Peter Thiel has spent 30 years arguing, on political and economic grounds, the regulatory state is the primary obstacle to technological progress.
He cofounded Palantir, the surveillance and data-analytics company whose government contracts depend on minimal oversight. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, an early backer of dozens of AI companies, and the most consequential political financier in Silicon Valley’s history—the man who backed President Donald Trump before it was safe, who bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign when Vance was a longshot, who has built an ideological project aimed at weakening the international institutions and regulatory frameworks that have governed technology and climate for a generation. He has made this case in newspaper columns, in books, in conference speeches, and in the funding decisions of his venture firm.
He has also been developing, for nearly a year, a theory about what he calls “the Antichrist.” The theory has escalated in stages: a four-part private lecture series in San Francisco in September 2025; leaked audio that made it a national story via the Washington Post that October; a first co-authored essay in First Things, the leading journal of Catholic intellectual conservatism in America, “Voyages to the End of the World.” He repeated the lecture series near the Vatican in Rome in March, which drew institutional pushback; and now he has co-authored a second, more pointed First Things essay. The idea centers on a provocation. In earlier centuries, Thiel argued, the Antichrist might have looked like a Dr. Strangelove-style mad scientist, a figure of obvious menace. But that isn’t how the Antichrist shows up in the 21st century.
“The Antichrist interests me for several reasons,” Thiel writes, “mostly because nobody else is talking about it—which, for most of Christian history, would have seemed a clear sign of his impending arrival.” In his fullest public argument yet about his thinking, Thiel and co-author Sam Wolfe write the figure of ultimate evil is best understood not as a monster or a tyrant but as a technocrat. A beneficent administrator. A figure who speaks the language of safety, ethics, and global coordination, who builds harmonized regulatory regimes and appeals to existential risk to justify sweeping institutional authority.
The argument draws on Vladimir Solovyov, a 19th-century Russian philosopher, and on Pope Benedict XVI, and it is developed with genuine theological seriousness. It also describes, with extraordinary precision, everyone who wants to regulate Peter Thiel.
The problem is that Thiel’s Antichrist looks, with extraordinary precision, exactly like the people who want to regulate Peter Thiel.
From private lectures to public theology
By moving this argument into print, for a second time, Thiel has transformed a niche theological roadshow into a formal statement of belief. The First Things essay draws on Benedict’s eschatology and Solovyov’s 1900 novella A Short Story of the Antichrist to sketch a detailed portrait of what this figure looks like in practice: a peace-obsessed leader who speaks the language of safety, ethics, and global coordination. He builds harmonized regulatory regimes. He appeals to existential risk—climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war—to justify sweeping institutional authority. He does not persecute Christianity openly. He absorbs it, incorporates it, makes it comfortable within a technocratic order that promises to manage civilization’s dangers on humanity’s behalf.
The essay leans heavily on Solovyov’s fictional Antichrist, who tells Christ directly: “Christ brought the sword. I shall bring peace,” and chides him for having “threatened the earth with the Day of Judgment.”
As George Weigel, a longtime interpreter of Solovyov’s text puts it, “Soloviev’s genius was to portray the Antichrist as a compelling rather than repellant figure”—unlike a Hitler or a Stalin, this Antichrist wins the world’s affection before he wins its submission.
At the center of Thiel’s framework is a concept that has no obvious precedent in corporate or political discourse: the legionnaire. Climate activists and AI safety researchers—figures like Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky—are not, in Thiel’s telling, consciously aligned with anything sinister. They are the Antichrist’s unwitting infantry, helping to build the very institutional architecture that a future consolidating power would need to rule: worldwide treaties, harmonized regulatory regimes, and coordinated AI moratoriums. Their insistence on emergency action and global coordination does not make them villains. It makes them, within this eschatological frame, dangerously naive.
This is where the argument stops being purely theological and starts being something else. Because the institutional apparatus Thiel finds spiritually treacherous is the regulatory state. Things like the EU’s AI Act, the Paris Agreement, the people who want Palantir to explain its surveillance algorithms and OpenAI to submit to external audits, which Thiel has been arguing against for decades on political and economic grounds, but not religious ones.
Why this functions as political theology
Thiel has spent the better part of his adult life building a coalition between Silicon Valley libertarianism and conservative Christianity. He has been one of the most effective political operators of the past decade precisely because he found a language—about freedom, disruption, the corruption of elite institutions—that spoke to both tech founders and religious conservatives who had historically distrusted each other. The Antichrist framework extends this project: By casting climate activists and AI safety researchers as legionnaires of an apocalyptic figure, he elevates a policy disagreement into a cosmic one. Being wrong about emissions targets or model weights could cast you on the wrong side of history, in this thinking.
Thiel and Wolfe point to a concrete real-world template: Catholic theologian Hans Küng’s “World Ethos” project, quoting Küng’s own words that there can be “no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.” They cast this ambition—a single, universal ethical-political consensus enforced through global dialogue—as structurally identical to the Antichrist’s promised “peace and safety” (1 Thessalonians 5:3).
The essay’s target has also sharpened. Recent reporting suggests Thiel has extended the argument to Pope Leo XIV directly, framing the current pope’s openness to AI regulation as making him—unwittingly—a vehicle for the same dynamic. That marks a shift from critiquing abstract “technocrats” to naming a sitting pope as a potential legionnaire, raising the stakes of the argument considerably.
The convenience is too perfect to ignore. Thiel’s Antichrist is a composite portrait of everyone who would constrain his portfolio. Palantir’s business model depends on minimal regulatory oversight of surveillance technology. The AI companies adjacent to his network benefit from a permissive regulatory environment. His political project requires weakening the international institutions—the UN, EU regulatory bodies, multilateral climate frameworks—that his theology now identifies as potential instruments of the Antichrist’s rule. Whether or not Thiel arrived at this view through genuine biblical study, the effect is to give his preexisting political commitments a cosmic mandate.
The sincerity problem
None of this means the theology is insincere. Thiel is a serious intellectual shaped by René Girard, his mentor at Stanford, whose mimetic theory of violence and sacrifice underpins much of how Thiel sees the world. He has been thinking about these questions for a long time. The Solovyov he cites is a real and under-read figure—a Russian philosopher who sketched his Antichrist not as a monster but as a humanitarian and a pacifist, a man of genuine gifts who earns the world’s gratitude before consolidating its submission. The Benedict he draws on warned repeatedly about what he called the “dictatorship of relativism”—the danger of a world that replaces moral truth with technocratic consensus. These are serious sources interpreted in a serious tradition.
What it does is close the debate. If the people regulating AI are legionnaires of the Antichrist, there is no version of AI regulation that can be discussed in good faith. If the institutions managing climate risk are instruments of a cosmic power consolidating control over humanity, the question of whether a carbon price is well-designed becomes not just wrong but spiritually treacherous.
Who is the real Antichrist?
Solovyov’s Antichrist rationalizes his own supremacy this way: “Christ came before me; I come second; but that which in the order of time comes later is essentially prior. I come last, at the end of history, just because I am the perfect and final saviour. The first Christ was my forerunner. His mission was to anticipate and prepare my coming.” It is not malice that drives him—it is a sincere, self-flattering conviction that he is finishing what Christ started.
There is also the matter of how Solovyov’s story actually ends. The Antichrist convenes an ecumenical council and offers each Christian faction exactly what it has always wanted—the Catholics a restored papacy, the Orthodox a great center of theological learning, the Protestants a definitive biblical institute. Most accept. Then Elder John, the leader of the Orthodox remnant, stands up and asks the Antichrist a single question: What do you personally believe about Christ? Whether Jesus is Lord. The Antichrist cannot answer. That silence is his unmasking. The three Christian leaders—historical enemies—unite in that moment, are expelled, martyred, and resurrected. The empire collapses. Christ returns. The victory belongs to the people who refused the deal, not the people who were sophisticated enough to work within the system.
Solovyov was a Christian universalist who spent much of his career arguing against the kind of religious nationalism that would use doctrine as a weapon in a culture war. He was suspicious, specifically, of those who bent theological tradition toward political ends—who took the forms of religious seriousness and filled them with something else. His Antichrist does not persecute Christianity. He absorbs it, repurposes it, makes it comfortable within a project it was never designed to serve. Solovyov considered this the more dangerous move, and the harder one to see clearly from the inside.
The question Solovyov’s Elder John asks is not “are you lying?” It is something harder: What do you believe when there is nothing left to gain from believing it?
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
