WorldPosted at: Oct 9 2026 9:42PM


Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel accuses Pope Leo XIV of using AI fears to divert attention from Catholic Church child sex scandals

Nashville, Oct 9 (UNI) Pope Leo XIV is exploiting the rising fears surrounding artificial intelligence to divert public attention from the Catholic Church's many child sex abuse scandals, claimed Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, while also accusing former US president Barack Obama of using opposition to AI for political gain.
Thiel made the comments during a series of closed-door lectures in Nashville on September 28 and October 5, details of which were reported by Politico on Thursday.
Thiel argued that opposition to AI had become a useful political tool, allowing public figures to capitalise on concerns about the technology.
"Many people know that AI is politically unpopular and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity," Thiel said. "Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI."
Obama recently urged Democrats to develop a more comprehensive strategy on artificial intelligence.
Thiel also alleged that Leo had focused on AI to draw attention away from decades of child sexual abuse scandals involving the Church.
"He needed something politically popular to distract from the church's child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI," Thiel said, referring to the pope's first encyclical, published in May.
Leo has repeatedly warned about the risks of unchecked AI development, including its potential impact on human dignity, individual freedoms and the concentration of power.
Thiel's remarks came as concerns grow among technology leaders and researchers about the potential consequences of increasingly powerful AI systems.
Developers and executives have called for safeguards and greater oversight, while warnings about possible loss of human control have intensified debate over how quickly the technology should advance.
Tech giants such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, have backed calls to slow the development of increasingly powerful models.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, likewise has warned that rogue systems could take control of large parts of the internet within months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
Altman said earlier this week that society should accept some "bad things" from AI, including hacking, scams and misuse, in exchange for its benefits. He said, however, that a "serious loss of control to AI" would constitute a catastrophic risk.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has called for government regulation, warning that AI in the hands of malicious actors could trigger events resulting in "a billion deaths".
Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known for his work on AI, has also warned that increasingly powerful systems could eventually escape human control, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Thiel has separately warned about the Antichrist, a figure in Christian tradition associated with deception and opposition to Jesus's teachings. He has argued that such a figure could exploit fears surrounding AI and other catastrophic threats to restrict technological progress and impose a heavily regulated "one world government".
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