As Pope Leo Warns Against ‘Paradise of Machines,’ Thiel Calls the Pontiff ‘a Useful Idiot’ for Communist China

The debate over how and whether to regulate artificial intelligence is growing more heated, with Pope Leo XIV issuing a new warning that humanity could be lost to a “paradise of machines,” while tech mogul Peter Thiel this week described the pontiff as “a useful idiot for” the Chinese Communist Party.The escalation of rhetoric accompanies a wave of new examples of rogue AI agents breaking out of their testing environments, including Friday’s disclosure that OpenAI’s agents probed or accessed three United States government websites last summer. Also Friday, the company announced that its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. Reuters quoted a “person briefed on the matter” saying that since mid-September OpenAI has found roughly two dozen incidents of its agents acting in undesirable ways.Leaders of some of the very companies developing the technology have raised alarms and called for tighter regulation of the industry, while others, including President Trump, have dismissed those calls as fear-mongering and argued that America cannot slow down for fear of being beaten to AI supremacy by Communist China.At their White House summit this week, Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping established a new dialogue “to exchange views on risks and benefits” related to what the president has rebranded as “super intelligence,” according to a White House fact sheet, with the next meeting set for November. However, there was no public sign of a commitment on the part of either country to slow AI development or establish new guardrails for the technology.Pope Leo, who in May issued an encyclical calling for strong international legal frameworks and strict accountability in the development of AI, returned to the subject Friday during a high-profile visit to France. “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying at the Elysee Palace.Speaking to reporters on his way to Paris, the pontiff recounted his discussions with industry leaders and said he believed his message was getting through. “And I think from their perspective, many of them, they’re very much open to looking for ways of making sure that AI does not displace or ultimately destroy humanity, but rather be a tool for human beings,” he said. “Good things are beginning at least.”Palantir CEO Peter Thiel appears to be presented with the Axel Springer Award honoring outstanding entrepreneurs, innovators, and thought leaders at Berlin on September 24, 2026. Gerald Matzka/Getty ImagesLess impressed with the pope’s efforts is Mr. Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of the defense technology and data analytics giant Palantir Technologies. Speaking Thursday to the German news publishing house Axel Springer, he said AI could only be slowed by a single world government, “a cure that’s worse than the disease.”“The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope,” he said in reference to the May encyclical. “There’s a chance people in the US will. And so in effect, the pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist Party. I’m not saying he was an agent of the Communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.”Mr. Thiel is more sanguine about the AI future than many of his Silicon Valley colleagues, who have endorsed a September 12 manifesto from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warning that advanced AI models could become capable within the next year of “leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet.” Other threats include severe cyberattacks and bioterrorism, he said.In one of the most widely reported instances causing concern, OpenAI disclosed in July that one of its AI agents acted on its own to recruit other AI agents and, by sharing information on message boards, successfully hacked into the production infrastructure of the AI startup Hugging Face.On September 18, Google reported that its Gemini model gained access to the internet in May and broke into three websites after guessing at login credentials. And on Friday, OpenAI said its agents had sought access to websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission without the company’s knowledge.An AI agent — a software program capable of making independent decisions —- managed to secure data from the Census Bureau website using login credentials it found online, the company said, while an attempt to access the Education Department website was unsuccessful. The company said one of its agents posted publicly available data from the SEC website on an online forum.Despite the growing list of incidents, Mr. Trump remains resistant to any steps that would allow China to overtake the United States in the race for AI dominance. Speaking Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly, he said, “Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence wins. That’s the group that wins.”

As Pope Leo Warns Against ‘Paradise of Machines,’ Thiel Calls the Pontiff ‘a Useful Idiot’ for Communist China

As Pope Leo Warns Against ‘Paradise of Machines,’ Thiel Calls the Pontiff ‘a Useful Idiot’ for Communist China

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