A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.
The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.
A directory in the website’s code was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. Known for exposing the US government’s No Fly List and breaching the surveillance-camera company Verkada, crimew tells WIRED the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. WIRED independently verified its contents.
A source separately provided WIRED with the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, Ireland.
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks 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.
Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.
Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.
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, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.
None of the individuals named in this story responded to requests for comment. Raffi Grinberg, who lists himself as Dialog’s executive director on his LinkedIn profile and is the author of the self-help book How to Be a Grown-Up, did not respond to a request for comment.
The registration records appear to show not only who belongs to Dialog but who attends. Of the 222 people signed up for the 2026 retreat, according to the leaked records, 87 are marked as first-time attendees. Others list histories stretching back more than a decade, and a handful to the society’s founding 20 years ago. None of the registrants, Grynkewich included, used a government email address. All registered with personal or corporate accounts, placing their attendance outside the email systems subject to public-records laws.
What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. 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. Several foresee 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 religious revival provoked by the disruption.
“Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”
Members also list talents like “funhouse construction,” accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations skew toward the canonical and optimization-minded, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and, from at least one attendee, Thiel’s own Zero to One.
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
The form also gathers sensitive answers, including each registrant’s “political leaning,” which Dialog promises “WILL NOT be shared in the app or with other participants, ever.” That data, and the matchmaking responses, were exposed in the leak.
The records sit in Airtable, a commercial database. For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.
The leaked registration list also names senior figures absent from the public directory of 113: 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; Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, the president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
It also lists a cluster of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs for the company’s frontier AI division, and one working journalist, Souad Mekhennet, a national security correspondent for The Washington Post. (She 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.
One of several internal documents Dialog left exposed on the same online database that held its registration records is a guide for event moderators, urging them to remind participants that everything is “off the record” and that comments should be concise and “nonobvious.” It also coaches them to model brief introductions to “avoid status signaling” in a room full of senators, dignitaries, and tycoons.
The discipline imposed by the group did not extend to its website. The directory was embedded in the code of dialog.org, a near-empty page, and was served to any visitor who viewed the page’s source. A separate Dialog page, at app.dialog.org, presents a sign-in screen for “Dialog Global 2026,” outside Dublin. The page invites any visitor to sign in by email or Google account and presents no terms of service, no notice that the application is restricted to members, and no indication that an invitation is required.
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, according to Axios, which first reported the group’s plans for a campus in the Washington, DC, area. 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. The 2026 registration list reviewed by WIRED names 222. Public glimpses 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.
