According to Vance, Thiel told the Yale students that they were being pushed into “cutthroat professional competitions” for clerkships, law-firm jobs and prestige while Silicon Valley had become better at producing software and phones than the breakthroughs in energy, transportation and medicine that actually changed life. Thiel saw those two things — elite competition and technological stagnation — as connected.²
The speech also led Vance to René Girard, whom Thiel had studied at Stanford. Girard’s ideas about people copying one another’s desires, turning them into rivalries and eventually finding scapegoats spoke directly to Vance’s experience at Yale. More importantly for Vance, Girard argued that Christianity exposes the scapegoat rather than joining the mob.²
That provides a useful bridge to something Thiel has been thinking about for years: the Antichrist. Not casually, either. Most of us encounter the Antichrist roughly as often as we encounter the Loch Ness Monster. Thiel gives lectures about him.
His version is much more interesting than the fellow with horns. Thiel accepts that nuclear weapons, engineered disease and artificial intelligence could pose genuine catastrophic dangers. His worry is what frightened people might agree to do about them.
Suppose dangerous AI really could destroy humanity. You would have to make sure nobody in China built it. Nobody in Russia. Nobody in a basement in New Jersey. No eccentric graduate student with a laptop and poor impulse control.
Follow that logic far enough, Thiel says, and preventing dangerous AI could require a government capable of monitoring “every keystroke everywhere.”³
Thiel’s Antichrist therefore does not arrive breathing sulfur and frightening the household pets. He arrives looking reassuringly competent, surrounded by experts and promising to protect us from catastrophe. In Thiel’s telling, the Antichrist can gain power by frightening people with Armageddon and then offering “peace and safety” if they surrender enough control.³
The Devil has a safety plan.
But Thiel’s argument contains an even more interesting problem. Christian political thinkers have sometimes called the force that holds catastrophe back the katechon, or “restrainer.” Sometimes, Thiel says, a strong nation, institution or political movement really does restrain something worse.
The trouble begins when the thing built to stop a threat acquires the same kind of power that made the threat frightening in the first place. Institutions created to defeat an enemy tend not to disappear when the enemy does. Their power survives, finds another mission and perpetuates itself. “There’s always a risk,” Thiel says, “that the katechon becomes the Antichrist.”⁴
That is the heart of the story. Not that Peter Thiel is a hypocrite, that JD Vance thinks ChatGPT is Satan or that somebody in the White House is drafting executive orders with Revelation open beside the Diet Coke button.
The interesting question is whether you can build something powerful enough to restrain technological tyranny without building precisely the machinery a technological tyrant would need.
Now look at Washington.
In 2025, Vance went to the Paris AI summit and announced, “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety … I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.” He warned that excessive regulation could kill a transformative industry and said the administration intended to make American AI the world’s “gold standard.”⁵
The Trump administration has since turned that philosophy into policy. Its AI Action Plan calls for removing regulatory barriers, accelerating AI adoption inside government and the military, rapidly building data centers and energy infrastructure, exporting American AI to allies and countering Chinese influence over international AI governance.⁶
The logic is straightforward. America intends to beat China in AI, keep international rules from hobbling American development and make sure the most important technology of the era remains in friendly hands.