Gay billionaire wants tech-made transhumans amid warning AI will end humanity
Peter Thiel (Getty Images)
Gay tech billionaire Peter Thiel has said he wants a radical transformation of humanity, saying changes trans people make to their bodies don’t go far enough.
As the debate about artificial intelligence continues, with a former Anthropic staffer saying AI could kill us all within the next decade, Thiel’s past comments have resurfaced.
In a 2025 interview with the New York Times, it wasn’t abundantly clear whether or not Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, thought technology ending humanity was bad or good.
Interviewer Ross Douthat asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure”, leading to hesitation from Thiel.
After eventually accepting that, yes, he would like the human race to endure, he went on to say that he wants humanity to be radically transformed with the help of technology, not-so-elegantly also bringing trans folk into the conversation.
‘We want more transformation than that’
He said: “There’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina, and we can then debate how well those surgeries work.
“But we want more transformation than that.”
He suggested that those things are not “weird and unnatural”, instead that they are “so pathetically little” in terms of transformations.
“We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs,” he went on. “We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”
Bringing religion into it, which often doesn’t go hand-in-hand with science, Thiel added: “It is about transcending nature, it is about overcoming things, and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen, the natural thing in a Christian sense is that you’re messed up.
“And that’s true, but there’s some ways that, with God’s help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.”
Warnings of killer AI
This week, Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, saying not enough care was being put into the development of AI – and that it could kill us all.
He said: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead agreed, saying: “I personally think that it is [greater than] 10% within the next decade.”
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