Peter Thiel arrived in Rome this month carrying an unusual set of briefing materials. The billionaire co-founder of Palantir Technologies — whose data-mining systems now run inside the U.S. defense and intelligence communities — was not there for a shareholder meeting or a policy summit. He was there to lecture, by private invitation, on the Antichrist. The talks ran four nights at the Renaissance-era Palazzo Orsini Taverna, steps from Vatican City, closed to the press and cameras. Catholic universities in Rome raced to distance themselves. The Vatican’s official newspaper called him “an agent of chaos.” Protesters gathered in the street outside.

I am not one of them.

Thiel is wrong about some things — his theological framing carries its own hazards, which I will come to — but what he has set before that private audience is a question too urgent to leave to Silicon Valley. His core warning: the Antichrist may not arrive as an obvious tyrant but as a comforting administrator, one who promises global safety from catastrophic risk — artificial intelligence (AI), nuclear war, climate disaster — and quietly consolidates power in the process. Scripture does not describe a figure who openly opposes God. It describes one who persuades the world he is acting for its good.

That reading deserves a serious response. As someone who spent years in uniform studying how power concentrates and in the years since studying how artificial intelligence reshapes the global order, I believe the question behind Thiel’s question matters more than Thiel himself does.

The intelligence community has a term for what concerns me most: cognitive warfare. Not propaganda in the old sense — leaflets, radio broadcasts, crude appeals to fear. Modern cognitive warfare operates through the same AI systems that millions consult daily for news, guidance, emotional support, and moral reasoning. As I document in my forthcoming book, “The New AI Cold War,” these systems are already being used to manipulate perception, distort truth, and influence populations at scale — not in distant adversary states, but in our own homes, on our children’s devices, in the pocket of every parishioner in every congregation in America. Deepfakes, synthetic media, and algorithmic manipulation can reshape reality in millions of minds before any correction catches up. The battlefield is not a map coordinate. It is human belief itself.

Scripture prepared us for exactly this. Jesus warned that in the last days, deception would intensify — “so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). John wrote plainly: “Test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Neither warning was given to encourage paralysis. Both were given to demand discernment. The question is whether the church today is cultivating that discernment or outsourcing it.

The deeper problem runs beneath Thiel’s framing. When an AI system functions as moral counselor, spiritual guide, and emotional confidant — roles it increasingly plays for teenagers across this country, as the Pew Research Center documented in February 2026 — it is no longer serving as a tool. It has become a competing authority. Deuteronomy 6 places the transmission of truth and moral instruction squarely on parents and the community of faith: “You shall teach them diligently to your children” (6:7). When a machine quietly assumes that function, the displacement is not announced. It accumulates.

The Tower of Babel had similar architecture. Genesis 11 records a humanity united by common language and technological ambition, reaching for a kind of self-sufficiency that needed no reference to God. The language of today’s most powerful technology companies carries the same echo: optimization, efficiency, global coordination, alignment. The goals are presented as neutral. The infrastructure being built is not. Whether through governments, technology corporations, or the international institutions now accelerating AI governance frameworks, power over knowledge and communication is concentrating in ways that warrant the strategic wariness any soldier develops watching a battlefield shift.

This is not a counsel of Luddism. I have argued in “AI for Mankind’s Future” and before congressional audiences that America must lead in artificial intelligence — because the alternative is ceding that leadership to Beijing, and the consequences of that outcome are existential. The People’s Liberation Army treats AI as a warfighting domain. China’s AI ecosystem is designed for social control at scale. We must compete and compete hard. But competition requires clarity about what we are competing for. A system that concentrates power without accountability — even if built in America, even if marketed as democratic — is not freedom’s answer to authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism with better public relations.

Revelation 13 describes the figure at the end of that road: authoritative, globally persuasive, wielding deception at a scale no previous generation could have imagined. I am not claiming we are there. I am saying the structural conditions that could enable such a system are developing faster than the wisdom required to govern them. That is worth more than a private lecture series in Rome. It warrants a public reckoning — from pastors, parents, policymakers, and soldiers of faith alike.

Thiel’s error is not that he takes Scripture seriously in the public square. His error is that his framing exempts the thing he is building from the danger he is warning about. Palantir’s systems are among the most powerful instruments of AI-enabled surveillance and data concentration in the Western world. The warning and the instrument are in the same hands. That contradiction does not invalidate the question. It demands that Christians think far more carefully about the question than Thiel is asking them to.

Paul’s instruction to the church at Colossae has never been more operationally relevant: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception” (Colossians 2:8). In Paul’s day, captivity came through Hellenistic philosophy and the claims of mystery cults. In ours, it comes through systems that promise knowledge, connection, and guidance — and carry embedded assumptions about truth, value, and authority that most users never stop to examine. The machine does not announce its theology. It simply shapes yours.

The question Thiel raised in Rome is the right one. Who and what will we permit to govern truth? The answer is not found in a Renaissance palazzo, and it is not found in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. It was given once, on a hill outside Jerusalem, and confirmed in an empty tomb — “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). That authority does not require an upgrade. It requires our allegiance.