For nearly 20 years, Dialog operated as Silicon Valley’s ultimate members-only black box, bringing together billionaires, senators, Cabinet officials, NATO commanders, AI executives and tech founders under a veil of secrecy, until a simple coding mistake cracked open the door. The accidental exposure of a website directory revealed a 2026 retreat list containing 222 registrants, including 87 first-time attendees, alongside a separate 113-name roster and a trove of personal information ranging from phone numbers and birthdates to political leanings and private login tokens. What has emerged is a rare glimpse into a private ecosystem where the architects of artificial intelligence, defense technology, surveillance systems and public policy gather away from public scrutiny, raising fresh questions about influence, privacy and the increasingly blurred line between those who build powerful technologies and those who regulate them.
DUBLIN, Ireland, is an unlikely place for the next reckoning over Silicon Valley’s appetite for secrecy. But this August, the grounds outside the city are scheduled to host the latest retreat of Dialog, an invitation-only network cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and for two decades, almost no one outside the group knew it existed.
That changed this month. A Swiss hacktivist named Maia Arson Crimew, who first came to public attention for surfacing a copy of the United States government’s No Fly List on an unsecured cloud server, found something else hiding in plain sight: a directory embedded directly in the source code of Dialog’s own website, visible to anyone who knew where to look. WIRED independently verified the contents and went on to obtain the full registration list for the group’s 2026 retreat, near Dublin, scheduled for August 12 through 16.
“It’s just wild to me how this once again shows that the people who run the world are so confident in their safety that they don’t really bother with any proper operational security.” — Maia Arson Crimew, security researcher
What the records show, according to multiple outlets that have since reviewed them, is a group whose reach extends far beyond the tech industry where Thiel made his fortune. The leaked materials name Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, and General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who according to WIRED’s reporting has attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. A separate roster of 113 names, posted by crimew and reported on by The Stanford Daily, adds Stanford University president Jonathan Levin, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, and the writer Ezra Klein.
A Network Built on Discretion
Dialog was founded by Thiel together with Auren Hoffman, an investor who built his career on data, as founder of the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. The group describes itself, in the sparse language on its own website, as a space for off-the-record relationships among leaders from different fields and ideological backgrounds. It is sometimes compared to the Bilderberg Group, the decades-old European gathering of political and business elites, for its mix of government, military, finance, and technology figures meeting with no public record of what was discussed.
Unlike Bilderberg, which discloses its attendee list after the fact, Dialog has never published who belongs to it. The retreats themselves are reportedly lavish. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona, the Ritz-Carlton in Santa Barbara, and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, according to reporting examining the documents. The 2026 edition is set for a property near Dublin.
The leak suggests the organization’s ambitions extend well beyond a single annual event. Records reviewed by reporters indicate Dialog has recently purchased land outside Washington, D.C., and that the group, under executive director Raffi Grinberg, is planning some form of expansion, though the documents do not specify what that involves.
Senators, Generals, and ‘Six Members of the PayPal Mafia’
The 2026 registration list names 222 people, of whom 87 are attending for the first time. Among the business figures invited are several founders and executives of companies in the surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data industries, the same sectors that depend most heavily on the kind of personal information the leak itself exposed. The list also includes six members of the so-called PayPal mafia, the cohort of PayPal’s early executives and founders, Thiel among them, who went on to build or fund companies including Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Palantir.
Palantir’s footprint in the records is hard to miss. Cofounder Joe Lonsdale appears on the list, as does Jared Kushner, the businessman and former White House adviser. The Hollywood Reporter, examining the same materials, found that the registration also names OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s global affairs chief Michael Sellitto, YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan, and Xbox president Sarah Bond, placing some of the people who run the world’s largest AI labs and platforms in the same room as the senators and generals who increasingly regulate or rely on them.
A data-security trade publication put the underlying tension bluntly: the leak, it warned, hands any hostile intelligence service a ready-made target list for espionage, influence operations, and blackmail, precisely because the exposed data ties real names to phone numbers, email addresses, birthdates, and emergency contacts.
Other names threaded through the documents come from entertainment and media rather than government. Reporting on the 113-name roster lists actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sophia Bush, and Josh Brolin, along with the podcast host Sam Harris and the longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Asked about his client’s appearance on the list, a spokesperson for Brolin told The Hollywood Reporter the actor would “like to know what the fuck he got himself into.”
“Like to know what the fuck he got himself into.” — spokesperson for actor Josh Brolin, to The Hollywood Reporter
Build-a-Cult, Navigating WWIII, and a Members-Only Dating App
If the guest list alone testifies to Dialog’s reach, the leaked agenda testifies to its self-image. Session titles for the 2026 retreat, as reported by multiple outlets that reviewed the documents, include “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Build-a-Cult,” “Build-a-Party,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” A panel on whether money buys happiness is reportedly on the schedule as well, alongside more conventional fare on artificial intelligence and geopolitics.
Internal guidance for the people running these sessions instructed attendees that everything discussed was strictly off the record, and encouraged participants to avoid overt status signaling, despite a guest list stacked with senators, ambassadors, and four-star generals.
The leak also exposed something closer to a lifestyle product than a foreign-policy retreat: Dialog runs its own internal matchmaking system. Registration forms ask attendees whether they are “looking for love,” and single registrants can opt into “future matchmaking” through a connected platform, dating.dialog.org, pitched as a service for “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
The irony was not lost on the journalists who reviewed the data. Dialog’s forms had collected each registrant’s stated “political leaning,” with an explicit promise that the information would never be shared with other participants or shown inside the dating app. That promise did not survive the leak; the political-leaning data was among the material exposed, along with private access tokens that functioned as login credentials. WIRED said it chose not to publish those tokens.
A Trail That Runs Through the Epstein Files
Dialog’s emergence into public view has collided with another set of disclosures. Newly released files from the Jeffrey Epstein case, reviewed by Miami New Times, include a February 2016 email in which Epstein told the former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito that “peter thiel LOVED the secret society idea … he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far.”
A separate document in the same files, an email from November 2012, shows the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall forwarding Epstein an invitation to Dialog’s 2014 retreat at the Sundance Resort in Utah, signed by Thiel and Hoffman and describing the gathering as bringing together “150 people to change the world.” “Is this worthwhile?” Randall asked Epstein in the email.
The files also include a roster for Dialog’s 2013 retreat naming, among others, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, KKR cofounder Henry Kravis, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, future Maryland governor Wes Moore, Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, according to Miami New Times’ review of the documents.
Neither email establishes that Epstein attended a Dialog retreat or became a member of the group, and the documents do not show any wrongdoing by Thiel, Randall, or the organization itself. What they do confirm is that Dialog was already circulating, by name, in Epstein’s correspondence more than a decade before its directory leaked, surfacing in the overlapping academic and Silicon Valley circles Epstein spent years cultivating after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
No Comment
Asked to respond to the leak, neither Dialog’s executive director, Raffi Grinberg, nor a spokesperson for Thiel replied to requests for comment from the outlets that have reported on the documents. WIRED reported that none of the named individuals it contacted responded either. The European Union, for its part, pushed back on one specific claim in the leaked list: officials there denied that foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas would attend this year’s retreat, despite her name appearing in the registration data.
That denial points to a complication running through the entire leak: appearing on a Dialog list does not necessarily mean attending, joining, or even agreeing to attend. Reporting on the documents has repeatedly noted that the data does not always distinguish between confirmed members, conference registrants, and invited guests who never showed up. None of the 222 people on the 2026 registration list signed up using a government email address, according to WIRED’s review, registering instead with personal or corporate accounts that fall outside the reach of public-records laws.
Why It Matters
Dialog is not, on its own terms, a conspiracy. It is closer to a Davos for people who would rather not be photographed. But the leak lands at a moment when the lines between Thiel’s commercial interests, including his stake in the data-analytics and defense contractor Palantir, and the people who set policy for surveillance, defense procurement, and financial regulation have rarely been more visible.
As one outlet covering the breach put it, the documents show “the regulator and the regulated, the senator and the surveillance vendor, the elected and the unelected,” sharing a conference agenda rather than a negotiating table. Whatever was actually said inside those off-the-record sessions remains, for now, exactly what Dialog always intended it to be: unrecorded.
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