// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
The Gospel according to Peter (Thiel)
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We have Peter Thiel’s secret lectures about the Antichrist.
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It’s a time of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI doom cycle is driven by effective altruism, a philosophy that has lurked around the fringes for years but recently burst into the mainstream because its adherents are embedded across the AI industry, from Anthropic to newly appointed AI safety watchdog METR. EA is a utilitarian approach to charity premised on doing the most good for the most people over the longest time, and EA advocates see halting an AI-induced doomsday as critical to saving as many humans as possible.
But EA has an important and equally apocalyptic rival in the crosscutting cosmologies of the tech titans — a strain of Christianity best represented by Peter Thiel, who believes EA will bring about the Antichrist. It’s an issue on which the billionaire techno-capitalist is a self-styled expert, and, somehow, Thiel has become America’s most provocative and visible Christian theologian.
Thiel’s current fixation on the End of the World as We Know It is in theological language called eschatology, the study of the “last things.” His specific bête noire is the Antichrist, the villain of these end times scenarios. Thiel’s riffs on the Antichrist began a little over three years ago, first in a 2023 talk at the Catholic University of America but then, starting in 2025, only in closed-door, invitation-only, multipart lectures out of San Francisco. While that secrecy is frustrating for those of us interested in how uber-rich and politically powerful tech titans see the future of our world, it’s also rather savvy — no surprise from the guy who started hugely successful ventures like PayPal and Palantir. “It’s a pretty good marketing shtick if you want everybody to hear about something, not to let anybody in the room,” Thiel reportedly told one San Francisco audience last fall.
In March, he traveled to Rome for another private, four-part series on the Antichrist. Taking his shtick to the doorstep of the Vatican was guaranteed to generate publicity, and it did.
Months ago, recordings of Thiel’s lectures were leaked to The Verge. We have listened to and read transcripts of all four of these lectures, which provide a window into Thiel’s dizzying religious and sociocultural philosophy. He comes off as an intellectual magpie who somehow combines disparate elements into grave warnings against the AI and general “safetyism” that he claims precedes the Antichrist.
“Peace and safety” — the slogan of the Antichrist, according to Thiel — trouble him throughout the lectures. In the first, he wonders if we’re headed toward World War III or Cold War II, and afterward, potentially, an unjust peace, the corollary to an unjust war: