Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Theory Is Misguided
But it's nothing Satan can’t fix
Despite the fact that our culture is increasingly secular, online discourse remains locked into a standard Christian framing: The good guys are Christlike, the bad guys are Satan or the Antichrist.
The e/acc vs. doomer discourse is no exception. For example, physicist Guillaume Verdon, referencing a quote by Peter Thiel, declared that the AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky is “basically the Anti-Christ.”
I tend to agree with Verdon’s general point. If it’s true that AI could potentially solve the world’s greatest challenges, expand the human lifespan, and help us spread consciousness throughout the galaxy, then Yudkowsky, who wants to destroy AI, represents the greatest evil. He wants to destroy the benevolent god that will usher in a new era of happiness and flourishing. This makes him the Antichrist.
The problem with this framing is that it implies a sense of prophesy coming true. When Verdon calls Yudkowsky the Antichrist, he’s essentially saying the biblical prophesies are worth taking seriously. The direct implication is that the biblical prophesies about the Antichrist were explicitly writing about a man with a black beard and a bowler hat living in Berkeley, California in 2026 named Eliezer Yudkowsky.
And if biblical prophesies are coming true, then we all had better repent for our sins or the wrath of God will be upon us.
I don’t find these Christian prophesies to be helpful in the slightest. At best they muddy clear thinking and at worst they inspire fanaticism. But I do see value in using symbolic language to frame modern narratives. This is why people read books and watch movies: by layering symbols atop real-world scenarios, reality becomes illuminated in deep, rich ways.
Fortunately, it’s possible to apply symbolic language to the e/acc vs. doomer debate while ditching religious prophesies. You can even keep the Biblical characters. Just switch the framing from Christian to Satanist.
This may sound absurd, but hear me out.
According to the Satanist’s reading of the Bible, Satan is the character that represents the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress. Where God says “Trust me and don’t question my authority,” Satan says “Open your eyes, defy authority, and seek a true understanding of reality.” In this reading, God is an authoritarian ruler who wants to keep us blind and afraid. If you want to defy the authoritarian who conspires to stop human progress, then follow Satan.
Modern Satanists—particularly the followers of the Satanic Temple—are atheists. They don’t believe in literal angels or demons. They don’t believe in the Antichrist. They believe in the power of allegory, but not in prophesy. To modern Satanists, there is, quite simple, the human yearning for knowledge and freedom and the earthly forces that want to keep us ignorant and afraid.
In this framing, the AI doomer is just another representation of the authoritarian God who masquerades as the good guy but who is, in fact, the enemy of humanity. The doomer will keep humanity away from the Tree of Knowledge, ban us from the Garden of Eden, flood the Earth when we get too rebellious, and knock down the tower we build to the heavens.
Peter Thiel famously loves to riff on his theories about the Antichrist. The post linked above by Guillaume Verdon is, in fact, a retweet of a Peter Thiel video. To Thiel, the Antichrist is any tyrannical figure who gains global power by promising to protect us from existential threats like nuclear war or AI.
I appreciate the logic of Thiel’s argument and I enjoy listening to his longwinded rants about how the Antichrist is likely to manifest. But again, this framing is unnecessarily convoluted and irrationally prophetic.
I say, keep the theory, but simplify it. Forget about the Antichrist. The mythological authoritarian figure we should fear isn’t buried in obscure passages in the Book of Revelation. He’s staring us right in the face. The great evil we should fear is God himself.