Peter Thiel calls “peace and security” the Antichrist’s slogan and opposes stronger AI regulation: The Verge examines his private lectures
Peter Thiel calls “peace and security” the Antichrist’s slogan and opposes stronger AI regulation: The Verge examines his private lectures
On October 20, The Verge published an analysis of four private lectures on the Antichrist that Peter Thiel delivered in the fall of 2025. David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, read them alongside an essay by Thiel and Sam Wolfe in First Things. He found a fairly conventional American evangelical worldview, specifically a fundamentalist one.
In his first lecture, Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, described how the Antichrist gains control over science and technology by frightening people:
“The Antichrist talks about Armageddon relentlessly. We are all terrified that we are sleepwalking toward Armageddon. And because we know that a third world war would be unjust, we feel a very strong pull toward peace at any price.”
Peace at any price, Thiel explains, more often turns out to be unjust because people fail to examine its terms. He identifies “peace and security” as the Antichrist’s slogan, drawing on Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, which warns that sudden destruction will come upon those who speak these words. According to Gibson, Thiel uses this passage as the basis for his criticism of AI regulation: fear of the technology prompts demands for safety and stronger regulation, which Thiel regards as a mistake of almost apocalyptic proportions. Gibson also sees Thiel portraying effective altruism as a path to the Antichrist. Its adherents seek to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, work throughout the AI industry, and want to prevent AI from killing people.
In quotations published by The Guardian, Thiel calls AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, philosopher Nick Bostrom, and Greta Thunberg “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” He says all three demand a world government to stop science. On the eve of the publication of Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s book on superintelligence, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” Thiel said it fit his lecture’s thesis even better, adding:
“I am embarrassed by my past association with all these people and by how far into madness they have gone. It all began with Baconian ambitions for transformative technology: we will build it, and it will change the world. Then somehow it turned into something bleak and hopeless, probably more depressed and more Luddite than Greta.”
Gibson identifies Thiel’s interpretation of Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, as his central error. Thiel believes Benedict literally saw people’s departure from the Church as a sign of the end times. He finds his evidence in a footnote to Ratzinger’s dissertation, where Ratzinger quotes his supervisor: the apocalyptic tone prevails regardless, and even Mozart cannot make a trumpet forget how to sound like a trumpet. In Thiel’s reading, Ratzinger was explaining his silence about the apocalypse: once you begin discussing it, it crowds out everything else. Gibson objects:
“The supposed evidence that the future Pope Benedict was as preoccupied with the literal end times as Thiel is, of course, that he never spoke about them.”
According to Gibson, Thiel views Catholicism through the eyes of an evangelical for whom the end times mean a global apocalypse with deliverance for the saved. Ratzinger was concerned about the end of a historical era for the Church. He saw the threat in liberal Catholics who were diluting its doctrines. Gibson writes that such prophecies always serve the same purpose: to divide the world into the saved and the damned, with Thiel “firmly among the righteous.” Political power distinguishes Thiel from other prophets of the end times. As Gibson notes, his record donations helped elect JD Vance, the US vice president, to the Senate.