Antichrist

The Antichrist lectures are a four-part private lecture series that Peter Thiel delivered across September and October 2025 in San Francisco, partly at the Commonwealth Club, advancing the argument that the biblical Antichrist will arise not as a tyrant of science but as the architect of a one-world government built to manage existential risk and impose universal "peace and safety." The lectures were closed and off the record, but recordings reached the Washington Post, which published an account in October 2025. They are the synthesis of the political theology underlying the Thiel Influence Network, fusing the mimetic theory Thiel absorbed from René Girard with the political theology of Carl Schmitt and an explicitly anti-regulatory reading of artificial-intelligence governance.¹²

The Argument

Thiel inverts the popular image of the Antichrist as a technological tyrant. In his reading the Antichrist is a Luddite, a figure who halts science and technology in the name of safety and order, and whose instrument is global political coordination. He cast the people calling for international restraint on artificial intelligence, among them Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and the climate activist Greta Thunberg, as "legionnaires of the Antichrist" who "argue for world government to stop science," and said in the September 15 lecture, "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or Eliezer." The argument turns the existential-risk politics of the Rationalist Community and Effective Altruism movements, which Thiel himself had funded through the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, into the eschatological enemy.²³

Thiel's mechanism is that the Antichrist takes power through fear: "The way the Antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop," installing a single world state that promises "peace and safety" in order to stop science. He argued that secular arguments against a one-world government are insufficient, saying that "if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough." The four Monday lectures ran on September 15, 22, 29, and October 6, 2025 at the Commonwealth Club, were hosted by the ACTS 17 Collective run by Michelle Stephens, the wife of Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, and sold out at two hundred dollars for the full series; the organizers revoked the ticket of one attendee who published his notes in violation of the off-the-record rule, and the leaked audio was authenticated by the digital-forensics researcher Hany Farid.⁶⁷

Sources and Frame

The lectures drew on a dense body of theological and literary material: the nineteenth-century Antichrist lectures of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov's "Short Tale of the Antichrist," Robert Hugh Benson's 1907 novel Lord of the World, the early-modern political thought of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and Girard's late writing on sacrifice, violence, and apocalypse. The biblical anchors included Daniel 12:4 ("knowledge shall be increased"), Matthew 24:6 ("wars and rumours of wars"), 1 Thessalonians 5:3 ("peace and safety, then sudden destruction"), and the "katechon," the restrainer of the end times from 2 Thessalonians that Schmitt placed at the center of his political theology. Thiel has located the katechon variously in the Roman Empire, in anti-communism, and in the United States, casting the restraint of the totalizing world-state as a Christian and civilizational duty.¹⁴

Thiel had been an early funder of the work he now cast as Antichrist-adjacent, backing Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute, the forerunner of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, from 2005. In the lectures he described himself as a "small-o orthodox Christian" and a "humble classical liberal," criticized what he called "zombie liberalism" and "lame libertarian abstractions," and argued that the rational case against world government fails without the biblical frame of the Antichrist to make the danger felt. The reasoning is recognizably the political theology that Thiel had developed since "The Straussian Moment," in which the restraint of social dissolution is itself the temptation that the Antichrist exploits.³⁵

Reception

Thiel later carried the lecture series toward Rome and the Vatican, extending a private San Francisco seminar into a public theological intervention. Coverage in Fortune, The New Republic, and Reason read the project as the most developed public statement of Thiel's worldview, in which his libertarian opposition to regulation, his Girardian account of crowds and scapegoating, and his Christian eschatology converge on a single claim: that efforts to coordinate humanity against catastrophic risk are themselves the catastrophe.³⁵

In a June 2025 interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, Thiel hesitated when asked whether he would prefer the human race to endure, replying "I don't know" before, pressed on the "long hesitation," answering yes and pivoting to transhumanism, an exchange critics treated as the clearest sign of the project's nihilism. Gil Duran in The New Republic called it "a highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology" and noted the irony that Thiel's own Palantir Technologies builds the surveillance infrastructure of the centralized state he warns against. Reason's Jack Nicastro, having listened to more than seven hours of the leaked audio, found the lectures "surprisingly libertarian," while Jeet Heer in The Nation read them as part of a pattern of billionaires "abandoning humanity."⁸⁹