Leak Exposes Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society Members

What is the Dialog Society and Why Was It Leaked?

A significant data breach has exposed the inner workings of Dialog, a private, invitation-only organization that has operated with near-total anonymity for two decades. Cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, the group convenes a unique intersection of power, bringing together US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives for off-the-record annual retreats. For years, Dialog has successfully declined to disclose its membership, maintaining a strict veil of secrecy around its gatherings and participants.

The exposure occurred after a directory within the organization's website code was left publicly accessible online. This vulnerability was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, known for previous high-profile disclosures including the US government’s No Fly List and breaches of surveillance-camera company Verkada. Crimew stated that the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. WIRED independently verified the contents of the leak, confirming that it contained a comprehensive registration list for Dialog's 2026 retreat, scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, Ireland.

The leaked data provides an unprecedented look into the composition of this elite circle. The registration list names 222 people, recording their membership status and attendee type, distinguishing between active members and guests. Beyond simple attendance records, the documents lay out a detailed program of off-the-record sessions. These topics range from the mundane to the extraordinary, including discussions on nuclear policy, battlefield technologies, and even personal matters such as sex life and happiness.

The convergence of power represented by these records is striking. The list includes General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who has attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. It also names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States. Additionally, the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies are present on the same roster.

How Does the Intersection of Tech and Government Manifest?

The leaked documents highlight a deep integration between the technology sector and government oversight, with executives appearing side by side with senior US officials who regulate their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman and founder of location-data broker SafeGraph and identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, is listed alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent’s department writes the rules on financial data, while Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.

This proximity extends to other major tech figures. Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes. Himes is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees the agencies that Palantir contracts with. This overlap raises significant questions about regulatory capture and the influence of private data brokers on public policy.

The registration records also reveal how participants manage their privacy and public records. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others have histories stretching back more than a decade, with a handful attending since the society's founding 20 years ago. Notably, none of the registrants, including General Grynkewich, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, effectively placing their attendance outside the email systems subject to public-records laws. This deliberate separation ensures that their participation in Dialog remains shielded from standard transparency mechanisms.

The data is stored in Airtable, a commercial database, where Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat a person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. While WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, the exposure of the underlying data structure itself is a significant security failure. The breach also exposed sensitive answers to questions on the participant form, including political leaning and matchmaking preferences, despite Dialog’s promise that such data would not be shared.

What Themes Define the Dialog Community?

What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. When asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. The predictions vary widely, with some foreseeing mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs. Others predict an AI winter, domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or a religious revival provoked by the disruption.

One registrant predicted that societal degeneration will continue to accelerate. These concerns are reflected in the session topics, which include Build-a-Cult, moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and Build-a-Party, run by a former White House national security official. The intellectual diet of the group also skews toward canonical and optimization-minded works. Book recommendations include Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and Thiel’s own Zero to One.

Dialog also functions as a social and matchmaking platform. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are looking for love, offering to include Single Man, Single Woman, or Other respondents in future matchmaking. A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as providing meaningful connections for exceptional people. The form also gathers sensitive personal data, including talents such as funhouse construction, accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality. One attendee listed compassion and existential dread, while another offered dinner parties, keeping secrets, and remembering birthdays.

The group’s internal culture emphasizes discretion and equality among elites. One of several internal documents exposed in the leak is a guide for event moderators. It urges them to remind participants that everything is off the record and that comments should be concise and nonobvious. The guide also coaches moderators to model brief introductions to avoid status signaling in a room full of senators, dignitaries, and tycoons. Despite this discipline, the group’s digital footprint was surprisingly lax, with the directory embedded in the code of dialog.org and served to any visitor who viewed the page source.

Who Else Is on the List and What Are the Implications?

The leaked registration list names senior figures absent from the public directory of 113, expanding the known scope of the group. These include Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who now serves on the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, a former general counsel and acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. Also listed are Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.

The list also includes a cluster of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs for the company's frontier AI division. Notably, one working journalist, Souad Mekhennet, a national security correspondent for The Washington Post, is listed as running an event called Ulysses Book Club. The rest of the membership spans hedge fund and private equity billionaires, current and former foreign officials, network television actors, best-selling authors, and religious leaders.

Dialog has operated with little public footprint since its founding. It holds at least one retreat a year, with assigned seating, moderated sessions, and a rule that nothing said is for attribution. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, Italy. It has been likened to a tech-industry version of Bilderberg, the off-the-record gathering of Western political and business elites. Accounts describe retreats of around 100 participants, but the 2026 registration list reviewed by WIRED names 222, suggesting a significant expansion in recent years.

Public glimpses of the group are rare. The statistician Andrew Gelman published one of Dialog’s invitations to his blog in 2022, describing its format and a registration fee of more than $16,000. The 2014 retreat drew renewed attention this year when its invitation list, which included the financier Jeffrey Epstein among roughly 150 invitees, surfaced in the US Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files. It remains unclear whether he attended or not. The current leak, however, provides concrete evidence of the group's ongoing influence and the breadth of its network, raising urgent questions about privacy, accountability, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few.