Peter Thiel: You Know Who Else Wants to Regulate AI? The Antichrist

Culture Peter Thiel: You Know Who Else Wants to Regulate AI? The Antichrist Thiel's 'Antichrist' lecture series in Nashville is reportedly focused on casting AI regulation advocates as antichrist enablers. 8, 2026, pm ET Reading time 4 minutes Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2016. © mark reinstein via Shutterstock Read Later Read Later Comments (12) Fun fact: Billionaire PayPal, Founders Fund, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, when he’s not busy exerting his ghastly influence over the U. S. government, moonlights as a touring theorist and lecturer on Christianity, the end times, and the antichrist. Thiel and his team have tried to create an air of secrecy around the ‘Antichrist’ lectures, which began with a 2025 series in San Francisco. Thiel’s complete lack of qualifications to speak on theology, of course, pale in comparison to his fame and wealth. So the lectures expanded to Paris and Rome and are now ongoing as a four-part, $100-per-ticket lecture series in Nashville. On Thursday, Calder McHugh of Politico’s Decoded obtained recordings of Thiel attacking former President Barack Obama and the pope at the first two Nashville events over AI. The central thesis of this round of talks, Politico wrote: government attempts to regulate AI are evil. Politico’s quotes from the events show that Thiel seemed intent on pushing the antichrist-as-AI-safety-advocate angle. “Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel told attendees. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI.” Thiel then dug in on Pope Leo XIV, a popular target for U. Thiel’s particular beef with the Vatican appears to be that the pope targeted AI in his first encyclical, associating the AI era with “new forms of dehumanization” and “idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak.” (The feeling seems mutual: a Vatican advisor, Paolo Benanti, penned a March 2026 essay with a title asking whether Thiel should be burned at the stake for heresy.) “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity,” Thiel said in Nashville, according to Politico. “The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical… he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.” Note that this is an incredibly convenient position for Thiel, whose wealth is heavily invested in AI.