Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and key MAGA financier, is delivering a closed-door, invitation-only lecture series on the Antichrist in Rome this week—putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff.
The lectures follow a blueprint from last September, when Thiel gave four talks in San Francisco arguing that existential risk rhetoric around AI would be weaponized to justify totalitarian overregulation. “The way the antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop,” he has said. Catholic critics note the irony: Palantir’s AI targeting systems are currently in use in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and its Gotham platform builds searchable surveillance profiles from emails, financial records, and social media.
The Vatican’s AI adviser this week described Thiel’s career as “a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus.” The Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire called Palantir “a Big Brother that puts Orwell’s prophecies to shame.” Theologian Massimo Faggioli was blunter: “This is an operation hostile to the papacy—part of an attempt to create an alternative American circle in Rome in competition with what Pope Leo is saying.”
