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  • ⛪ Thiel called the Pope a CCP asset. Over AI.

⛪ Thiel called the Pope a CCP asset. Over AI.

Plus, OpenClaw is now everyone's AI wingman and it is getting weird fast.

July 04, 2026

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My fellow AI explorers

Happy almost 4th. While most of America preps grills and fireworks, the AI world spent this week proving no headline is too strange, from a billionaire calling the Pope a communist stooge to the Founding Fathers getting a suspicious LinkedIn glow-up.

In today’s edition:

The best voice models, now across all channels

Most CX platforms do not own the voice. They orchestrate a workflow, then call a third party for speech and transcription. Every hop adds latency, cost, and another vendor to manage.

ElevenAgents is the opposite. They make the voice models the market builds on, and ElevenAgents puts full orchestration on top. Voice, transcription, text-based chat, and reasoning run in one vertically integrated pipeline, so responses come back in <400 milliseconds and sound human, not synthetic.

Plus, you keep full control. Plug in any LLM, integrate tools, webhooks, and MCP servers, and ground responses in your knowledge base. Get an agent live in minutes, then A/B test with Experiments, enforce Guardrails, and version every change.

The payoff: more human conversations, lower latency, and far less time stitching infrastructure together. You build on the models you already trust. Pricing is transparent and flat at $0.08 per minute.

Thiel vs. The Pope

Peter Thiel Says the Pope Is Doing China's Bidding

Peter Thiel just accused Pope Leo XIV of working for the Chinese Communist Party. Over AI regulation. In front of a laughing crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Here's what happened:

  • Thiel argued the Pope's calls to regulate AI would only slow down the US, since China won't listen to the Vatican anyway

  • He tied this back to the Pope's first encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," which warned AI could build a modern-day Tower of Babel defined by greed and disrespect for human life

  • He also claimed the Democratic Party is under a "democratic socialist takeover," because apparently one controversial statement per speech wasn't enough

  • The remarks are the latest chapter in an already tense feud between the Vatican and the Trump orbit, which escalated after Trump publicly attacked the Pope earlier this year

Here's the thing worth sitting with. Thiel's argument is a version you'll hear from a lot of accelerationists right now: any regulation is unilateral disarmament, because your rivals will not follow the same rules.

That is a real strategic tension worth debating. But turning it into "the leader of a billion Catholics is a CCP asset" is not policy analysis. It’s spectacle. And spectacle is exactly what gets clipped, shared, and argued about for a week straight.

🔮 Prediction: Expect more Silicon Valley figures to frame AI safety advocates, regulators, and now religious leaders as accidental or intentional allies of China. It is a rhetorically powerful move because it reframes caution as a national security liability. Watch for this exact playbook the next time someone proposes a rule Silicon Valley does not like.

Where do you land? Is "regulation helps our rivals" a legitimate strategic argument or a convenient excuse? Hit reply; I read every single one.

Freedom 250

America's Founding Fathers Just Got Yassified by AI

In the spirit of the country's 250th birthday, the Trump-aligned nonprofit Freedom 250 commissioned a gallery of Revolutionary-era portraits. The problem, a lot of them were run through generative AI, and historians are not having it.

The details:

  • Dozens of Founding Fathers and a handful of Founding Mothers now sport suspiciously smooth skin, chiseled jawlines, and neoclassical backdrops that were not common in 18th-century portraiture

  • Historian Zara Anishanslin points out that the poses (arms crossed, chin cradled in hand) are anachronistic for the era

  • Phyllis Wheatley is the only Black woman in the gallery, and historians say the AI renderings of women lean toward a generic, modern beauty standard rather than historical accuracy

  • A Google AI watermark confirms the images are generative, not restorations of real paintings

This lands right as Freedom 250 is already under fire, with House Democrats alleging in a new report that the group misled donors by redirecting funds meant for the official, bipartisan America250 celebration. So you have a group facing funding scandal allegations, also putting out AI slop as "history," in the same week.

Here is the tension. AI image generation is genuinely useful for making history visually engaging, especially for audiences who will not read a textbook but will look at a picture. But when the tool smooths over real historical detail (accurate clothing, real skin tone, actual facial structure) in favor of a homogenized "corporate vision" of the past, you are not illustrating history, you are replacing it with fiction that happens to wear a tricorn hat.

🔮 Prediction: This will not be the last historical AI content controversy. As image tools get cheaper and faster, expect more institutions, museums, schools, and government campaigns to reach for them as a shortcut, and expect more historians to push back hard when accuracy gets sacrificed for aesthetics.

Would you trust an AI generated historical portrait if you knew going in it was not a real painting? Or does the "fake but pretty" version quietly do damage either way?

30-Second AI Play

Turn OpenClaw Into a Research Assistant, Not a Dating Bot

This week's wildest AI story might be this TechCrunch piece on people wiring up the open source agent OpenClaw to auto post Instagram reels and DM strangers to generate dates. One founder claims over a million views and 200 DMs from a script posting the same "heartbroken World Cup fan" video with the country name swapped out.

We are not telling you to do that. But the underlying pattern, using an agent to automate repetitive research and outreach, is genuinely useful. Here is a safer version:

  1. Set up OpenClaw, or any agent framework you already use, with access to a search tool and a notes doc

  2. Give it a recurring, well scoped task, for example "every Friday, pull the top 3 AI funding announcements in my industry and summarize them in 3 bullets"

  3. Have it write results directly into a shared doc instead of posting or messaging anyone automatically

  4. Review before anything goes out publicly, and always keep a human in the loop for anything customer or public facing

💡 Pro tip: The line between smart automation and creepy automation almost always comes down to whether a real person approves the output before it reaches another human. Automate the research. Keep yourself in the loop for anything that touches someone else's inbox or DMs.

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Other Relevant AI News!

🍉 Meta's next model, codenamed "Watermelon," has reportedly caught up to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on internal benchmarks, according to AI chief Alexandr Wang.

🐉 A cheap Chinese model called GLM-5.2 is quietly climbing developer leaderboards and reportedly sits just below Anthropic's Opus 4.8 in capability, at a fraction of the cost.

🚨 A school in Nebraska received a bomb threat this week from a caller using an AI generated voice, in what investigators are calling a swatting incident.

Golden Nuggets

  • ⛪ Peter Thiel called the Pope a Chinese Communist asset over AI regulation, turning a policy disagreement into a culture war headline

  • 🎨 Freedom 250's AI generated Founding Father portraits are drawing fire from historians for flattening real history into generic AI aesthetics

  • 🤖 OpenClaw is being used for everything from dating automation to swatting calls, a reminder that agentic AI's biggest risk right now might be creative misuse, not the tech itself

Would love to hear your thoughts! Send me your thoughts by replying to this email (yes, I read them all :)

Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI