Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

Why is Peter Thiel talking about the Antichrist, and what has that word ever meant? A non-Christian’s guide to the oldest weapon in politics.

In the autumn of 2025, Peter Thiel sold out four private lectures in San Francisco to warn paying guests that the Antichrist is coming.

To understand why a man who sells surveillance software to governments would say this, start at the walls.

The Enemy at the Gate

For more than a thousand years, Constantinople was the greatest Christian city on earth, and the last living piece of the Roman Empire. Rome in the west had fallen long before, but in the east the empire never died. It had moved its capital to Constantinople, kept the Roman name, and stood as the shield of Christendom against every army that came for it. By the spring of 1453 that thousand-year empire had shrunk to a single city behind a single ring of walls, and a sultan of twenty-one, Mehmed II, arrived to take it.

He brought the largest gun the world had seen, twenty-seven feet of bronze that threw a stone ball heavier than a plough ox. It could fire only seven times a day, because it needed hours to cool, and each shot rolled across the water and struck the city so hard that people behind the walls felt the blow in their chests before they heard it. For fifty-five days it worked the ancient walls. Then, in the dark before dawn on the 29th of May, they broke.

The emperor could have run. Ships still sat in the harbor, and men were already boarding them. Constantine XI stayed. He pulled off the purple robe and the imperial ornaments, the marks that would have made him worth capturing alive for ransom, and went down into the breach to fight and die as an ordinary soldier, defending an empire that was already gone. His body was never found.

For four hundred years, Greek mothers told their children that an angel had turned the last emperor to marble and hidden him beneath the city, and that one day he would wake and take it back.

The news moved across Europe like a fever. A future pope called it a second death of Homer and Plato, the murder of the old world itself. Learned men believed they were watching the end of days begin. And to articulate what they thought they were seeing, they reached for the darkest figure their civilization had made: the Antichrist.

The Antichrist was the West’s idea of ultimate evil. He was not an ordinary tyrant but the final one, a deceiver who would appear at the end of history, disguise himself as a savior, seize the whole world, and rule it until God returned to destroy him. His arrival was the signal that time itself was running out, that the last battle between good and evil had begun. To call something the Antichrist was to say it was the worst force that could exist, and that its coming meant the world was ending. Europe looked at the armies of Islam standing where Rome had stood, and named the sultan the Antichrist.

By 1529, seventy-six years later, those same Turkish armies had pushed up the Danube to the walls of Vienna, deep inside Europe, and in Germany a monk named Martin Luther gave the accusation a second target. Luther had already broken Western Christianity in two. He had charged the Pope in Rome with corrupting the faith itself, and millions had walked out of the Catholic Church behind him. Now, with the Turk at the gate, he wrote a tract called On War Against the Turk and fused his two enemies into one. The Antichrist, he said, “had a body and a soul.” The Turk was the body, the army breaking Christendom from outside. The Pope was the soul, seated at the center of the Church, rotting it from within.

Passions of Christ and Antichrist by Lucas Cranagh (1521)

It was the most frightening claim a European could hear. The two most powerful men on earth, the head of Western Christianity and the ruler of Islam, were one monster wearing two faces. Luther set it to music for the young. In 1541, as the Ottomans overran Hungary, he wrote a hymn, a song for children to sing against the two great enemies of Christ and his Church, the Pope and the Turk. In cold churches across Germany, boys and girls stood in rows and sang to God to strike both of them down.

There was one more piece to the picture, and it explains why these wars felt like the hinge of history rather than another border fight. Christians believed that something was holding the end of the world back, keeping the final catastrophe from arriving before its appointed hour. That something was their own empire. As long as a Christian power kept its walls, the last days could not begin. So an emperor defending a wall against the Turk was doing much more than saving a city. He was holding the end of the world at bay with his own hands. To defend the empire was to defend time itself.

The enemy stood at the gate one last time in the autumn of 1683. 150,000 Ottoman soldiers under Kara Mustafa had dug their trenches up to the walls of Vienna, and the city had been starving for two months. On the afternoon of the 12th of September, the defenders looked up at the wooded hill above the city and saw the tree line fill with horsemen. Twenty thousand of them came down through the vineyards, the winged hussars of the Polish king Jan Sobieski at the front, cavalry who rode into battle under tall arcs of eagle feathers fixed to their backs, in the largest cavalry charge ever recorded.

Battle between king John Sobieski III and the Turks by Pauwels Casteels (1677)

It is the scene Tolkien would turn into myth three centuries later in the charge of the Riders of Rohan: the horns sounding, the horsemen breaking over the ridge, the siege lifted at first light by a relief that arrives at the last possible moment.

By nightfall the Ottoman camp was overrun and Kara Mustafa was riding east for his life. The advance that began when Constantinople fell ended on that hillside, and the Ottoman tide went out of Europe for good.

For more than two centuries, the Antichrist sat outside the walls of Christendom. He was a foreign army, an alien faith. He was always someone else, and always somewhere beyond the wall.

The Word Turned Inward

In September 2025, in a private club in San Francisco, Peter Thiel picked the word back up.

He gave eight hours of lectures, by invitation, with no recordings allowed, and later carried them to Rome, to the doorstep of the Vatican. His argument begins by throwing out the usual picture. People expect the Antichrist to look like a “conqueror, or a mad scientist with a weapon.” Thiel says that image is the disguise. Two novels from around 1900, one Russian and one English, shaped his version. In both, the Antichrist takes power as a beloved humanitarian who ends war, feeds the poor, and gathers the nations under one peaceful government, and only afterward reveals what he is. He arrives as a savior.

For five centuries the Antichrist had battered the walls from outside. This one is welcomed through the gate, because he comes with no army and no siege, only a promise to keep everyone safe.

The way he tells it, the takeover is bloodless. You call a danger so large that no single country can face it alone. Climate collapse. Runaway artificial intelligence. Nuclear war. Then you offer the one cure big enough to match it: a single government over the whole planet, with the power to watch everyone and forbid whatever it fears.

The people who sound those alarms, Thiel says, are the ones preparing the way. “In the 21st century,” he said, “the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.” Greta Thunberg, the climate activist. Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has spent his life warning that artificial intelligence will kill everyone. Thiel calls them “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” The regulators, the safety campaigners, the people who want to slow the machines down, are the advance guard of a coming world tyranny.

Thiel is pointing at something that exists. Governments reach for emergency powers, and frightened people hand them over. The larger the danger, the larger the powers that can be claimed. The world watched it happen in 2020. In a matter of weeks, democracies confined their citizens to their homes, tracked their movements by phone, and shut down public life, all under the banner of safety, and most people agreed.

The difficulty is where he is standing when he points.

A Dream the Shape of a Religion

Peter Thiel is the chairman and co-founder of Palantir Technologies. He named it, in 2003, after the seeing-stones in Tolkien, the palantíri: crystal globes that let a distant watcher see across the whole world. In the story, the enemy captures one and uses it to spread despair and bend what men believe.

Palantir builds the real version. Its software lets a government pull every database onto one screen and watch an entire population, the immigration service, the military, the police, the battlefield. It is the apparatus of total visibility, and it is sold to the state.

In 2025 its reach widened in the open. Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid Palantir to build a system to track the people it had marked for deportation. In July, the Army folded seventy-five separate contracts into a single agreement with the company worth up to $10B. By autumn the market valued Palantir at more than $400B. The seeing-stone is built, and it watches from inside the wall.

The move underneath is ancient. For a thousand years the word Antichrist was aimed outward, at whoever came for Christendom from beyond the wall. Luther turned it inward, at the Pope. Thiel has turned it a third time, and aimed it at everyone who wants to slow technology down.

He has company in the fight, and he is only the most theological of them. Two years earlier the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” with a section headed “The Enemy,” and the enemy was a list: “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “the precautionary principle,” “risk management.” The people Thiel calls legionnaires of the Antichrist, Andreessen calls a “mass demoralization campaign.” One reaches for scripture and the other for a manifesto, and they point at the same crowd: everyone who would lay a hand on the machines.

What that crowd threatens is a dream large enough to have the shape of a religion. The people around Thiel believe the human race has been stuck for half a century. “We wanted flying cars,” he likes to say, “instead we got 140 characters.” Progress in the world of atoms, in energy and transport and medicine and space, slowed to a crawl around 1970, strangled by caution and paperwork, until a species that once walked on the Moon came to spend its genius on apps.

The dream is to break the spell and cross every ceiling at once. Defeat aging and death, which Thiel calls the “oldest enemy” and refuses to accept as fixed. Build a mind greater than our own. Reach Mars and live there. Turn scarcity into abundance. It is a bid for transcendence, the same escape from death and limit that religion has always promised, pursued this time with capital and code.

There is a political dream folded inside it. The builders have come to believe that democracy and the technological future pull against each other, that voters and regulators and treaties are a drag chain on progress, and that the way forward is to slip free of all of it.