By: Angel Au-Yeung – wsj.com/tech – September 28, 2025

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense and weapons development technology companies, wants everyone to think more about the end of the world.

For about a year now, Thiel has been publicly laying out his understanding of biblical prophecies and the potential for the rapid advance of technology to bring about an apocalyptic future.

In a lecture Monday, he encouraged an audience to continue working toward scientific progress, whether in artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. Fearing or regulating it, or opposing technological progress, would hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Thiel said, according to people who attended.

A devout Christian, Thiel is expanding on a number of speeches and public interviews he has given about the Antichrist in a closed, four-part lecture series this month in San Francisco. The second lecture happened on Monday, and the series will end in early October.

He is among a number of Silicon Valley figures who have recently spoken more openly about their faith, a contrast to the cultural milieu of the epicenter of the tech world, which is mostly secular.

This is how Thiel says the end of the world might happen, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his recent lectures. Existential risks will present themselves in the form of nuclear war, environmental disaster, dangerously engineered bioweapons and even autonomous killer robots guided by AI.

As humans race toward a last battle—the Armageddon—a one-world government will form, promising peace and safety. In Thiel’s reckoning, this totalitarian authoritarian regime, with real teeth and real power, will be the coming of the modern-day Antichrist, a figure defined in Christian teachings as the personal opponent of God who will appear before the world ends.

Not ‘defeatist’

The point of these talks is “not to be defeatist,” Thiel said last October in an interview series produced by the Hoover Institution. In driving people to think more about the Armageddon or the Antichrist, his hope is that human society can find a third way and avoid both outcomes. “I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it’s actually more hopeful,” he said.

The AI arms race gripping Silicon Valley has prompted more spiritual reflection by many tech luminaries, including those who have called for Christian concepts to inform the advance of the technology. Pope Leo XIV has begun to speak about the threats posed by AI, even choosing his papal name in a nod to technological revolution in the past.

“In the last two years, with AI, it definitely feels like we’ve unleashed more of a high-stakes conversation on all fronts,” said Jonathan Gundlach, an ordained minister and attorney who is attending the lecture series and counts tech workers among his parishioners. “There’s a heightened sense of spirituality because it feels like we’re dealing with a new form of being that has infinite potential. It’s kind of like a God,” said Gundlach. He said Thiel occasionally attended a church where Gundlach was formerly a minister.

Former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger gave a lecture this summer about his Christianity. Garry Tan, chief executive of startup incubator Y Combinator, also has hosted fireside chats discussing how religion fits in with science and technology. Elon Musk, who has extolled the virtues of Christianity in recent public remarks, quoted from a scripture in the New Testament Sunday on X.

According to a review of his past lectures, Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power needed to regulate the existential risks from science and technology.

Jay Kim, the lead pastor at WestGate Church in the Bay Area, who has had a front-row seat to the new attention to Christianity emerging in Silicon Valley, said Thiel’s focus on the Antichrist is misplaced.

“My best understanding is that the New Testament writers focus very little, if at all, on pointing followers of Jesus towards spending their energy on accurately identifying the Antichrist,” he said. “To give all your energy into thinking about all that, to me, feels like a pretty futile endeavor.”

Thiel’s speaker series is hosted by ACTS 17, a San Francisco-based nonprofit co-founded by Michelle Stephens, an executive at a healthcare software startup. Her husband is Trae Stephens, an investor at Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril Industries, one of the few privately held tech companies to land contracts with the Defense Department. The couple does Bible study with Thiel, she said.

In an interview, Michelle Stephens said she started ACTS 17 in part because of the questions she and her husband faced as practicing Christians working in tech. “Trae was building his own tech company and really facing hostility around what he was building, why he was building unmanned defense systems with Anduril,” she said.

ACTS 17, an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” aims to create a community of Christians and non-Christians to talk about many topics, including religion and Jesus.

Stephens said she has faced questions on whether they are seemingly “tending to the rich” with ACTS 17’s work rather than giving back to the poor. She pushes back on that criticism. “Christians actually don’t do a very good job of ministering to the wealthy, who can think that they’re basically gods themselves which can be very dangerous,” she said.

A charismatic Antichrist

The twin concepts of the Armageddon and the Antichrist have been the subject of intense scrutiny and attention for generations, especially interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which includes vivid imagery as it describes the conditions that lead to a final battle between good and evil.

At one recent lecture, an audience member asked Thiel if a certain world leader was the Antichrist. Thiel said the leader wasn’t “charismatic enough,” according to Nestor Tkachenko, a startup CEO who is attending the lectures. In the past, Thiel has named certain left-leaning political figures as analogues for what the Antichrist could be.

This month’s lectures appear to build on Thiel’s two-hour interview with Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and host of “Uncommon Knowledge,” a show by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

The two discussed Thiel’s sourcing for his theories on Armageddon and the Antichrist, which include biblical texts like the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, and fictional books such as “Lord of the World,” a dystopian science-fiction novel written by a Catholic priest in 1907.

At one point in the conversation, Robinson asked Thiel why he believed in texts that much of contemporary society has ignored. “One can take it seriously without taking it completely literally,” Thiel responded.

“The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, it’s redistributive, it’s an extremely great philanthropist as an effective altruist,” Thiel said. “And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong.”

Thiel also draws heavily from theories and personal conversations with René Girard, a French historian who taught at Stanford University. For his San Francisco lecture series, Thiel has added new sources, including Renaissance paintings from the Italian artist Luca Signorelli to Japanese comic books, also known as manga, according to people in attendance.

“In some sense, the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do in a world in which they have ever more powerful technologies in which there are no sacred limits on the use of these technologies,” said Thiel in past talks.

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Source: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist – WSJ