Religion: Thiel’s ‘Antichrist’ obsession

Peter Thiel is cynically weaponizing “the language of faith” to serve his own ends.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 21 October 2025

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel wants to alert the world to an overlooked danger, said Nitasha Tiku in The Washington Post: the coming of the Antichrist. In a recent series of “off-the-record” lectures delivered in San Francisco to sold-out crowds, the venture capitalist and GOP megadonor warned that critics of technology, artificial intelligence, and financial innovation are “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” who could usher in the destruction of America “and an era of global totalitarian rule.” The modern version of the biblical Antichrist would be “a Luddite who wants to stop all science, it’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” he said, referring to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who wants to prevent machines from achieving human-level intelligence. By calling for stricter global regulations, he claimed, these activists could help create a singular world government that the Antichrist would then use to control humanity. Thiel is a devout Christian and longtime libertarian; still, his words were striking in their “effort to cast resisting oversight of technology development as a religious battle.”

“The Antichrist has long haunted American politics,” said Matthew Avery Sutton in The Guardian. “A protean figure cobbled together from obscure biblical passages,” the demonic supervillain typically grabs the popular imagination during times of “social disruption and geopolitical dread.” Over the years, the tag has been affixed to “New Deal bureaucrats,” Hitler, communists, and Saddam Hussein. But its familiarity makes it no less dangerous. Once you cast your opponents as Satanic agents, compromise becomes “complicity” and “violence begins to look sanctifying.” As an Episcopal priest, “I find Thiel’s warnings heretical,” said Kevin Deal in the San Francisco Standard. In the Bible, the Antichrist represents “a foil to Christ,” not “a tool to sow fear or division.” Thiel is cynically weaponizing “the language of faith” to serve his own ends.

Thiel seems like “someone desperately trying to disidentify” from his own vast power, said Adrian Daub in The Guardian. This is a man who, with his “fellow Silicon Valley freaks,” mentored Vice President JD Vance and helped return to the White House an unfit president determined to “remake society and the world.” The PayPal and Palantir co-founder funds the companies that “harness your data and determine who gets doxxed, deported, drone-struck.” And he continues to champion the development of AI, despite also admitting that the technology just might kill us all. If Thiel truly wants to identify the shadowy forces that could end humanity, perhaps he should put down the Book of Revelation and take a look in the mirror.