Peter Thiel: You Know Who Else Wants to Regulate AI? The Antichrist

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.

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.”

Note that this is an incredibly convenient position for Thiel, whose wealth is heavily invested in AI.