnifica Humanitas, was released in May. Thiel went further on the pope specifically, suggesting the Vatican's emphasis on AI safeguards functions as a convenient distraction from the Catholic Church's abuse scandals — a claim that casts the pontiff's stated moral concerns about the technology as self-interested rather than sincere.

A years-long campaign against the 'Antichrist' of centralized control

The Nashville talks are the latest stop in a lecture series Thiel has carried from San Francisco in the fall of 2025 to Paris in January and Rome in March of this year. Across those appearances, Thiel has built out a theological framework in which he casts calls for AI regulation and global coordination as a step toward the kind of centralized, planet-spanning authority he associates with the biblical Antichrist — an argument aimed less at specific AI safety proposals than at the broader instinct to regulate powerful new technology at all.

That framing puts Thiel at odds with a growing list of tech figures who have called for a slower, more cautious approach to AI. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay in September arguing for pacing the technology's development, and OpenAI's Sam Altman has likewise voiced support for a more measured rollout. Elon Musk, too, has warned repeatedly about the risks of advanced AI moving faster than safeguards can keep up. For Thiel, those warnings function less as genuine caution and more as evidence of his broader thesis: that invoking fear of AI has become a reliable way for public figures, religious leaders, and even fellow technologists to build influence.

Framing regulation as the real threat

Underlying Thiel's lecture series is a consistent argument that treats AI regulation itself, rather than the technology, as the primary danger — a threat to technological progress and to individual freedom that he equates with the drift toward centralized global governance. By placing Obama, the pope, and even some of his industry peers on the same side of that argument, Thiel positions himself as one of the most prominent voices in Silicon Valley still pushing back against the emerging consensus that AI development needs meaningful guardrails.