Peter Thiel Is Preaching the New Gospel of Silicon Valley
By framing the future of artificial intelligence in biblical terms, Thiel transforms technological ambition into a matter of faith — and turns Silicon Valley into his pulpit.
The Christian Bible foretells the coming of the Antichrist — a demonic being who will use his powers of deception and persuasion to lull the world into godless servitude. This outcast angel will promise miracles, make deals only to break them, and persecute those who resist.
And according to technology billionaire Peter Thiel, the Antichrist is close — and coming for Silicon Valley.
The Washington Post last week published an extraordinary account of a series of lectures Thiel delivered in San Francisco about the dangers the Antichrist poses to technological progress. If the world isn’t mindful of this threat, he warned, humanity could plunge into a new dark age.
“In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil, crazy science. In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
Thunberg is the Swedish climate activist who has spent much of her young life protesting for economic and industrial reforms to reverse the rise in global temperatures. Yudkowsky is an artificial intelligence researcher who advocates for slower, more measured, and safer AI development, warning of the risks of unfettered progress.
Thiel, on the other hand, is advocating for unrestricted AI advancement. The threat he sees is that governments and bureaucrats — particularly in the United Nations and the European Union — will use their authority to curb AI development, impose controls on its use, mandate stricter safety protocols, and prohibit certain functions.
For AI advocates, regulations and restrictions are antithetical not only to their technological philosophy but also to their financial interests. AI is enjoying a massive boom. It has rocketed the fortunes of people like Thiel, Elon Musk, Alexander Karp, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg by tens of billions of dollars — and they want more of that.
A devout Christian, Thiel isn’t just speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He has a genuine religious conviction in his belief in the coming of the Antichrist. But he’s also a staunch conservative who has long championed removing government obstacles to business and technological development. He was a major backer of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which returned Trump to the White House, and he still has the president’s ear on policy issues.
And Thiel isn’t alone — at least in his desire to reduce AI regulation and keep government oversight to a minimum. Others also want the unfettered development and application of AI, believing it will radically transform the world and business.
People like Thiel are right about one thing: AI is a remarkable technology, and the world stands on the leading edge of its transformation. Over the next decade, AI is poised to reshape various sectors, including health care, warfare, personal productivity, scientific research, and economics. Whether that transformation will be for the better remains to be seen. There are serious potential consequences for the misuse and abuse of the technology.
AI is already having a disruptive impact, displacing jobs to the point where entry-level software programmers and computer engineers struggle to find work. Service and technical support professionals are feeling the pinch as much of their routine work becomes automated. Many other professions — from translators to journalists — face the risk of being disintermediated.
Beyond jobs, there’s the issue of content. AI companies like Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and DeepSeek are voraciously gathering data — books, transcripts, and other records — to feed their large language models (LLMs). In some cases, they are violating copyright laws, forcing authors to sue to protect their intellectual property and income. Several AI companies have already made substantial payouts and begun licensing content. Still, many AI advocates argue for unfettered access, claiming it is necessary to keep pace with foreign competitors.
But there’s more to Thiel’s assertions than a desire to push AI to new heights. It’s also about hubris. Silicon Valley’s technocratic elite believe technology can save the world. They are confident that, if governments and the uninformed public would stay out of their way, they could deliver miracles that people both want and have yet to imagine.
The reason Musk drives SpaceX’s mission to colonize Mars, and Bezos develops his rival Blue Origin, stems from their belief that advancing space-faring technologies will secure humanity’s future.
Marc Andreessen, the famed tech investor and co-founder of the Netscape browser in the 1990s, published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto in 2023 — a defiant declaration that technology and continuous growth are the sole paths to human progress and material abundance. It forcefully rejects what he views as pervasive pessimism and the constraints of the precautionary principle. The manifesto insists that technological innovation, fueled by free markets and capitalist ambition, is the ultimate solution to all societal problems — from poverty to scarcity. Andreessen promotes a cultural shift toward high-aspiration values such as merit, risk, and achievement, and advocates for the uninhibited acceleration of technologies like artificial intelligence, framing any regulatory or anti-growth sentiment as the “enemy” of human flourishing.
Karp, the co-founder of Palantir — an artificial intelligence company backed by Thiel that does extensive work for the U.S. government — published a book earlier this year titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls on the U.S. technology sector to abandon trivial consumer pursuits and renew its symbiotic partnership with government to address critical national security and existential challenges. The book is also laced with arguments favoring limited government oversight.
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The world faces numerous challenges, including social unrest, economic shifts, political division, climate change, pandemic threats, food insecurity, energy and water scarcity, and geopolitical tensions that could lead to war. Technology is indeed a potential solution to many of these challenges. Throughout history, technological innovation has helped humanity avoid or mitigate existential risks.
But technology developed without restraint or regard for its broader consequences is reckless. A common trait among wildly successful people is a lack of self-doubt — a belief that they can do no wrong. Musk is a classic example of that, and now Thiel is entering the same territory.
Thiel’s rhetoric also reflects a broader transformation underway in Silicon Valley, where technology’s secular faith in innovation is merging with a new religious fervor. What was once a culture of disruption has become a movement of moral justification — a belief that building faster, bigger, and smarter isn’t just profitable but righteous.
By framing the challenges to AI development in biblical terms, Thiel perpetuates an “us versus them” narrative that deepens social division. Moreover, invoking the symbolism of a satanic figure undermining humanity’s future taps into the fears of Christians — many of whom already believe in a global cabal intent on suppressing their faith and taking away their Bibles.
If the struggle between good and evil now runs through the circuitry of artificial intelligence, then the choice before us isn’t between faith and progress but between wisdom and hubris. Thiel’s vision of divine innovation might inspire a new technological awakening — or it could invite a reckoning of our own making. Either way, the contest for the soul of Silicon Valley has already begun, and if there is an Antichrist in this story, it may not be the one Thiel imagines.