Last week WIRED verified a leaked membership list for Dialog, a private society co-founded by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman in 2006. No public website, no disclosed members, total confidentiality for two decades. 222 people registered for their August retreat in Dublin. The list includes the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of the Army, the senator who chairs the committee overseeing the FTC, a NATO supreme commander, the co-founder of Palantir, and OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer. Among others. Every government official registered with personal or corporate email. Not a single .gov address. That means none of it is subject to FOIA. The retreat agenda includes sessions called “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “Build-a-Cult.” The AI angle specifically: the people building the models, the people deciding how to regulate them, the people funding them, and the people distributing them are all sitting in the same room with no public record of what’s discussed. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a structural problem. I built a site archiving the verified membership data, documented conflicts of interest, and sourced research: build-a-cult.com . Everything traces to named credible sources. It’s a research tool, not a hit piece. The full essay is there too if you want the longer version of why this matters for AI specifically. submitted by /u/TreesOfPortland
Originally posted by u/TreesOfPortland on r/ArtificialInteligence