Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures
Thomas Colsy • October 7, 2025
One of the richest and most powerful men in the world has just completed a series of four off-the-record lectures on the Antichrist at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The talks set an eerie tone for political and technological developments in the 21st century.
Organised by the Acts 17 Collective – which describes itself as "a community of thinkers, builders, artists and leaders who are wrestling with what it means to live with purpose and conviction" – the talks occurred on 16 September, 23 September, 30 September and culminated on 6 October. They were given by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, a self-described Christian influenced by Catholic philosopher René Girard, as well as openly homosexual and libertarian in his political outlook.
At the heart of Thiel’s warnings about the Antichrist are the matters of technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism and surveillance – all areas of his own production and expertise. These are issues that are catapulting themselves to the fore in much of the world, including in the UK as Prime Minister Kier Starmer presses ahead with his scheme to demand all citizens to possess a digital ID in order to work (a policy strongly lobbied for by Thiel’s fellow political tech-billionaire Larry Ellison).
Indeed, in recent events, Palantir – already under increasing public scrutiny and not wanting to tie itself to a sinking ship – rejected a contract to implement Starmer’s digital IDs after citing low public support. But the fact that the company was approached and had the necessary capacity ought still to give us pause.
Hence it’s worth asking what prompts Thiel to describe the Antichrist and end times to elite audiences? – portraying the Antichrist as a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control.
Thiel’s lectures attracted tech executives, academics and investors keen to explore technology's role in Christian eschatology. Thiel drew on John Henry Newman's 19th-century apocalyptic writings and Vladimir Soloviev's 1900 novella A Short Story of the Antichrist, in which the Antichrist is portrayed as an engineer offering rational solutions to chaos. Leaked summaries of the lectures in the New York Times captured Thiel's argument that existential threats would drive overregulation, fostering pervasively oppressive governance.
In a related October 2024 interview, Thiel elaborated: "The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety ... if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time."
The irony of Thiel’s role is hard to ignore. Palantir, the company he co-founded in 2003 with CIA seed money, builds the very structures he warns against.
Its Gotham platform integrates emails, financial data, social media and more into searchable profiles of individuals. Developed after 9/11 to track terrorists, it now aids the National Security Agency (NSA) and supports US immigration enforcement. It even reportedly assists the Israeli Defence Forces, with Palantir said to maintain contracts with Mossad. A 2024 investigation, corroborated by Human Rights Watch, linked Palantir’s algorithms to Israel’s AI targeting in Gaza, where civilian data was fused with military indicators, contributing to strikes on civilian targets.
Even Palantir's name draws suspicion – especially from English and Catholic audiences – due to its roots in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The company is named as a result of Thiel’s vocal enthusiasm for Tolkien – particularly the palantíri: magical seeing-stones that reveal distant truths but are secretly controlled by the demonic Sauron, who twists visions to manipulate viewers. One such viewer, the steward Denethor, obsessively consults his palantír for military insights, only to descend into madness and suicide.
As Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce observes, the Elvish term palan-tír ("far-seeing") translates into German as fernsehen and (less subtly) into the Greek-rooted word “television”. This reveals Tolkien's encoded critique: new technologies which purport to relay audiovisual truths invite control by worldly powers, seeding despair and self-destruction.
This makes for an unusual choice of name by founder Peter Thiel, a purported tech optimist.
Palantir’s influence extends pervasively into civilian life. In Los Angeles, leaked documents showed Gotham controversially powering predictive policing, generating “risk scores” on citizens. In Britain, its Foundry platform won a £480 million NHS contract to consolidate patient records. Palantir’s stock has climbed 73 per cent in 2025, boosted by prospective Trump administration deals, including a centralised federal database for immigration and social services.
From a Catholic perspective, such systems threaten human dignity and the principle of subsidiarity. In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II warned explicitly that higher authorities must not deprive smaller communities of their rightful functions. Psalm 139 describes God’s knowledge of each person as intimate and redemptive; Palantir’s algorithms, by contrast, reduce people to impersonal correlations.
Thiel confronts the dissonance in a New York Times interview with Ross Douthat: "Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?!" Thiel exclaims, laughing uneasily. He cited the katechon of 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7, the barrier to Satan’s reign in the world – yet Palantir wins contracts producing new AI-facial-recognition drone technologies which give those who possess it the power to unleash depersonalised conscience-free targeted death.
Catholic teaching challenges this development. Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum cautioned: "The State should watch over these societies of citizens banded together in accordance with their rights, but it should not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their organisation, for things move and live by the spirit inspiring them, and may be killed by the rough grasp of a hand from without."
John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus, decried how "scientific and technological progress … was transformed into an instrument of war … directed to the production of ever more efficient and destructive weapons." Palantir's pursuits – including Thiel’s own explicitly-stated “transhumanist” aims like tech-enabled longevity – seem to be ushering in a worse world. A would-be tyrant would welcome such technologies, which begs the question: why are people like Theil pushing them while also warning against them?
In the 19th century, the Papal States once briefly and amusingly tried to outlaw gas street lamps on health and security grounds. Its natural law philosophy also cautioned that remaining awake after the sun’s setting is contrary to nature. We have come a long way since then, and this was only a temporary measure for a small preindustrial state. Yet the Church’s skepticism of technology should not be dismissed. Just as circumventing nature by altering our sleep times in relation to daylight and sunset harms our biology and circadian rhythm, so may outsourcing surveillance control and execution to unaccountable AI overlords harm a free and Christian civilisation.
Leo XIII and scholastic philosophy – building on the ancient world’s Aristoteleanism – always honoured nature as the beneficial design of God. The Church – which researched, developed, sponsored and administered medicine through history – has always recognised that natural means at avoiding untimely or premature deaths are beneficial. But, to the Christian, death is not to be transcended or escaped. It is sacred: when we step into the light, presence and judgement of our Creator.
Moreover, Christians always understood: better to live as a poor and blighted free man with the ability to live according to the truth, than as a materially rich man enslaved to the lies of the powerful and the world.
If Thiel is so frightened about the Antichrist, why cheer a world which seeks to radically overturn the designs Christ himself put in place? And why develop weapons and systems which eerily match those described in the New Testament’s final book? The answer may well prove deeply troubling for us all.
Photo: Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida, 7 April 2022. (Photo by Marco Bello/Getty Images.)