Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory—and it’s a tech and climate regulator

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........

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