It\u2019s a time of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI doom cycle is driven by effective altruism, a philosophy that has lurked around the fringes for years but recently burst into the mainstream because its adherents are embedded across the AI industry, from Anthropic to newly appointed AI safety watchdog METR. EA is a utilitarian approach to charity premised on doing the most good for the most people over the longest time, and EA advocates see halting an AI-induced doomsday<\/a> as critical to saving as many humans as possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But EA has an important and equally apocalyptic rival in the crosscutting cosmologies of the tech titans \u2014 a strain of Christianity best represented by Peter Thiel, who believes EA will bring about the Antichrist<\/a>. It\u2019s an issue on which the billionaire techno-capitalist is a self-styled expert, and, somehow, Thiel has become America\u2019s most provocative and visible Christian theologian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel\u2019s current fixation on the End of the World as We Know It is in theological language called eschatology, the study of the \u201clast things.\u201d His specific b\u00eate noire is the Antichrist, the villain of these end times scenarios. Thiel\u2019s riffs on the Antichrist began a little over three years ago, first in a 2023 talk<\/a> at the Catholic University of America but then, starting in 2025, only in closed-door, invitation-only, multipart lectures out of San Francisco. While that secrecy is frustrating for those of us interested in how uber-rich and politically powerful tech titans see the future of our world, it\u2019s also rather savvy \u2014 no surprise from the guy who started hugely successful ventures like PayPal and Palantir. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty good marketing shtick if you want everybody to hear about something, not to let anybody in the room,\u201d Thiel reportedly<\/a> told one San Francisco audience last fall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In March, he traveled to Rome for another private, four-part series on the Antichrist. Taking his shtick to the doorstep of the Vatican was guaranteed to generate publicity, and it did<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Months ago, recordings of Thiel\u2019s lectures were leaked to The Verge<\/em>. We have listened to and read transcripts of all four of these lectures, which provide a window into Thiel\u2019s dizzying religious and sociocultural philosophy. He comes off as an intellectual magpie who somehow combines disparate elements into grave warnings against the AI and general \u201csafetyism\u201d that he claims precedes the Antichrist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPeace and safety\u201d \u2014 the slogan of the Antichrist, according to Thiel \u2014 trouble him throughout the lectures. In the first, he wonders if we\u2019re headed toward World War III or Cold War II, and afterward, potentially, an unjust peace, the corollary to an unjust war:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Somehow, it\u2019s very strange how the first Cold War from \u201949 to \u201989 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace. Where somehow you didn\u2019t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have World War III, it will be an unjust war. If we have Cold War II, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace.<\/p>\n Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it\u2019s obviously not written in stone and there\u2019s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren\u2019t the odds that we\u2019re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time? The fourth possibility is that Cold War II will end an unjust peace. And it\u2019s because the Antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We\u2019re all scared to death that we\u2019re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know World War III will be an unjust war, that pushes us very hard towards peace at any price.<\/p>\n What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don\u2019t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the Antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It\u2019s \u201cpeace and safety,\u201d the unjust peace. And then what Christ says in Matthew 24:6, the full verse: \u201cAnd you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, see that ye be not troubled.\u201d If you\u2019re too troubled, will we always end up with very unjust peace? Or something like this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n We are publishing an analysis of these lectures now because Thiel published a version of these same ideas in the conservative religious journal First Things<\/em> in July. You can read along for yourself. Titled \u201cThe Pope and the Antichrist,\u201d<\/a> the essay fills in the huge gaps in Thiel\u2019s thinking and allows us to better understand his ideas, such as they are.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The bottom line is that after sifting through all of the arcane references and esoteric exegesis, it turns out that Thiel \u2014 a Protestant who likes to describe himself as a \u201cheterodox Christian\u201d \u2014 offers a fairly standard-issue American evangelical worldview, and a rather fundamentalist one at that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He\u2019s less a coherent religious thinker than a repackager of recognizable ideas \u2014 dressing them up in the rhetoric of a tech nerd turned theological hobbyist \u2014 which he uses to promote his own ideology. He reads everything from the Bible to pre-papal writings of a future pope to Robert Hugh Benson\u2019s 1907 novel Lord of the World<\/em> to semi-obscure Scottish poetry with an eye toward his own, sometimes shockingly literal interpretation of the Antichrist\u2019s arrival (ideally, he should make his mark, as it were, more quickly than Jesus, who died at 33 and a few months \u2014 although Thiel allows in his third lecture that perhaps \u201cin our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33\u201d). While his mashup of religious concepts and authoritative assertions on dubious interpretations make him sound like an undergrad who just took his first philosophy class and then a few too many hits on the bong, the goal of his eschatology is the same as every apocalyptic visionary: to divide the world between the saved and the damned. And Thiel is, clearly, one of the righteous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s notable here that Thiel is coming from the heart of what is arguably America\u2019s latest, and most unexpected, religious revival \u2014 one concentrated among the Silicon Valley elite<\/a>, like the ACTS 17 Collective, which is<\/a> a reference to St. Paul\u2019s preaching to the Greek pagans in the Acts of the Apostles and an acronym for \u201cAcknowledging Christ in Technology and Society.\u201d But that movement presents an upbeat message of self-improvement through Jesus, the kind that the clean-and-fit Bay Area crowd tends to embrace. Thiel\u2019s worldview is quite unusual for Silicon Valley, and perhaps especially unexpected for a gay German billionaire; he\u2019s right at home in the US tradition of apocalypticism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The key to Thiel\u2019s theological vision comes at the very opening of his most recent First Things<\/em> essay, and it is his fixation on, and fear of, the Antichrist. The Antichrist has traditionally been associated with, as Thiel himself put it elsewhere<\/a>, \u201can evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.\u201d That is true, though Thiel says that the Antichrist interests him \u201cmostly because nobody else is talking about it.\u201d That would be news to anybody with even a passing familiarity with American Christianity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In fact, the Antichrist and eschatology are arguably the central religious impulse running through American Christianity, and that focus distinguishes the US from most other churches and cultures around the globe. In America, biblical teachings tend to jump from the Ten Commandments at the beginning of the Old Testament to the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. The Gospels, the Beatitudes, all that provides the key teachings of Jesus Christ is a footnote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The enthusiasm for the end of the world has been fueled in large part by the series of sweeping revivals, or \u201cGreat Awakenings,\u201d that have marked American religious history from the Colonial era up through the 1800s and, some would say, on into the 20th century. These revivals focused not only on personal conversion but on dark warnings about the \u201cend times\u201d as foretold in the New Testament, when Christ would return to gather believers up to Heaven and those who remained would be stuck facing various tribulations on their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For American Christians especially, the quest to save souls from eternal damnation was increasingly driven by the fear that the Second Coming was imminent, so you\u2019d better repent now. New apocalyptic movements and sects and cults continued to flourish, from those early tent revivals through the more slickly branded televangelists and, later, the enormously popular Left Behind<\/em> series of novels in the 1990s. Forecasters variously took snippets in the Book of Daniel and other prophets in the Hebrew Bible and joined them with the often phantasmagoric array of visions from the Book of Revelation, and eventually what had been a confusing jumble of end times scenarios solidified into a widely accepted timeline: increasing natural and human-made disasters, the Second Coming of Jesus, aka the Rapture of true believers, followed by the rise of the Antichrist and seven years of the Great Tribulation on Earth, ending with a final battle between good and evil and a thousand years of peace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOne of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the Antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type character. The public Mr. Rogers, the neighborhood character \u2014 but I saw the Mr. Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop Tourette\u2019s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on. Certainly, of course, there are a lot of people who are wannabe Antichrists. They sort of want peace and safety. [He] definitely wants a Nobel Peace Prize. He would give his soul for that, no question about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere is another book \u2014 I haven\u2019t been able to get a copy of it because it\u2019s coming out tomorrow, but we sort of downloaded it \u2014 that fits this thesis even better. It\u2019s from the East Bay rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky. I\u2019m embarrassed about all the ways I was once affiliated with these various people and how deranged and crazy they\u2019ve all gone. It started with these Baconian aspirations of transformative technology: We\u2019re going to build it, it\u2019s going to change the world.<\/em> And then it\u2019s somehow ended in some sort of blackpilled thing that\u2019s probably more depressed and more Luddite than Greta.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think one of the ways these things always get reported is I denounce Greta as an Antichrist. And I want to be very clear, Greta is not, I mean, she\u2019s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an Antichrist of the sort that would be tempting, but I don\u2019t want to flatter her too much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the Antichrist. Because, you know, the Antichrist is popular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Phew. Now enter Peter Thiel. He is in effect the latest in a long line of apocalypticists, though his own spin is that anxieties over strange new technologies like AI will prompt demands for greater regulation and that would be a grave, almost apocalyptic, mistake. Given the latest warnings from AI leaders themselves that the new technology could risk human extinction within a decade, Thiel\u2019s concerns run counter to what you\u2019d expect from an apocalypticist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel\u2019s theological justification for criticizing this instinct toward what he derides<\/a> as \u201csafetyism\u201d rests on a verse in St. Paul\u2019s first letter to the Thessalonians in which the apostle warns that many will promote \u201cpeace and safety\u201d to lull people into a false sense of security and then POOF, Jesus returns and the Antichrist appears and unbelievers are doomed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel identifies promoters of this kind of peace and safety with a \u201crestraining\u201d force that will be a sign of the coming of the Antichrist and which will eventually pave the way for the Antichrist. He has pointed to Anthony Fauci as one example of such a \u201crestrainer.\u201d And now the apostles of effective altruism, with their concern for protecting as many people as possible, are in Thiel\u2019s sights. Thiel uses the original Greek term for \u201cthe restrainer,\u201d katechon<\/em><\/a>, because of course he does. Deploying arcane terms is part of the mystery that gives apocalypticism its allure, and prophets their power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So who is actually the Antichrist? Thiel at one point dismissed such speculations as \u201cdown-market\u201d behavior, but he himself cannot resist weighing in. Viewing the Roman pontiff as the Antichrist or a collaborator with the Antichrist is a standard trope of end times theology, and in his First Things<\/em> essay Thiel follows that tradition by suggesting that the late Pope Francis could have been the Antichrist. In previously leaked snippets of Thiel\u2019s talks he has accused the current American pope, Leo XIV, of being a \u201cChinese communist agent\u201d<\/a> or, more recently, Beijing\u2019s \u201cuseful idiot,\u201d<\/a> because he wants to regulate AI \u2014 all very Antichrist-adjacent behavior.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel has a somewhat unusual relationship to the Catholic Church. True to the more anti-papist strains of his tradition, he worries that Pope Leo XIV is a \u201cwoke American pope\u201d who will join with American liberals to create a tyrannical \u201cCaesaro-Papist fusion.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the same time, the German-born Thiel\u2019s record-breaking financial support propelled JD Vance, a relatively recent Catholic convert, to the US Senate and now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel has also made a little-known Catholic literary theorist from France, Ren\u00e9 Girard, a spiritual guide for America\u2019s political right \u2014 though only by completely inverting<\/a> Girard\u2019s famous teaching about the scapegoat mechanism<\/a> by which a society eases internal divisions by blaming a single person or subgroup of people for their problems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel\u2019s latest essay is also unusual, or inventive, in that rather than denouncing the papacy as the Whore of Babylon \u2014 a traditional fundamentalist Protestant trope<\/a> drawn from a stark image in Revelation 17<\/a> \u2014 he tries to co-opt one pope, the late Benedict XVI, into his very American and Protestant worldview and against the papacy and the Catholic Church itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope, but I did hope, even as a Protestant, to be more Catholic than the average Catholic,\u201d Thiel says. His aim is to use Benedict \u2014 who resigned as pope in 2013 and died in seclusion in the Vatican in 2022 \u2014 as the one Catholic leader who understood the imminent threat of the Antichrist and the end times, the one Catholic who got it right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Granted, Benedict is the one pope who provides Thiel with the kind of opening, however tiny, that Thiel could run with. Benedict was \u201ca decided Augustinian,\u201d as he wrote during his earlier days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and he shared St. Augustine\u2019s rather pessimistic view of humankind. Thiel spends much time on the young Ratzinger\u2019s dissertation on St. Bonaventure\u2019s theology of history \u2014 a recondite topic in which the 13th-century Italian Franciscan rebutted the odd apocalyptic writings of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian abbot who lived a century before St. Bonaventure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thiel somehow reads Ratzinger\u2019s endorsement of Bonaventure over Joachim of Fiore as a sign that Ratzinger saw the apocalypse coming rather than what Ratzinger actually wrote and meant. In his third lecture Thiel extrapolates wildly on this theme from a quote within a footnote, saying:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The TL;DR: My belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.<\/p>\n Is there evidence for this? There\u2019s all sorts of subtle hints. Writing the 1959 professorial dissertation on Bonaventure, he uses all this colorful language on the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon. What does one make of this? In a footnote, it\u2019s sort of the most cryptic, esoteric way to write it. Not in his own words but quoting another professor, Ratzinger wrote \u2014 obviously before he\u2019s Pope \u2014 quoting this other professor: \u201cIn the case of Bonaventure, we see how difficult it is to succeed in placing the proper limits on apocalyptic images. Apocalyptic images are like a torrent of water that overflows the banks and it\u2019s difficult to keep in bounds. And regardless of all efforts to mollify the imagery, the apocalyptic tone predominates. Even a Mozart cannot make a trumpet forget to sound like a trumpet.\u201d So it\u2019s sort of like you are saying, if you think about this stuff, you can never, ever talk about it. If you talk about it even one peep, it will dominate everything and you can\u2019t say anything else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n The proof that future Pope Benedict was as focused on the literal end times as Thiel? That he would never talk about it, of course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What Ratzinger actually wanted was to avoid the idea that humanity could bring peace and justice to this world through our own efforts \u2014 a preview of his decadeslong campaign against what he saw as Marxist-influenced liberation theology, not on behalf of the Antichrist. Yet Thiel continues to pick out various comments on eschatology \u2014 \u201cbreadcrumbs,\u201d Thiel calls them \u2014 from Ratzinger\u2019s lectures and writings as the decades progressed and Ratzinger\u2019s own theological vision admittedly grew darker and more conservative. He interprets Benedict\u2019s resignation from the papacy \u2014 unprecedented in modern times \u2014 as one of Benedict\u2019s \u201cwinks and hints\u201d that the Antichrist is coming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This ventriloquizing is as bizarre as it is morbid, but Thiel is convinced that when it comes to talking about the Antichrist \u201cthese apocalyptic paroxysms make Benedict sound like a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That comment shows Thiel\u2019s basic problem, which is that he wants to view Roman Catholicism through an Evangelical Protestant lens that sees the end times as a global apocalypse where the \u201csaved\u201d will be rescued \u2014 and confirmed in their righteousness. Ratzinger, and later as Pope Benedict, was a thoroughgoing Catholic churchman who was less concerned about the end of time than he was \u201canxious about the end of a historical era of the Catholic Church,\u201d as the Italian theologian Marcello Neri put it. Ratzinger saw Catholic liberals who would dilute church doctrine and dogma as the apocalyptic threat, and it\u2019s a threat to the Catholic Church, not the planet. History will go on, Ratzinger believed. It\u2019s the church\u2019s fate that\u2019s less certain, thanks to infiltration by modernist currents. Thiel is making a category error that undermines his entire argument. It\u2019s typical Thiel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the end of the day, and of his essay, Thiel\u2019s grandiose language and project is shown to be a rather ordinary ideological one. \u201cThiel is above all a political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem,\u201d the Italian Franciscan Paolo Benanti wrote in a sharp riposte<\/a> to Thiel\u2019s Rome talks. As Benanti explains, this ideology includes the \u201cpathological radicalization\u201d of a handful of Western values \u2014 \u201ccompetition, technology, the individual\u201d \u2014 resulting in outcomes \u201cradically divergent from the common democratic project.\u201d Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor elaborate on that theme in their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If liberals want to \u201cimmanentize the eschaton,\u201d as William F. Buckley once put it, by focusing on doing good in this life instead of being anxious about the world to come, conservatives tend to focus on personal salvation ahead of the apocalypse. That end times theology is a perfect match for them because it tends toward a libertarian ethos like Thiel\u2019s; Jesus is coming back soon, let\u2019s not get bogged down in overregulating or overthinking. \u201cWe moralize way too much,\u201d as Thiel said in a podcast last month<\/a> with Axel Springer CEO Mathias D\u00f6pfner. \u201cIf you\u2019re evil, you\u2019re at least competent. And if you\u2019re evil, you\u2019re not bad, and therefore you\u2019re actually maybe kind of good because you\u2019re at least getting something done.\u201d Instead, Thiel suggests, let\u2019s make hay \u2014 meaning, bushels of money \u2014 while the sun shines. Climate anxiety? Your worries about the future show a lack of faith! That\u2019s why, in addition to the previous pope and the effective altruism movement, Thiel has also been reported as suggesting climate change activist Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Or maybe, he suggests in one lecture, it\u2019s the system that\u2019s the real Antichrist \u2014 specifically the financial regulatory system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Book of Revelation tells us, sort of, the Antichrist will abolish financial freedom. Revelation 13:16\u201317: \u201cHe causes all, both great and small, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads, that no man might buy or sell save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s this whole constellation of things, where over the last 25 years \u2014 this uneventful, Groundhog Day<\/em> 21st century since 2000 \u2014 under cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed. And all these tech fortunes are downstream of this vast system. You have the illusion of power and autonomy, but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment. It\u2019s become quite difficult to hide one\u2019s money.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n He admits that \u201cthis Antichrist-like system, this machinery\u201d moves at a different speed than a human Antichrist (who, again, should probably be 33.5 or younger), but insists it was set up \u201cnot overnight but relatively quickly, and there\u2019s a feeling it could be activated at the flip of a switch.\u201d If that all seems like a definition of the Antichrist that only a billionaire could love, he assures his listeners it\u2019s more than that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And then, of course, it\u2019s not just a financial system. It\u2019s also, in some sense, an ideological system. The Antichrist won\u2019t stop just at money. Money is not enough to stop the Antichrist and follows that he wants something more from you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s also, per Thiel, the International Criminal Court and the way it has spooked Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and erstwhile members of the George W. Bush administration, and it\u2019s Germany\u2019s strict laws around Nazi symbolism and libel online, and it\u2019s Australian age verification laws, which all cobble together into a vision of the end of days that so transfixes him. It\u2019s not exactly fire and brimstone, but to Thiel, it is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For all of Peter Thiel\u2019s prominence and brilliance \u2014 Vance called him \u201cthe smartest man I\u2019ve ever met\u201d \u2014 his spiritual preoccupations are ultimately quite mainstream. Vance recently spent part of a long podcast with a popular Evangelical influencer<\/a> talking about the End Times and the Antichrist. It blew the mind of most Catholics, but as Vance\u2019s friend conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher said<\/a>, this is \u201ca very, very common belief.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These beliefs are also very representative of an increasingly DIY religious culture in America that is disconnected from traditional practices and flesh-and-blood congregations. When it comes to religion, seemingly everyone now does their own research and generates their own social media ministry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The difference is that Thiel is an uber-wealthy influencer with political power. The theological thrifting by which he has sewn together his own apocalyptic vision would at one level be seen as quirky but innocent if not for the fact that he is using that vision to set himself up as a godlike judge between the saved and the damned \u2014 one might almost say a kind of Antichrist. That\u2019s what eschatology has always done, but few apocalyptic preachers have wielded the kind of power Peter Thiel does, and he doesn\u2019t seem to view many of us outside his circle as worthy of salvation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Additional reporting by Tina Nguyen<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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