Peter Thiel: AI is bigger than the internet — but Europe is falling behind
Key points
Key takeaways from the MDMEETS — Essential Talks with Mathias Döpfner interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of Founders Fund and Palantir (September ️2026):
AI is bigger than the internet. Thiel defends his long-held stagnation thesis — progress slowed in the world of atoms since the 1970s — but argues AI has the potential to reaccelerate growth and is at least as big as the internet, noting that nobody now disputes that the pre-AI decades were ones of stagnation.
Don't slow down AI to appease doom fears. He accepts extinction-type risks are non-zero ("even 5 or 10% seems pretty bad"） but rejects precautionary slowdowns: the alternative of zero progress is "far from neutral," and if America slows while China accelerates, you only strengthen China. He calls the Pope's anti-AI encyclical "useful idiot" work for the Chinese Communist Party.
Anti-AI backlash is largely self-inflicted. He says he is inclined to believe Chinese actors spread anti-AI content through American social platforms to tilt sentiment, but insists the main driver is what the West does to itself, urging tough China competition without blaming China for everything.
Palantir's US sales have accelerated. Thiel says urgency to transform for the AI age has driven a "tremendous" acceleration in Palantir's sales to US corporations in recent years, while Europe still lacks that urgency — "don't do tomorrow what you can save for the day after."
Europe is "extremely far behind" in AI. He frames the race as the US leading, China a fast follower and Europe extremely far behind and "extremely hard to catch up"; he compares Europe's AI position unfavourably with Minitel (where France fell behind and dug deeper) rather than Concorde(where Europe caught up and overtook the US).. In Germany, he notes, all 20 of the 50 wealthiest people under his Gen-X cutoff inherited their wealth — not one built a great new scalable company — versus nine of 12 such Americans who made their own money.
Democracy's trouble is a growth problem. Liberal societies lack a broad growth story, politics turns zero-sum and extremes gain ground; he clarifies his 2009 "freedom and democracy are incompatible" line as an argument for depoliticisation, not an attack on democracy, saying he issued a correction two weeks later.
Germany's extremes reflect centrist failure. He holds the AfD wrong on Ukraine, China and Israel alike, but says its rise (and the Linke's 47% among Berlin's 16–24-year-old voters against 25% overall) reflects centrists systematically underestimating the scale of the problem — seven UK prime ministers in 10 years, none with a plan to turn society around.
Longevity: dementia is the frontier he'd tackle. He keeps investing in biotech and says the single problem he would target is slowing or reversing cognitive decline; he sees no natural limit to lifespan, but rejects brain-uploading — "it wouldn't be me," identity is physical.
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