ChainCatcher reported that, according to WIRED’s analysis of newly leaked data, Dialog, a secretive society co-founded by Peter Thiel, maintained an internal mechanism described as extremely cold and visibly biased. The materials reviewed by WIRED did not cover the club’s entire membership. Instead, they consisted of 192 internal personal files, including 130 formal members and some candidates. Dialog is said to have more than one thousand members, but this batch of files shows how the club recorded, ranked and screened the people inside its network.
An Entry-Level Rating System With an Inverted Hierarchy
The leaked files show that Dialog operated under a hidden rule in which members were rated as soon as they entered the system. The order of the grades was counterintuitive. Within Dialog, C was the highest VIP level, B represented the ordinary layer that made up the majority, while A, normally regarded as the top grade in many ranking systems, was instead the bottom and marginal layer with the lowest level of prominence. This inverted structure formed the club’s internal hierarchy and shaped how members were positioned for activities and access to resources.
The ratings were also directly connected to members’ wallets. According to the documents, only about 25% of VIP "C" members were asked to pay the full attendance fee. Among the bottom-tier "A" members, however, the share paying the full fee of tens of thousands of dollars reached 70%. In this structure, higher-ranked members were less likely to bear the full cost, while lower-ranked members were more often asked to pay the full amount.
AI Screening Favored Public Fame, While Staff Adjusted Some Results
Dialog’s AI screening mechanism, as reflected in the leaked materials, placed heavy emphasis on what was described as national name recognition. Josh Brolin, the actor associated with the role of Thanos, had never attended a meeting, but his movie box office record and millions of followers were enough for him to land directly in the VIP "C" tier. By contrast, academic figure Tyler Cowen was judged by the AI as not famous enough among ordinary people and was nearly placed into the ordinary layer. He was moved into the C tier only after manual intervention.
Dialog also used a "value-add score" beyond the initial rating. This score was used to measure whether a member provided resource connections and intellectual contributions to other powerful figures in the club. After each gathering, employees reviewed member performance in a manner compared in the source to reviewing code. Members with low value-add scores, poor cultural fit, or declining public visibility were removed from future invitation lists. The leaked files therefore describe a system that did not merely screen people at the point of entry, but also evaluated whether they would remain inside the club’s ongoing circle.
Social Matching, Dating Pools and Bias in the Database
The leaked database also exposed an internal social and dating matching system. According to the files, 10% of members joined a singles pool. The algorithm recommended matches, while the system also included a list of prohibited pairings. This placed social relationships inside the same data-driven management structure as rankings, payment treatment and value-add assessments, making personal matching another recorded part of Dialog’s internal member files.
WIRED’s analysis also found differences in how the system treated gender and political identity. Women made up one third of the membership, yet received only 18% of VIP seats. On political orientation, more than half of members described themselves as left-leaning, but members labeled right-wing were more than twice as likely as left-leaning members to receive VIP status. The leaked data also showed that the left-leaning label of an environmental figure was forcibly changed by staff in the backend to right-wing.