Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is escalating his campaign against artificial intelligence regulation, taking aim at two of the technology's most prominent critics: former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV.

Speaking in closed-door lectures in Nashville on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, Thiel accused both men of capitalizing on public anxiety about AI, according to recordings obtained by Decoded by Politico. The talks are the latest installment of Thiel's lecture series on the Antichrist, a figure from Christian theology whom he regards as the embodiment of efforts to halt technological progress and impose a “ world government” of regulation.

In Thiel's framing, moves to rein in AI development form part of that threat — a path toward centralized control that would restrict both technology and individual freedom. Thiel's representatives did not respond to Politico's request for comment. The remarks land amid a widening contest over who gets to set the rules for AI — a question now being pressed at once by a former president, a pontiff and the industry's own chief executives.

Thiel says Obama and Pope Leo are cashing in on AI anxiety

During the lectures, Thiel questioned why so many public figures have weighed in on AI, singling out Obama and the pope.

“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 has recently urged Democrats to develop a clear AI plan. At a September fundraiser, he told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that the party should build a framework for a public conversation on AI policy if it retakes the House, and said 2028 presidential hopefuls should make the technology one of their “central agendas.”

Thiel was even more pointed about the pope, suggesting Leo's focus on AI is a distraction from the Catholic Church's history of abuse.

“He needed something politically popular to distract from the church's child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI,” Thiel said, according to Politico, in remarks aimed at the pope's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The book-length teaching, released in May, centers on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI. Encyclicals are among the most authoritative forms of papal teaching.

Pope Leo has urged AI companies to build strong ethical guardrails into their models, and has warned that society's growing reliance on the technology could reshape what it means to be human.

Thiel also targeted the effective altruism movement, telling attendees that its ideology “has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI,” according to Politico. Effective altruism is a philosophical and philanthropic movement whose adherents use evidence-based reasoning to pursue the causes they judge most urgent — among them, potential risks from advanced AI.

From San Francisco to Nashville

The Nashville talks are the latest stop on a tour that has drawn growing scrutiny. Thiel first delivered his Antichrist lectures in a sold-out series in San Francisco last fall, before taking them to Paris in January and to Rome in March, where Catholic commentators and Italian politicians pushed back on his ideas. Across every stop, he has argued that regulating technology — and AI in particular — plays into the Antichrist's hands. Critics have observed that his Antichrist looks a lot like the people seeking to regulate Thiel's own businesses.

A cofounder of PayPal andantir Technologies, Thiel has become a major voice in tech and conservative politics, with close ties to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Those ties sharpen the stakes: Palantir counts government agencies among its core customers, meaning Thiel is arguing against AI governance from inside the orbit of an administration whose decisions will shape how the technology is governed.

Thiel's view puts him at odds with AI's biggest CEOs

Thiel's hard line against regulation increasingly sets him apart from the people building the technology.

Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling on the industry to deliberately slow the pace at which AI models gain new capabilities, so that safety work can catch up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who has long warned that AI poses greater risks than other technologies — both publicly backed the call. Altman wrote that he agreed the industry needs to “pace the frontier,” and Musk posted that Amodei was right. Altman later spelled out why OpenAI would welcome safety requirements for frontier AI labs.

That rare show of unity among rivals stands in sharp contrast with Thiel's view that the push to slow AI down is not caution but something closer to evil. How the standoff develops may turn on two open questions: whether Democrats convert Obama's urging into a concrete policy agenda heading into the 2028 race, and whether the industry's newly public safety alignment holds as Thiel's lecture tour continues to draw scrutiny.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com