Peter Thiel, the gay technology baron and ally of Donald Trump and JD Vance, says fear of tech advances will hasten the coming of the Antichrist.
In the Christian Bible, for those who take it literally, the Antichrist represents all that is evil and is “the personal opponent of God,” notes The Wall Street Journal, reporting on an ongoing lecture series on the topic by Thiel. The Antichrist will deceive everyone as to his or her true purposes and will rule the world for a time, thanks to charisma and promises of peace and prosperity, but will eventually be defeated by Jesus Christ in a battle known as Armageddon, bringing on the end of the world.
Thiel, founder or cofounder of tech companies including PayPal and Palantir, claims to be a devout Christian. He has been giving lectures and interviews on the Antichrist and Armageddon for the past year and is now holding a four-part lecture series in San Francisco. The second lecture took place Monday.
Attendees are ordered not to disclose anything about the talks, but some have spoken to the media, and one posted notes on his personal website, which he linked on X, and then got barred from further installments.
In Monday’s lecture, “he encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology,” the Journal reports. “Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.”
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“Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power needed to regulate the existential risks from science and technology,” the news outlet explains.
Previously, in an interview with Peter Robinson of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Thiel said, “The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, it’s redistributive, it’s an extremely great philanthropist as an effective altruist. And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong.” Thiel also told Robinson it’s possible to take the Bible’s text “seriously without taking it completely literally.”
“Thiel has previously suggested (seriously) that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist, but attendees last week didn’t recall her name coming up,” The San Francisco Standard reports.
That suggestion about the prominent environmental activist came in Thiel’s interview with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in June. “The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this,” Thiel told Douthat. “And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.”
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Some other tech titans, including Elon Musk, have recently extolled Christianity, at least their version of it. But Pope Leo XIV, arguably the world’s top Christian leader, has questioned the value of artificial intelligence, telling the Catholic News Agency it will be “very difficult to discover the presence of God” in AI.
“Extremely wealthy” people who have invested in AI are “totally ignoring the value of human beings and humanity,” he said, adding, “The danger is that the digital world will follow its own path, and we will become pawns or be brushed aside.”
ACTS 17 — ACTS stands for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society — is hosting Thiel’s talks. A cofounder, tech executive Michelle Stephens, responded to criticism that the group is focusing on the rich instead of aiding the poor. “Christians actually don’t do a very good job of ministering to the wealthy, who can think that they’re basically gods themselves, which can be very dangerous,” she told the Journal.
Some other religious figures have questioned Thiel’s concentration on the Antichrist and Armageddon. “My best understanding is that the New Testament writers focus very little, if at all, on pointing followers of Jesus towards spending their energy on accurately identifying the Antichrist,” Jay Kim, lead pastor of WestGate Church in Silicon Valley, told the paper. “To give all your energy into thinking about all that, to me, feels like a pretty futile endeavor.”
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Gay Trump ally Peter Thiel: Fear of technology will bring on the Antichrist