> The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology.

According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.

You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.

The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.

In an infinitely-large "truly multilateral world", what you are saying is true under the assumption that unregulated AI provides a competitive advantage for the jurisdiction, assuming preferences are each sampled from a totally-supported probability distribution. But we only have finitely-many jurisdictions, and it's not clear that AI accelerationism is actually good for anyone (except those extracting wealth from the corresponding financial bubble), so this conclusion doesn't follow.