Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel (born 1967 in Frankfurt) co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics company whose AI platforms now run inside Western militaries and intelligence agencies. Through Founders Fund he has bankrolled defense-tech firms like Anduril, and he was an early donor to OpenAI’s original nonprofit — placing him at the origin point of the modern AI industry, even as he remains one of its stranger prophets.

The Antichrist lectures

Across September and October 2025, Thiel delivered a private four-part lecture series in San Francisco, later leaked to The Washington Post, arguing that humanity’s real existential danger is not runaway AI but the world government that fear of AI could summon. In his telling, the biblical Antichrist arrives not as a technologist but as a regulator — preaching “peace and safety,” invoking Armageddon, and using existential-risk panic to impose global totalitarian control. Critics of AI and technology, he warned, are unwitting “legionnaires of the Antichrist.”

Thiel’s position resists simple labels: he has elsewhere dismissed AI hype, mused that AI in its current form may be roughly as important as the internet, and voiced unease about machines surpassing humans. But operationally he is all accelerant — Palantir’s AI weapons platforms, his stakes across the AI stack, and his protégés in the Trump administration all push against restraint. Theologians called the lectures idiosyncratic; safety researchers called them a religious permission slip for recklessness; libertarians heard a familiar anti-regulation argument in apocalyptic dress.