It’s a time of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI doom cycle is driven by effective altruism (EA), 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.

There are more than a few things Thiel says in this Verge article that make it even more obvious to me that he has very little understanding of the moral foundations of Catholic teaching.

“I did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope, but I did hope, even as a Protestant, to be more Catholic than the average Catholic,” Thiel says.

What's wild to me is that he can say something like this with so much confidence and seemingly have no idea why it's such a misguided statement. With all these lecture leaks, he seems to believe he can intellectualize his way into understanding Catholicism, while completely missing some of the very things that make Catholic teaching what it is. Catholicism isn't just an intellectual framework to make sense of history or politics. There's a moral and spiritual foundation to it that requires something more than being clever or well read. Simply using biblical language or invoking the writings of Pope Benedict XVI doesn't mean you actually understand the faith or the moral obligations that come with it.

Read this article too, apprently it was written back in July 15, 2026, must've missed this when it came out.

Benedict believed he was living in the end times. This claim shocks us, because Benedict chose not to speak openly on this topic until the final years of his life, at which point he had resigned the papacy, his allies had been purged from Vatican leadership, and almost nobody was listening.

Thiel looks at Joseph Ratzinger's study of apocalyptic theology as evidence of a personal apocalyptic conviction, but ignores his take on the dictatorship of relativism, he takes remarks about the Antichrist as proof that Pope Benedict believed the final crisis was already underway, and even interprets his resignation as some kind of coded sign. It reveals how much he's willing to interpret through his own worldview.

Thiel moves back and forth between completely different meanings of the Antichrist. Sometimes he's talking about a literal figure at the end of history, other times a spiritual or even political force, a cultural movement, or simply someone whose ideas he finds dangerous.

Take Marc Andreessen, for example:

“It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the Antichrist. Because, you know, the Antichrist is popular.”

But those meanings aren't interchangeable. You can't move between theological doctrine, political speculation, and personal judgments about people as if they're all describing the same thing. At some point, you're no longer interpreting scripture.

And I think that's ultimately what bothers me about all of this. The irony is that Thiel seems so convinced he understands something that he might be missing the very thing he's trying to understand.

Also his conjecture based on piecemeal research sounds a lot like bad prompting. You collect a handful of references, connect them in whatever way supports your original assumptions, and end up with an answer that sounds incredibly convincing without necessarily being true.

I do wonder if Thiel has just tried praying instead and asking God directly for answers.