The Guardian and the Washington Post separately reported on recordings from a four-part invitation-only lecture series Peter Thiel gave in San Francisco in September and early October 2025, organized by the ACTS 17 Collective. Thiel used the sessions to map contemporary politics, international institutions and technology debates onto a reading of the Antichrist narrative, arguing that global governance, environmentalism and efforts to slow emerging technologies could empower such a figure, and describing prominent technology critics in those terms.
Thiel’s spokesperson did not dispute the accuracy of the recordings, though he clarified one point of interpretation. Thiel had aired the theme publicly before: in a New York Times Interesting Times podcast interview released on 26 June 2025, he discussed technological stagnation and warned that a lack of progress could lead to the emergence of the Antichrist. He gave a further four-part “Antichrist Lectures” series at the University of Cambridge, organised by Faculty of Divinity professor James Orr and reported in February 2026; that series was also invitation-only and off the record.