Peter Thiel: Pope's AI Encyclical 'Working for' China
Peter Thiel told Axel Springer’s Mathias Döpfner that Pope Leo XIV’s call to regulate AI helps China. He also blamed Americans, not Beijing, for the US backlash against AI.
September 25, 2026
Peter Thiel at the Converge Tech Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, in February 2022 Credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr (cropped)
Thiel referred to Pope Leo's encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which called on world leaders to regulate AI, as a "useful idiot" for the Chinese Communist Party.
"The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope. There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist party," Thiel said.
"I’m not saying he was an agent of the communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP," he added.
The text, published in May, wouldn’t slow China, according to Thiel. Instead, it might lead the US and its allies to impose heavy rules on AI.
The Vatican has since expanded its AI campaign with the AI4Peace association.
This is not the first time Thiel has criticized the pope over AI. In July, he said the pope was acting as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for regulation.
Thiel also placed blame for the growing US backlash against AI on Americans themselves, suggesting China was not the main force behind the shift.
"This is mainly what we’re doing to ourselves. It’s often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China," Thiel said.
He also criticized German entrepreneurs, stating that German founders tend to sell their companies before they grow into global businesses.
"If you have something that works, you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg," he said.
Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund, which has invested in OpenAI, Palantir, and Scale AI, among other AI companies.