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Ai Must Be ‘Disarmed’ Says Pope
- A Radical Dispatch
1) Disarm Ai Says Pope
Pope Leo XIV has used the opportunity of his encyclical address to warn of the dangers of technocracy, comparing autonomous artificial intelligence weapons systems to the nuclear arms race, and demanding that Ai be ‘disarmed.’
Click to play:
Pope Leo XIV: “Artificial Intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity. The Church has long been working for nuclear disarmament, aware that every great technical power can affect people’s lives, and so must be accompanied by adequate moral discernment and public control. Nuclear disarmament remains a service to peace and the dignity of the human family. In a similar sense, artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death. Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all and of the common good.”
Pope Leo went further than merely raising concerns about the potential of Ai to dominate humans, but also warned of the structural inequality that underpins most of its current computational power.
The Times reports 25th May 2026:
“Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan friar and AI expert who has advised the Vatican, said: ‘The encyclical surprised me not by what it says but by how directly it says it. Papal documents usually speak in principles; this one names the structural problem: computational power is concentrated in the hands of a few private actors who answer to no democratic process. That is a political statement, not just a moral one — and it is the right diagnosis’…Leo signed off on Magnifica humanitas on May 15 to mark the 135th anniversary of the issue of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical by his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, which called for improved workers’ rights during the industrial revolution.”
The Pope was not rejecting the technology outright rather he warned of its unethical use and misguided purpose.
Vatican News reports 25th May 2026:
“‘Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together’…Divided into five chapters, Magnifica humanitas has an underlying premise: technology is not ‘a force antagonistic to humanity’, nor is it ‘inherently evil’. However, ‘technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.’ Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build ‘for the common good’ and to ‘remain human,’ following a courageous mentality of shared responsibility and communion, so that the world ‘will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell’.”
Open Ai founder Sam Altman provides a live example of the Pope’s concerns around the misdirection that the technology’s business leaders are seeking to take it in.
Click to play:
Sam Altman, Open Ai Co-Founder: “The business of every other model provider is gonna look like selling tokens. Ya know, they come from bigger or smaller models, which makes it more or less expensive. They may use more or less reasoning, which also makes them more or less expensive. They may be running all the time in the background trying to help you out. They may run only when you need them if you wanna pay less. They may work super hard, ya know, spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions of so many billions of dollars on a single problem, right, that’s really valuable. But we see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they wanna use it for. The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go like this. And if we don’t have enough, we either can’t sell it or the price gets really high and it, you know, kind of goes to rich people, or society makes a bunch of sort of central planning decisions that I think almost always go badly about, you know, we’re going to use our limited compute supply for this and not that. So the best thing to me throughout all the history of capitalism, innovation, whatever you want is to just flood the market.”
Commentators were quick to point out the injustice inherently involved in Altman’s above proposition that Ai could eventually be charged as a utility.
The Pope’s full encyclical address may be accessed below.
Magnifica Humanitas, The Holy See, accessed 25th May 2026:
2) Peter Thiel’s Inversion:
The most high profile case of an Ai company causing global concern is Peter Theil’s data spyware firm Palantir.
Yes, that is named after the Palantiri spy stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where Saruman uses the Orthanc-stone to commune with the evil Sauron, who had the Ithil-stone. It is probably with Palantir in mind that the Pope also referenced Tolkien’s epic.
Peter Thiel seems aware that those warning of the dangers of Ai have his company in their crosshairs. So much so that Thiel - using typical inversion - has reportedly named the Pope himself as the anti-Christ.
International Business Times reports 28th April 2026:
“Last year, audio recordings from a private lecture series in which Thiel discussed the Antichrist and appeared to cast Pope Leo XIV as a potential manifestation of that figure leaked online. Those recordings have resurfaced, gaining renewed scrutiny and highlighting a deepening rift between the accelerationist goals of parts of the tech elite and the cautious humanism promoted by the papacy.”
In Thiel’s telling, it is those who seek to curtail Palantir’s ability to monopolise the automation of humanity who are the real danger, and speaking up against Palantir apparently makes Leo a ‘woke American pope’.
Thiel’s offensive-defence includes a legitimate critique of outsized government bureaucracy and overreaching state power.
The Observer reports 19th October reports 2025:
“Thiel, a committed Christian, claimed that modern society faces two dangers: armageddon on one side, and authoritarian control – what he calls the antichrist – on the other. ‘In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science,’ he said in his opening talk on 15 September. This vision of the antichrist is embodied by technology regulators, and the governing bodies that oversee them. According to journalist Ryan Mac, who has covered Thiel for over a decade, the billionaire’s recent rhetoric is not new but repackaged: the ‘antichrist’ is a scandalous new metaphor for old ideas. Since the early 2000s, Thiel has been warning that western civilisation is in decline, that progress is being strangled by bureaucracy, and that innovation must be liberated from state control.”
This is a legitimate concern raised for illegitimate ends.
As populist currents across the West testify to, the state has indeed become oversized and inefficient. But to propose such a critique by no means implies that oversized state power should in turn be substituted with private technocratic corporate power. That is the very meaning of fascism.
A true reformer would argue that power should be decentralised and devolved, not merely wrestled from one set of overlords and handed to another. When framing matters in this way, Thiel’s self-interested agenda for opposing state bureaucracy becomes self-evident.
3) The Pope’s Three Main Concerns With Ai
Despite Thiel’s disingenuous defence by inversion, Pope Leo XIV has raised three areas of legitimate concern around Ai that humanity would do well to consider. Below, we use the UK as a case study to highlight the Pope’s legitimate three concerns.
Click to play:
Maajid Nawaz: “Peter Thiel’s Palantir as a company, using the UK as a case study, already has, due to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, already has contracts to manage the nation’s, all of the nation’s health data unified on one platform and that health data being interpreted as it is by Palantir’s autonomous AI, making life and death decisions on the nation’s health. Palatir also separately has a contract with the Metropolitan Police using a combination of not just facial recognition but predictive programming to determine crime and to set the police’s priorities. This is something that, they already have this deal with the Metropolitan Police, but in addition, if you add Palantir’s contracts with the Ministry of Defence in the UK, like it has in the Department of Defence in the United States of America, you can see how a combination of health data, domestic crime surveillance and foreign war-mongering, being all under the auspices of one private company called Palantir, in the UK and in the US, it’s the same, it is a particularly worrying scenario.”
i) Ai & military targeting:
Modern warfare is fast becoming automated, autonomous and final. Whether it be drone swarms, missile guidance or predictive targeting, much of modern warfare relies on automated weapons platforms that use Ai, sparking a tech-based arms race similar to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. It is in this context that Pope Leo called for Ai to be ‘disarmed’.
The Times reports 25th May 2026:
“The Pope has said that artificial intelligence must be ‘disarmed’ to prevent it from accelerating wars, slashing jobs and dominating humanity….The pontiff set down his challenge to Silicon Valley in a manifesto or encyclical entitled Magnifica humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity. He said big tech firms should not be left to formulate an overarching ethical code to govern the use of AI themselves. ‘A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,’ he wrote…The Pope warned that the trend of AI companies winning military contracts to insert their algorithms into battlefield kill chains ‘can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defence into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data’. AI must be ‘disarmed,’ he wrote, adding: ‘To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity’.”
Our regulars will know that we have been warning of this aspect for some time. There have been major concerns around Peter Thiel’s Palantir using Ai to target Palestinians for military strikes in Israel’s war on Gaza.
Bloomberg reports 12th January 2024:
“Palantir Technologies Inc., the data analysis firm that provides militaries with artificial intelligence models, has agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry to supply technology to help the country’s war effort.”
Its use to identify military targets is no longer in doubt.
The Times reports 30th March 2026:
“The contract has attracted controversy because of the company’s work for the US military and intelligence services. One key system linked to Palantir is Project Maven, a US military AI programme that analyses surveillance data to identify potential targets. The company has also been accused of allowing its systems to be used to identify illegal immigrants to be targeted by ICE.”
Such a predictive Ai targeting system was used in Gaza and is now also being used in Iran.
The Times reports 3rd March 2026:
“During the US-led invasion of Iraq, a 2,000-strong American intelligence unit was asked to identify targets on the ground for western troops. In Operation Epic Fury against Iran, 20 troops can carry out the same workload. They are using software developed by the CIA-backed technology company Palantir, which uses artificial intelligence to choose and dismiss targets more quickly than the human brain can think…The Pentagon has been developing Project Maven with the help of Palantir since 2018 and the software is embedded in all US combatant commands. It uses AI and machine learning to crunch vast amounts of data, specifically for military targeting and surveillance. Experts compared it to a military version of Uber.”
The Pope’s encyclical address referenced his concern about “AI companies winning military contracts to insert their algorithms into battlefield kill chains”, and it is no longer disputed that Palantir engages in organising such military “kill chains”.
The Times reports 3rd March 2026:
“Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, a think tank, said the system allowed planners to organise kill chains and orchestrate the movement and actions of hundreds of military units. ‘This kind of work would take days using computer spreadsheets, but now planners can complete operational plans within hours or less,’ he said….The British military is pouring millions of pounds into the Palantir technology. To win wars, experts believe, nations will have to capture data faster than the adversary. Data could be provided from myriad sources, such as satellites, surveillance aircraft and assets on the ground.”
Such concern is not allayed by the pronouncements and behaviour of Palantir’s brazen CEO Alex Karp, who publicly boasts about killing people while seeking board member approval.
Click to play:
Alex Karp: “‘You know, we are doing what in the United Kingdom and many other places, Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you’re in favour of that. We hope you’re enjoying being a partner. And we’re really happy and very, very focused on what we’re doing. Thank you for your time’. ‘Thank you. That concludes Q&A for today’s call’. Now, that isn’t AI. That is a real Palantir meeting. That is their real CEO, Alex Karp, saying that Palantir is ‘happy to scare people and on occasion kill’ them. Now, that’s fine. It’s a Pentagon and CIA funded AI-military targeting software company. Fine. You know, sometimes war is necessary. We’re not pacifists here. But should such a company with their CEO acting like a Lex Luthor, real life Lex Luthor from the Superman movies, should such a company also be granted total access to our health data?”
In fact, Alex Karp regularly fantasises about using the immense power he has as CEO of Palantir to go after his enemies.
Click to play:
Alex Karp, Palantir CEO: “And I also think you often need a lower purpose. Like, the higher purpose, for me... ”
Interviewer: “What’s a lower purpose?”
Alex Karp, Palantir CEO: “Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us. So that’s my lower purpose. And, uh... Yeah, but... and others. But the higher purpose for me was to get this nation to be the preeminent power in the world. Because whatever faults we have, they’re nothing like anyone else’s.”
ii) Ai & the surveillance state
One more area of grave concern is Palantir’s use of Ai for the domestic surveillance state.
The Times reports 25th November 2023:
“…Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, is also a controversial figure. With wild, curly hair, he is an eccentric philosopher-billionaire who unashamedly discusses how his company serves America’s National Security Agency (NSA), FBI and CIA, helping them mine vast troves of data for clues to help them track down terrorists and human traffickers, as well as co-ordinate disaster response efforts.”
Nowhere has this been more evident than in America’s recent and highly controversial Immigration & Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids.
The Times reports 30th March 2026:
“…One key system linked to Palantir is Project Maven, a US military AI programme that analyses surveillance data to identify potential targets. The company has also been accused of allowing its systems to be used to identify illegal immigrants to be targeted by ICE.”
After the disarming and subsequent execution of US military veterans ICU nurse Alex Pretti by US Border Patrol agents working under ICE, even President Trump distanced himself from the policies of those officials - such as Peter Thiel’s surrogate, the vice-president JD Vance - who had been reliant on Palantir’s predictive AI system for these ICE raids.
Radical Media reports 29th January 2026
This applies not only in the US context with ICE, but also in crime and policing with London’s Metropolitan police, or the Met.
The Times reports 22nd May 2026:
“Palantir, the data and artificial intelligence firm founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor, had signed a deal with Scotland Yard to automate intelligence gathering for criminal investigations. However, the mayor of London, who has to approve Met contracts worth more than £500,000, has blocked it on the grounds that the force did not follow procurement rules and could not demonstrate that the tender process ‘adequately ensured or demonstrated value for money’…”
Once again, should a private company be provided access to such sensitive personal data in a law enforcement context?
iii) Ai medical data & transhumanism
Another major area of concern raised by the Pope has been Palantir’s transhumanist agenda.
The Times reports 25th May 2026:
“Leo also took aim at efforts in Silicon Valley to use technology to augment human physical and mental performance, which he calls transhumanism and posthumanism. Anna Rowlands, a Durham University theologian, said Peter Thiel, a co-founder of the AI firm Palantir, was a key proponent of pushing humanity to new levels. ‘He doesn’t understand why we have not cured dementia and cancer, broken basic barriers of human limitation by now,’ Rowlands, who joined the Pope at Monday’s press conference, said. She added: ‘The Pope’s letter makes clear that trans and posthumanism do not sit easily with the Christian tradition. Any ideology that believes the human condition is something primarily to be ‘overcome’ or that implies we have the means to ‘save’ ourselves through tech advancements, overcome our limits or even achieve forms of immortality, is incompatible with a Christian belief that we are not our own creator nor saviour’.”
The Pope has gone so far as to label this transhumanist reliance on tech as our saviour as being a ‘false idol’.
Click to play:
Professor Anna Rowlands: “Encyclical Tradition also traditionally exposes false idols. The Popes have taught we will not be saved by the market, nor by historical forces, nor by the nation state. Today, Pope Leo cautions that we will not be saved by AI either, or by its post and transhumanisms. Such ideologies present total autonomy, radical automation, machine consciousness, and the overcoming of human limits as saving goals. In doing so, they create new dependencies, exclusions, and inequalities, to quote the Holy Father. Instead, limits are part of how we learn compassion, generosity, and healthy interdependence, part of how the heart is pierced and how it expands towards communion, and part of how the soul grows in a wisdom that is more than mere knowledge. Yet the encyclical tradition, we should be clear, tells a fundamentally positive story about technologies. Since our origins, humans have created technologies that augment their freedom, alleviate suffering, and meet real needs. When technologies remain tools serving a clear good, they can be viewed as an extension of the freedom that God gives us in Genesis to till and keep the land. Technologies belong, therefore, within the terms of the covenant between God and humanity, serving the human vocation to decent work, to raise families, to seek truth as a common good, to build community, and to foster peace and unity. The tradition’s question is therefore constructive. How do we cultivate technologies that are truly good news for all?”
Ponder the danger here.
It was Palantir that ran the UK’s infamous ‘Covid dashboard,’ which was used by Boris Johnson’s government - as demanded by his then Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings - to scare the country into accepting a series of unhelpful and inhumane, long term Covid mandates.
The Times reports 30th March 2026:
“Palantir won the contract to join up NHS data systems in 2023 and began introducing it to trusts the following year. It was also involved in the successful vaccine rollout programme…Palantir also built the Covid-19 dashboard in the UK, which provided rolling daily updates on deaths, hospital admissions and vaccines, and was essential to the pandemic response.”
Considering how the Covid mandate period was abused as an opportunity to engage in a blatant power grab, it is no surprise that even the British Medical Association - so crucial in cheering for Covid mandates at the time - is now warning of the grave danger posed by Palantir.
This is especially so since PM Starmer takes the view that Palantir should be trusted to allow Ai to make decisions as important as admitting and discharging patients, as well as scheduling operations.
The Times reports 13th January 2025:
“Artificial intelligence is already advising doctors which patients to treat, writing up case notes, reading scans in the NHS and the technology could soon help prevent illness. Sir Keir Starmer said that he wanted to seize the ‘huge opportunity’ to use NHS patient records to help develop treatments and tests as he insists hospitals increase use of data-linking software…The NHS’s ‘federated data platform’ already uses AI to help make the most efficient use of operating theatres, offering a scheduling assistant that looks at waiting lists and doctors’ rotas to suggest the most suitable patients to book in when…Palantir, the US company that runs the platform, is testing AI that automatically writes discharge letters after patients’ treatments.”
Imagine having that much power, in the context of oppressive Covid mandates, and a media blackout preventing reporting on any abuses due to ‘misinformation’ rules.
We recently warned of precisely this for the Ellie On a Mission Podcast.
Click to play:
“If you remember the COVID dashboard, it was the daily ticker of how many have died and all the infection rates and everywhere there’s COVID is spreading. That was what was used to scare us into lockdowns, into mask mandates. That COVID dashboard that the government was using was run by Palantir. Now, Palantir is founded by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk’s friend, part of the PayPal mafia. Palantir that ran that COVID dashboard got the contract from Keir Starmer to unify our health data in this country to have it all under their control so every single interaction you have with the NHS whether at your GP whether at your A&E all your personal private information about your particular health, and all your vulnerabilities, and all your medications, which by the way some people on medication you give them wrong dose and they die, right? Palantir, because of Keir Starmer, the same Keir Starmer that shut down the grooming gang’s investigations, that refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile, who appointed Mandelson after knowing that he didn’t get security clearance at MI6, did not clear Mandelson. Starmer appoints him anyway. That same Starmer gives the other known Epstein associate, the founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, a £330 million contract to unify all our health data under Palantir’s database.”
Full episode on Spotify here. Full episode on Apple Podcasts here.
The fact that Palantir has been granted such contracts by Starmer is not for a lack of alternatives. There was even a British company that lost out.
The Times reports 30th March 2026:
“There were two other bids for the contract: from the US software company Oracle and a consortium of British tech companies led by the firm Quantexa.”
The failed bid of the British company had even focused on the privacy and data security concerns.
The Times reports 16th October 2023:
“Speaking to The Times, Vishal Marria, chief executive of Quantexa, urged the NHS to go with a British company whose staff are ‘all one hop away from the NHS’…Marria said NHS medical records were one of the most important assets the UK had, and that it was vital to ensure the data was put into a platform founded in the country. He said trust and transparency were in the DNA of his company, adding: ‘We come from the right intentions to support what could be a once in a generation data transformation’…Marria warned against contracts with a single supplier that risks ‘vendor lock in’, saying companies in such a dominant position risked ‘having people over a barrel’ by trapping data in software they control. He added that the way his software was designed meant that he had no access to the data, or to the platform once it was deployed in the infrastructure of the healthcare provider.”
Despite this British alternative being on the table, PM Starmer still awarded the UK government contract to Palantir, an American company founded by Epstein associate Peter Thiel, just as he insisted on appointing that other Epstein associate Lord Mandelson as the UK ambassador to Washington DC.
Notice a pattern yet?
4) Peter Thiel, Epstein & JD Vance
Concerns around Palantir are not restricted to its role in Ai military targeting software, domestic surveillance and Covid mandates. A spotlight is also shone on its founder Peter Thiel.
Like other tech billionaires, Peter Thiel plays up his libertarian anti-state credentials.
The Times reports 25th November 2023:
“The company was founded in 2003 by the enigmatic, libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who earlier this year told an audience at the Oxford Union debating society that the UK health service was so sclerotic that ‘the NHS makes people sick’. Pride in the service, free at the point of delivery, was misguided, Thiel said. It wasn’t working. The country had a collective ‘Stockholm syndrome’.”
But Thiel is no people’s champion. Most of this is merely sly accelerationism. Big Tech disdain for the state is not driven by any libertarian principle founded in freedom, rather it is a self-motivated desire to accelerate the demolition of the state so that tech-surveillance corporates may step in and fill the void where the state once existed. This fusion of corporate power and the state is otherwise known as fascism.
Lest we forget, this is the same Peter Thiel who has had multiple associations with Epstein, as detailed below.
