Peter Thiel says America's anti-AI backlash is a self-inflicted wound

• Peter Thiel said he doesn't believe China to be the driving force behind anti-AI sentiment in the US.
• "This is mainly what we're doing to ourselves," he said.
• Thiel railed against the Pope, calling him a "useful idiot for the CCP."

Americans are souring on AI. Peter Thiel said the US mostly has itself to blame, not China.

A growing cohort of tech executives blame China, America's AI adversary, for people turning on the tech. Executives from Garry Tan to Kevin O'Leary have accused data center discourse of being a psyop.

In a conversation on Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner's "MD Meets" podcast, Thiel said that while he was "inclined to believe" China could be fueling anti-AI content in the US — it wasn't the driving force of the change in sentiment.

"This is mainly what we're doing to ourselves," said Thiel. "It's often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China."

Thiel is a fierce critic of China, and he made that clear in the interview.

Thiel also criticized Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical published in May. The investor said it was anti-AI and that Americans were more likely to listen to the Pope than any social media posts from China. That means the Pope has the "effect" of working for the CCP, he said.

"I'm not saying he was an agent of the communists," Thiel said, "but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP."

Other tech CEOs have questioned and criticized the Pope's encyclical. The Holy See did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Still, Thiel believed the biggest contributor to AI skepticism in the US is … the US.

"I think there's so many of these things that we're doing to ourselves," he told Döpfner.

Döpfner interviewed the PayPal cofounder ahead of a Thursday event in Berlin where Thiel received the media company's "Axel Springer Award," which honors "individuals whose achievements have had a lasting impact on business, society, or technological progress." Axel Springer, which, among other publications, owns Business Insider, Politico, The Daily Telegraph, and Bild, previously bestowed the award on business leaders including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.