Anti-Christ Now: Peter Thiel’s War Against Mankind’s Greatest Enemy

Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. (1 John 2:18 ESV)

But first, Pastor David Jeremiah answers: Who is the Antichrist?

The Antichrist is a person who is against Christ. He will overtly oppose Christ and at the same time pass himself off as Christ. The Antichrist will aggressively live up to his terrible name. He will persecute, torture, and kill the people of God as he leads the armies of the world into the Battle of Armageddon.

Britannica adds:

Antichrist, the polar opposite and ultimate enemy of Christ. According to Christian tradition, he will reign terribly in the period prior to the Last Judgment. The term Antichrist first appeared in the Letters of John (1 John 2:18, 2:22, and 4:3; 2 John 1:7), and the fully developed story of Antichrist’s life and reign is found in medieval texts. As applied to various individuals and institutions for nearly two millennia, Antichrist and precursor of Antichrist have been, and remain, terms of the most intense opprobrium.

Who is the liar but he who denies that Yeshua is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22 ESV)

On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist obsession, The Week States:

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel alerts the world to an overlooked danger, of the coming of the Antichrist. In recent “off-the-record” lectures in San Francisco, venture capitalist and GOP megadonor warned critics of technology, artificial intelligence, and financial innovation are “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” who could usher in the destruction of America “and an era of global totalitarian rule.” The modern version of the biblical Antichrist would be “a Luddite who wants to stop all science, it’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” he said, referring to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who wants to prevent machines from achieving human-level intelligence. By calling for stricter global regulations, he claimed, these activists could help create a singular world government that the Antichrist would then use to control humanity. Thiel is a devout Christian and longtime libertarian; still, his words were striking in their “effort to cast resisting oversight of technology development as a religious battle.”

Guardian:

Over the past month, Thiel has hosted four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise.

And every spirit that does not confess Yeshua is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 John 4:3 ESV)

Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures: OVERVIEW October 7, 2025;

Guardian: OVERVIEW: Thiel believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening.

Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.

What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace, and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.

Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

“there will be a time when they will not endure wholesome instruction, but, having itching ears, will accumulate teachers for themselves, according to their own lusts; and they shall indeed turn away from the hearing of the truth, and be turned aside to fables” (II Tim. 4:3-4).

Thiel describes the antichrist as “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. He claims that this figure will cause Armageddon by weaponizing concerns about issues such as climate change, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence to justify consolidating their power and forming a one-world state.

“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of a very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”

In a related October 2024 interview, Thiel elaborated: "The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety ... if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time."

For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Yeshua the Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. (2 John 1:7 ESV)

Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.

Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.

“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:

And so, though we have barely scratched the surface, this article must end. The topic is vast, and much is posted online, giving the inspired reader a good opening for research. So -- Do you believe in Anti-Christ? And do you think his run could be shut down by ingenious believers, despite what the Bible seems to teach on their seeming inevitability?