SAN FRANCISCO — Entrepreneur Peter Thiel co-authored a series of essays and delivered private lectures arguing that the Antichrist will emerge as a benevolent technocrat who uses existential risk to justify global institutional control. Thiel and co-author Sam Wolfe identify climate and AI safety advocates as unwitting enablers of this consolidation of power.

Thiel, who is the president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC and a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir and an early backer of Facebook, held a four-part private lecture series in San Francisco in September 2025. Audio from these lectures was leaked and reported by the Washington Post in October 2025. Thiel repeated the lecture series near the Vatican in Rome in March 2026.

Thiel and Wolfe co-authored an essay titled 'Voyages to the End of the World' in First Things, followed by a second essay in the same publication. The writers argue the figure of ultimate evil is best understood as a technocrat and beneficent administrator who speaks the language of safety, ethics and global coordination. According to the essays, this figure builds harmonized regulatory regimes and appeals to existential risk to justify sweeping institutional authority.

Thiel writes that the Antichrist interests him because nobody else is talking about it. The arguments draw on Vladimir Solovyov, a 19th-century Russian philosopher, and his 1900 novella A Short Story of the Antichrist, as well as the writings of Pope Benedict XVI. George Weigel, an interpreter of Solovyov's text, stated that Solovyov's genius was to portray the Antichrist as a compelling rather than repellant figure.

The authors identify climate activists and AI safety researchers as 'legionnaires' in their framework, citing Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as examples. Thiel and Wolfe argue these legionnaires are unwitting infantry helping to build institutional architecture for consolidating power. The writers contend legionnaires are dangerously naive rather than villains.

Thiel and Wolfe point to Catholic theologian Hans Küng's 'World Ethos' project as a real-world template for this kind of institutional consolidation. They quote Küng saying there can be 'no peace among the nations without peace among the religions.'

Thiel, who has argued for 30 years that the regulatory state is the primary obstacle to technological progress, has said he believes humankind faces existential threats from nuclear war or runaway artificial intelligence that could lead to 'Armageddon.' Thiel runs a secret society known as 'Dialog' that brings together CEOs, billionaires and political leaders. NATO supreme commander Alexus Grynkewich and Jared Kushner are reportedly members of the Dialog society.

Thiel's framework connects his longstanding opposition to regulation with a theological interpretation of modern safety movements. By characterizing climate activists and AI safety researchers as unwitting enablers of authoritarian consolidation, the essays position two major areas of contemporary policy advocacy as components of a theological narrative about the Antichrist. The lecture series, delivered first in San Francisco and then near the Vatican, signals an effort to engage both Silicon Valley and Catholic intellectual circles with this interpretation.

The identification of specific figures like Thunberg and Yudkowsky as legionnaires, combined with the reference to Hans Küng's World Ethos project as a template, provides concrete examples of how Thiel and Wolfe map their theological framework onto current institutional initiatives. The leaked audio from the San Francisco lectures brought these private arguments into public discourse, while the Rome lectures extended the discussion to a location with direct significance to the Catholic intellectual tradition the essays draw upon.