Peter Thiel: Obama and Pope Leo XIV are cashing in on AI fear

Thiel's Nashville talks are the latest stop on a lecture tour that began with a sold-out series in San Francisco last fall and continued in Paris in January and Rome in March, where Catholic commentators and Italian politicians pushed back on his ideas. His representatives did not respond to Politico's request for comment.

The target of his criticism was not abstract. He singled out Obama, who recently urged Democrats to build a framework for a public conversation on AI policy if they retake the House and said 2028 presidential hopefuls should make the technology one of their "central agendas." He was more pointed about Pope Leo XIV, tying the pope's focus on AI to the church's child sex abuse scandals and to his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the book-length teaching released in May that focuses on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI.