Peter Thiel’s secret society talks AI takeover, World War III and ‘cult-building’ at elite retreats — a hacker just revealed who’s in it

Brian O’ConnellSat, June 20, 2026 at 12:30 PM UTC

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Billionaire Peter Thiel moves in elite circles, as in this 2024 event at the Cambridge Union, a historic debating and free speech society.

Is tech billionaire Peter Thiel's exclusive Dialogue club a geopolitical think tank, a secret society, or something else?

Regardless, Dialogue is now less of a secret after an investigation in the magazine Wired (1) released the names of 222 registrants to the organization's August 2026 retreat in Dublin, Ireland. The list includes high-profile names like the U.S. Senators Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Ted Cruz (Texas), Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube, Elon Musk, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, and Sarah Bond, former president of Microsoft's XBOX, among other business, technology, academic, and political leaders.

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The records were left exposed online and first uncovered by Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. They were independently confirmed by Wired.

Thiel is the co-founder of payments giant PayPal and data and surveillance juggernaut Palantir. In 2006, along with Silicon Valley angel investor Auren Hoffman, he founded Dialogue, an invitation-only group that hosts annual, off-the-record retreats where members discuss big-picture geopolitical issues in sessions with titles like "Navigating WWIII", "Disinformation and Deep Fakes," and "It's Fun To Be In Charge." Dialogue is deeply secretive, has no public website, and has faced criticism over its elite membership and the group's purported influence on public policy issues in the military and defense, AI and technology, health care, and more esoteric topics like longevity and the afterlife.

Moneywise has reached out to Thiel's representative for comment.

"The Dialogue conference titles read like a confession," Thom Hartmann (2), host of The Thom Hartmann Program, a progressive talk radio show, told Moneywise. "When the people who own the surveillance companies, the AI labs, and a growing slice of the defense budget sit down together to talk about navigating World War III, building cults, and democracy under surveillance, they're telling you they expect the current order to crack and they intend to be the ones standing on top of the rubble. "

Dialogue's influence on public policy is real and evolving

Now that Wired has exposed the "who" at Dialogue, it's a good time to start asking about the "what," particularly on often provocative session topics at the organization's meet-ups.

A case in point: The session topics to be discussed include "Three Predictions for Iran," "Democracy Under Surveillance," and "Contrarian AI Takes." Arguably more unconventional subjects are "How's Your Sex Life?", "Build-a-Cult," and "Build-a-Party."

The Dialogue list showed Thiel and his cohorts will play matchmaker, too. According to Wired (3), the event's signup form asked registrants if they're "looking for love" and included sign-up options for "Single Man," "Single Woman," or "Other."

Yet it's the heavy-duty public policy topics that have tongues wagging in the corridors of power, with talk of darker subjects from darker times.

"The inclusion of topics ranging from global conflict to nuclear energy suggests an assumption that many of the institutions that shaped the post-Cold War era are under strain," Irina Tsukerman, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based foreign policy analyst and founder at the advisory firm Scarab Rising (4), told Moneywise.

Tsukerman believes that Dialogue's discussions about a potential world war, for example, are really about understanding how escalating rivalries among major powers could reshape markets, supply chains, industrial policy, technological development, and investment flows. "Participants are increasingly asking what happens when national security considerations begin driving decisions that were once guided primarily by economic efficiency," she said.

Underlying many of these conversations is a recognition that information and data have become important strategic domains. "Themes such as surveillance, democracy, trust, and information integrity fit naturally into a Dialogue session framework," Tsukerman noted.

The culture surrounding these elite gatherings also helps explain why the Dialogue agenda is framed as a secret-society-type group.

"Within many technology and venture capital circles, there's considerable prestige attached to identifying large-scale global disruptions like war, AI, nuclear power, and broken democracies before they become obvious," Tsukerman said, adding that private discussions among the so-called elite also serve both an analytical and social function.

"They reinforce a shared identity among attendees as individuals attempting to anticipate major shifts before they fully materialize," she added.

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Dialogue members preoccupied with energy policy and AI

There's also a commonality among Dialogue session agendas, but not for the reasons the public may think.

For example, AI appears on the agenda for many of the same reasons as nuclear energy, as both are increasingly viewed through the lens of national capability and long-term political and technological power, Tsukerman explained.

"Interest in AI inevitably leads to discussions about data centers, electricity generation, semiconductor production, infrastructure investment, and industrial capacity," Tsukerman added. "Nuclear energy enters the conversation because advanced computing systems require enormous amounts of reliable power."

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That's also why AI and nuclear appear together, as AI is turning electricity into a strategic problem that needs to be resolved.

Other experts note that Dialogue's Dublin attendees likely view energy-intensive AI as a core input to economic growth and military advantage.

"The future of AI will not only be decided by who has the best models, but it will be decided by who can build data centers, secure chips, harden supply chains, generate reliable power, and defend the infrastructure," James Sheridan (5), CEO of Sheridan Technologies, an engineering and product development firm, told Moneywise. "Nuclear fits into that conversation because it offers dense, reliable, low-carbon … power, even if it comes with real cost, regulatory, safety, and public-trust challenges." Dialogue's agenda is in tune with that.

Same elite community, new questions

Public policy analysts say the Dialogue agenda may be more coherent than it appears at first glance.

"The session topics sound provocative, but underneath them is a fairly clear pattern: elite concern has moved from 'How do we build and scale new technology?' to 'How do we control the consequences of what has already been built?'" Sheridan said.

A decade ago, the dominant technology conference language was about disruption and growth.

"Since then, the center of gravity has shifted," Sheridan said. "Now the questions are about energy, war, surveillance, information integrity, industrial capacity, and whether democratic institutions can keep up with technologies that move faster than public governance."

That tells the general public something important about elite priorities in 2026. The people with the most capital, influence, and proximity to government are treating technology as national infrastructure.

"AI is not just an app layer; it touches labor markets, defense, education, media, elections, cybersecurity, energy demand, and geopolitical competition," Sheridan said. "Nuclear is not just an energy topic; it's about whether the United States and its allies can power the next generation of [computing], manufacturing, and strategic infrastructure."

Where Dialogue members' interests really lie

A lot of attention has been paid in the last few years to fringe ideas (6) circulating among some high-powered people in tech. Thiel, Dialogue's founder, is no exception. He even speculated in a series of lectures hosted by the heavily tech-influenced evangelical Christian movement Acts 17 (7) that climate activist Greta Thunberg is the literal antichrist (8).

And although the idea of an exclusive society of powerful people meeting in secret sounds romantic, mysterious, and even a little sinister — absolute bait for conspiracy theorists — Dialogue shares many traits with similar groups that have existed for decades.

"Whether it's Sun Valley (9), Bilderberg (10), Munich, or smaller invitation-only gatherings, influential people have always sought out places where they can learn from one another, build relationships, and pressure-test ideas," Corey Feinstein (11), a former U.S. diplomat and founder at Feinstein Advisory, a government relations services firm, told Moneywise.

What strikes Feinstein about the Dialogue agenda isn't that powerful people are talking about war, AI, or nuclear energy. It's that these same conversations are happening across nearly every leadership forum today.

"The agenda reads less like a roadmap and more like a snapshot of the anxieties shaping leadership circles," he noted. "Across sectors, there is a growing assumption that geopolitical instability, great-power competition, and technological disruption will define the next decade."

Feinstein said he attended a security-focused gathering several years ago where the prospect of a major worldwide conflict within the next decade was discussed almost as a foregone conclusion.

"What was interesting wasn't the prediction itself, but that finally a participant challenged the premise on the last day and redirected the conversation toward what could be done to prevent that outcome," he said. "The conversations completely shifted at dinner toward peace-building."

That's where Dialogue-type forums can be valuable. "The best version of these gatherings isn't a room full of people deciding the future," Feinstein added. "It's a room full of people challenging one another's assumptions about the future."

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Article Sources

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Wired (1), (3); Thom Hartmann (2); Scarab Rising (4); Whitebridge (5); CBC (6); The Catholic Herald (7); The Guardian (8), (9), (10); Feinstein Advisory (11)

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