I want to be Peter Thiel's Antichrist

In fall 2025, Peter Thiel delivered an unusual four-part lecture series at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, private, sold-out talks organized by a nonprofit called ACTS 17 Collective. Someone leaked a recording.

Over several weeks from mid-September through early October, he used the biblical concept of the Antichrist as a metaphor for modern forces that use fear of catastrophe to justify centralized control over technology, government, and society.

Drawing on Christian theology and political critique, he warned that movements focused on existential risks from climate activism to AI regulation feed a mindset that sacrifices liberty for safety, framing such fear-driven narratives as symbolic of the Antichrist he sees emerging in the 21st century.

As Professor Elke Schwarz writes in Opinio Juris, this attempt to demonize opponents of AI attempts to build a “spiritual narrative” that bolsters the wealth of investors. “To create belief in a technology is to sacralize the capacity of a startup to deliver this quasi-divine technology and this, in turn serves to elevate the valuation of such a company,” she writes.

Thiel suggested people like Greta Thunberg (climate activism) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI safety critic) could symbolically represent the kind of fear-based Antichrist archetype he warned about, not necessarily as literal villains but as embodiments of what he sees as risk-driven control narratives.

But this only serves his own aims… so what is the Antichrist really?