Fun fact: Billionaire PayPal, Founders Fund, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, when he’s not busy exerting his ghastly influence over the U.S. government, moonlights as a touring theorist and lecturer on Christianity, the end times, and the antichrist.
Thiel and his team have tried to create an air of secrecy around the ‘Antichrist’ lectures, which began with a 2025 series in San Francisco. Thiel’s complete lack of qualifications to speak on theology, of course, pale in comparison to his fame and wealth. So the lectures expanded to Paris and Rome and are now ongoing as a four-part, $100-per-ticket lecture series in Nashville. On Thursday, Calder McHugh of Politico’s Decoded newsletter obtained recordings of Thiel attacking former President Barack Obama and the pope at the first two Nashville events over AI.
The central thesis of this round of talks, Politico wrote: government attempts to regulate AI are evil. Politico’s quotes from the events show that Thiel seemed intent on pushing the antichrist-as-AI-safety-advocate angle.
“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel told attendees. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI.”
Thiel then dug in on Pope Leo XIV, a popular target for U.S. conservatives. Thiel’s particular beef with the Vatican appears to be that the pope targeted AI in his first encyclical, associating the AI era with “new forms of dehumanization” and “idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak.” (The feeling seems mutual: a Vatican advisor, Paolo Benanti, penned a March 2026 essay with a title asking whether Thiel should be burned at the stake for heresy.)
“AI is the threat über alles of late modernity,” Thiel said in Nashville, according to Politico. “The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical… he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.”
Note that this is an incredibly convenient position for Thiel, whose wealth is heavily invested in AI. That includes numerous startups funded by Founders Fund, Palantir’s AI-laden product suite, and a $418 million AI-focused portfolio at his global hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC.
Politico wrote that Thiel’s Nashville talks also addressed the Katechon, a sort of force or “restrainer” from 2 Thessalonians that delays the antichrist’s arrival and/or rise. He also spent a “significant portion” of one lecture criticizing effective altruism, an ideology popular with tech types that measures moral good in strict utilitarian terms.
Thiel’s issue doesn’t appear to be that the philosophy is associated with people like convicted FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s that he thinks effective altruism is the belief system of people who would form a one-world government to stop AI progress. From Politico:
“[O]ne also has to take seriously that once you create a near totalitarian one-world government with the power to stop all dangerous science, it cannot easily be uncreated either… There is no precedent in human history that suggests that this global prison warden would willingly give up his or its power. The effective altruist ideology has brainwashed a significant portion of the people working on AI.”
Thiel’s reps didn’t respond to Politico’s request for comment.
Note that this is an incredibly convenient position for Thiel, whose wealth is heavily invested in AI. That includes numerous startups funded by Founders Fund, Palantir’s AI-laden product suite, and a $418 million AI-focused portfolio at his global hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC.
Thiel hasn’t been reported to fully commit to one specific conception of the antichrist, allowing for alternative interpretations like antichrist as the umbrella term for the morally worst people, or less an entity than some kind of “spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil.” But the one he discusses most operates on the same eschatological game plan that antichrist movies from Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen to End of Days have set up: the antichrist is a tyrannical figure, whose destined rise to near-absolute power triggers the biblical apocalypse. Thiel just does it by ditching the evil baby part in favor of more Bible quotes and dilettante philosophizing.
During the 2025 series in San Francisco, the Guardian reported, Thiel focused on what he called the “most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.” He also stated, “My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.” (Thiel was referring to climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.)
The Guardian cited this 2025 tour quote as a representative sample of what it called Thiel’s “muddled, contradictory” ideas on the antichrist’s identity:
“There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power?”
Hmm. Lot of things to think about in that one.
