Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has spent the past three years talking about the Antichrist. He started in public, with a 2023 talk at the Catholic University of America. Since 2025, he has given closed-door, invitation-only lectures in San Francisco, and in March he took a private four-part series to Rome, right on the doorstep of the Vatican.

Recordings of those lectures leaked to The Verge, and the outlet has now listened to and read transcripts of all four Rome talks. The material shows a man pulling together scraps of religion, history and politics into warnings about what he sees as a coming catastrophe. The main target is what Thiel calls “safetyism,” and the people he blames for pushing it.

What Is Peter Thiel's Argument Against AI Safety Advocates?

Those people include effective altruists, a utilitarian movement that focuses on doing the most good for the most people over the longest time. Many in the movement see halting an AI-driven doomsday as critical to saving human lives. Thiel argues that the promoters of “peace and safety” are the forces that prepare the way for the Antichrist. He draws that idea from a line in St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, and he uses the Greek term katechon, or “restrainer,” for those who hold back the end. He has already pointed to Anthony Fauci as one example.

Thiel’s argument runs against the usual fears of AI leaders, who have warned that the technology could threaten human extinction within a decade. In Thiel’s framing, the real danger is that anxiety about AI leads to heavy regulation, and that regulation is the mistake.

Why Does Peter Thiel Criticize Pope Leo XIV?

His July essay in First Things, titled “The Pope and the Antichrist,” extends that logic to the Vatican. In it, Thiel suggests the late Pope Francis could have been the Antichrist. In leaked talks, he has called the current American pope, Leo XIV, a “Chinese communist agent” and, more recently, Beijing’s “useful idiot,” because the pontiff wants to regulate AI. Thiel also worries that Leo XIV is a “woke American pope” who could join with American liberals to build a tyrannical “Caesaro-Papist fusion.”

Thiel leans heavily on Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013 and died in 2022. Thiel reads the young Joseph Ratzinger’s dissertation on St. Bonaventure as evidence that Benedict saw the end times coming. He also treats Benedict’s resignation as one of the pope’s “winks and hints” about the Antichrist. Thiel says Benedict’s apocalyptic language makes him “sound like a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist.”

The analysis argues that Thiel misreads Ratzinger. In the cited passages, Ratzinger was warning against the idea that humanity could bring about peace and justice through its own efforts. His real fear was for the Catholic Church, not the planet. As the Italian theologian Marcello Neri put it, Ratzinger was “anxious about the end of a historical era of the Catholic Church.”

Thiel’s most unusual move may be his claim that the Antichrist could be a system rather than a person. In one lecture, he points to tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions as parts of a machine that could be “activated at the flip of a switch.” He also names the International Criminal Court, Germany’s strict laws on Nazi symbolism and online libel, and Australian age verification rules as pieces of the same picture.

Thiel’s ideas have a strong connection to Washington. His financial support helped propel JD Vance to the U.S. Senate, and Vance, who is a Catholic convert, is now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Thiel once called Vance “the smartest man I’ve ever met.” Vance has also talked about the End Times and the Antichrist on a podcast with a popular evangelical influencer. Conservative commentator Rod Dreher said that belief is “a very, very common belief.”

The analysis concludes that Thiel’s theology is more standard evangelical fare than his grand language suggests. What sets him apart is his money and influence. Thiel is using his apocalyptic vision to set himself up as a judge between the saved and the damned, and few preachers have had that kind of power.

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