What is Peter Thiel Trying to Tell Us?

Peter Thiel warns of a pending one-world totalitarian government—while himself pushing to supercharge the surveillance state.

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Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, has a provocative theory about how the Antichrist could take over the Earth and enslave humanity.

"My speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time," Thiel told Hoover Institution interviewer Peter Robinson earlier this year.

The greatest danger we face, according to Thiel, might not be from global warming, terrorism, nuclear winter, or artificial intelligence going rogue. The real danger is that we're so afraid of these threats that we're willing to give up our freedom in the interest of "peace and safety," which is the phrase Thiel ascribed to the Antichrist, citing Thessalonians 5:3.

"It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world," Thiel told the New York Times' Ross Douthat on a podcast. "In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg."

"I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building," replied Douthat.

Douthat was referring to Palantir, the government contractor that Thiel co-founded in 2003 during the height of the war on terror. Today, Palantir is "in the white-hot center of the latest trend reshaping the global order," according to The Wall Street Journal, receiving more than $322 million from government contracts in the first half of 2025.

It's equipping the government with tools to sift through massive data troves to identify patterns and hunt down illegal immigrants. It's helping the Feds deploy facial recognition technology, and has created AI tools to "predict" where crimes might happen in advance.

This war on privacy in the name of safety needs to stop.

And maybe technologists, like the executives and engineers at Palantir, have a moral responsibility not to use their talents to design tools that a government can so easily turn against its citizens. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stressed, privacy protections are more important than ever.

If you go to chat about sensitive stuff and then there's like a lawsuit or whatever, we could be required to produce that," Altman told podcaster Theo Von in July. "And I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever…. I think it's this huge issue of, like, how are we going to treat the laws around this?"

But we don't have to wait for regulators to act. Altman could make design choices to add more privacy protections to Chat GPT.

Ultimately, tech founders will do what consumers demand, which is why public opinion matters.

"Americans have been brought to their present inauspicious circumstances by, above all else, changes in the prevailing ideology," wrote Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan. But "there remains a hope, however slight, that the American people may rediscover the worth of individual rights, limited government, and a free society under a true rule of law."

The federal government didn't balloon as the country lurched from crisis to crisis in the 19th century, Higgs observes. That changed in the 20th century, when Progressive intellectuals convinced the public that a strong central government was the solution to our problems, especially in times of crisis.

Now is the time to absorb a different lesson: No one person should hold the rings of power. Better they be cast into the fire.

Producer: Zach Weissmueller

Video editor: John Osterhoudt

Graphics: Lex Villena

Photo Credits: New Media CC BY-SA 2.0, Abaca Press Poitout Florian Abaca Sipa USA Newscom, Gage Skidmore, aaron shwartz sipa usa newscom, EyePress Newscom, Periodismodepaz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Sailko CC BY 3.0, Gerd Küveler