Peter Thiel has warned that artificial intelligence could be used to 'summon the Antichrist,' just days after Pope Leo XIV issued a major Vatican decree on the moral limits of AI in Rome on 25 May, deepening an uneasy global argument over where technology ends and theology begins.
The billionaire venture capitalist has spent years backing AI firms in Silicon Valley while also writing for conservative religious magazine First Things. In an October 2025 essay, he framed a stark question that now looks less hypothetical than it once did: whether modern science will 'summon or suppress the Antichrist.' That language, once the preserve of fringe sermon notes, suddenly sits alongside a formal papal warning about the dangers of confusing machine processing with human intelligence.
