Tech billionaire and artificial intelligence investor Peter Thiel criticized Pope Leo XIV on Thursday, accusing the pontiff of serving as a “useful idiot for the [Chinese Communist Party]” by calling on world leaders to regulate AI.
During an interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of POLITICO’s parent company Axel Springer, the PayPal co-founder said the pope’s May encyclical would do nothing to rein in China’s AI ambitions — but could cause the U.S. and its allies to place onerous rules on the technology.
“The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope,” Thiel told Döpfner, “There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist party.”
“I’m not saying he was an agent of the communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP,” Thiel added.
Spokespeople for the Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The tech billionaire was speaking just ahead of Chinese leader Xi Jinping sitting down with President Donald Trump in Washington. As fears grow about the catastrophic risks of AI, lawmakers and tech executives have called on the two leaders to strike a deal that could slow the tech’s development or otherwise ameliorate those risks.
Thiel has a history of harshly criticizing public figures who call for new regulations on technology. Last year, he compared climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI safety advocate Eliezer Yudkowsky to “the Antichrist,” which he warned would appear as “a Luddite who wants to stop all science.” Speaking in July in Colorado, Thiel accused the pope of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” for advocating AI regulation.
Thiel spoke with Döpfner in Berlin at a ceremony where he received the Axel Springer Award, which honors those “whose achievements have had a lasting impact on business, society, or technological progress He is a partner at Founders Fund, a venture capital group that is invested in OpenAI, Palantir, Scale AI and several other powerful AI firms.