Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel launched a four-part lecture series in Nashville on September 28, using theological arguments to claim that government attempts to regulate artificial intelligence are evil, while attacking former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV.
Nashville Lectures and the Antichrist AI Safety Argument
Thiel delivered the first two events of his $100-per-ticket lecture series in Nashville on September 28 and October 5, as POLITICO reported. The talks continued a closed-door theological tour that began with a 2025 series in San Francisco before expanding to Paris and Rome. During these sessions, Thiel argued that figures warning about artificial intelligence are using the technology’s political unpopularity to boost their own public standing.
“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel told attendees in Nashville, according to POLITICO. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI.”
Thiel also targeted Pope Leo XIV over the Vatican’s official stance on digital technology. “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity,” Thiel said in remarks captured by POLITICO. “The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical… he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.” The Vatican’s first encyclical on the topic associated the AI era with new forms of dehumanization and an idolatry of profit.
Financial Ties to Artificial Intelligence
Thiel holds significant financial investments across the artificial intelligence sector through multiple investment vehicles. His portfolio includes numerous startups funded by Founders Fund, product suites from Palantir, and a $418 million AI-focused allocation managed by his global hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC.
Politico.com noted that Thiel’s theological stance against AI regulation aligns directly with his commercial interests. Representatives for Thiel, Barack Obama, and the Vatican did not respond to requests for comment regarding the Nashville remarks.
The Vatican previously reacted strongly to Thiel’s earlier tour stops. In spring 2026, Vatican adviser Friar Paolo Benanti published an essay titled “The American Heresy: Should We Burn Peter Thiel?” in response to the initial San Francisco lectures.
Thiel Uses Scripture to Critique Tech Policy and Effective Altruism
Throughout the Nashville events, Thiel integrated scriptural references into his critique of tech policy, citing Matthew 24:24 regarding false prophets. He also expanded on the theological concept of the Katechon, a restraining force from 2 Thessalonians that delays the arrival of the Antichrist, naming historical figures such as Charlemagne and Klemens von Metternich as individuals who briefly played that role.
Thiel directed sharp criticism at effective altruism, an ideology that measures moral good through utilitarian calculations. Rather than focusing on its association with convicted figures like Sam Bankman-Fried, Thiel argued that effective altruists support the creation of a global governing body to halt dangerous technological research.
“One also has to take seriously that once you create a near totalitarian one-world government with the power to stop all dangerous science, it cannot easily be uncreated either,” Thiel stated, as reported by POLITICO. “There is no precedent in human history that suggests that this global prison warden would willingly give up his or its power. The effective altruist ideology has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI.”
During his 2025 San Francisco lectures, Thiel offered a shifting definition of the Antichrist, suggesting that while past eras might have viewed an evil scientist as the antagonist, modern luddites attempting to halt scientific progress fit the eschatological role.
