Peter Thiel, the Palantir co-founder whose Founders Fund holds stakes in OpenAI, Palantir and Scale AI, said in Berlin on Sept. 24 that Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence was “working for the Communist Party” of China. “The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope,” Thiel told Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, in an interview at the ceremony where the company gave him its Axel Springer Award. “There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist party.” He added: “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 had said in July at the Aspen Ideas Festival that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent,” and last year he compared advocates of AI regulation to “the Antichrist,” who he said would appear as “a Luddite who wants to stop all science.” Some 400 people demonstrated outside the ceremony under the slogan “Thiel shall not pass,” and the German Journalists’ Association criticized the award; Springer’s own Politico had just been barred from the White House by the President Thiel supports.

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was published May 25. It does not argue against technology; it argues against its unaccountable concentration. “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,” the pope wrote, and “to disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” On weapons: “There is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable.”