A cold war has broken out between Silicon Valley and the Vatican, as they accuse one another of jeopardizing humanity’s future.
In a Monday encyclical letter, Pope Leo XIV warned mankind is facing the “risk of being misled by deceitful goals” in the age of AI and called on regulators to stand up to its creators.
The 42,000 word manifesto comes after Peter Thiel has repeatedly argued in a global speaking tour — including in Rome, right outside Vatican City — that a powerful figure trying to stymy technological progress will turn out to be the antichrist predicted by the New Testament.
It’s a frankly bizarre standoff between two very different Christian predictions about the future of AI: one in which AI delivers us to our maximal human potential, and the other in which AI represents an existential risk to our very humanity.
While the pope warns AI’s creators are playing god and flirting with disaster, Thiel has been arguing that anyone who stands in their way is a “legionnaire” of the antichrist.
The New Testament predicts that a seemingly compassionate false prophet will seduce humanity with false promises of peace and prosperity but ultimately cause suffering before the true Messiah returns.
Thiel, a protestant, believes that this biblical moment is imminent. In his view, AI is on the precipice of delivering humanity to its pinnacle, and an antichrist figure will soon rise up to oppose this techno-utopia.
“In the 21st century, the antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” he warned in an October lecture. “In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic… the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.”
Thiel has been delivering his message about the antichrist in speeches since at least 2023. He has never publicly named who he believes the antichrist is, though he’s said the antichrist has many “legionnaires,” including AI doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of a book sub-titled “Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.”
In an article published several months after Leo’s appointment Thiel also noted how “various popes” were suspected of being the antichrist.
He has derided Leo as a “woke American pope” and said that he worries about the fact that Vice President JD Vance, whose political campaigns he has contributed to generously, is “too close to the pope.”
“The slogan of the antichrist is peace and safety,” he said in December 2024 at the Hoover Institute, where he predicted the antichrist “probably presents as a great humanitarian” who will tell his fearful followers that “the stakes are so extreme.”
In his Monday encyclical letter, the pope said just that: the stakes are, indeed, extreme. He warned AI could cause mass unemployment, the dissolution of family units, and unprecedented warfare.
Leo advocated for “the protection of employment” in the face of AI, arguing family “is a fragile social good immediately affected by the economic and technological transformations reshaping the nature of work.”
The pope also warned that it is “not permissible to entrust lethal” warfare decisions to AI, such as automated targeting for missiles and drones and predicted doing so would “only bring about conflict more quickly,” lower “the threshold” for violence, and reduce “victims to data.”
He called out Silicon Valley giants like Thiel directly, accusing them of “[monopolizing] expertise, data, and decision-making authority” and imposing power “from above in an opaque and unilateral manner.”
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke in support of the pope’s warnings at the Vatican on Monday, though one should ask whether Anthropic is in any way different, or just posturing; billing itself as the “good guy” in a crowd of bad actors, yet in reality offering exactly the same product.
The pope also advocated for AI regulations including independent checks and transparency about algorithms.
Thiel has warned that the antichrist will call for global regulation and bring about a “one-world government.”
The pope also seemed to be critiquing the pseudo-religious savior complex of some Big Tech execs. He warned humanity to resist being seduced by “the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness” and emphasized the “pressing duty to remain profoundly human” in the age of techno-optimization.
This may be a response to “transhumanism,” a vision for humanity’s future popularized by some Silicon Valley execs that insists man and machine must merge to become cyborgs to reach our full potential.
In addition to being a Christian, Thiel identifies as a transhumanist. He defended transhumanism in a July New York Times podcast, where he explained his vision of a “radical transformation, where your human body, [your] natural body, gets transformed into an immortal body.”
“We want you be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body… [and] to transform your whole self,” he said
While the pope suggests deviating from our humanity is dangerous, Thiel argued during the podcast that transhumanism aligns with “Judeo-Christian inspiration.”
“It is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things,” he explained. “People are fallen… You are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.”
But the pope isn’t having that.
In his encyclical letter he admonished “any effort” that “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.”
Each man is using his Christian faith as a lens to analyzeAI, and they each have come to the same conclusion: that the other could be theharbinger of disaster.
While both paint apocalyptic visions of the future, AI has yet to turn the world completely upside down. For the moment, millions of mundane and routine tasks have been automated. Perhaps AI will continue on to displace meaningful human labor, or maybe its aid will free up our time and unleash new frontiers of creativity.
For the moment, we’re still a long way off mass destruction or a cyborg-filled techno-utopia… let alone proving the existence of an antichrist.
