Peter Thiel Accuses Pope Leo XIV of Working for the Chinese Communist Party

Thiel told a nonrecorded Aspen Ideas Festival panel with Francis Fukuyama that the pope’s AI encyclical serves Beijing. The billionaire behind JD Vance has spent a year casting Leo as an agent of the Antichrist.

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Peter Thiel stood before the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday and told the crowd that Pope Leo XIV is “working for the Chinese Communists.”

The audience laughed, but Thiel was dead serious.

CNN reported the remarks Thursday from a non-recorded panel in Colorado, where Thiel appeared alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and reporters were permitted to take notes.

The logic behind the accusation runs through the pope’s own words. In May, Leo published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, a 40,000-word document declaring that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and calling for stronger international oversight of the technology.

Because Americans might actually heed that teaching while the Chinese Communist Party ignores it, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatens to slow exactly one side of the AI race between Washington and Beijing. A pope who asks his flock to think before they build becomes, by this arithmetic, an asset of a foreign adversary.

The Vatican did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Readers of this community know the longer arc.

Here’s the backstory.