The Brooklyn Rail

The Pentagon has been using an artificial intelligence system called Project Maven, developed by Palantir and incorporating the AI model Claude from Anthropic to speed up the “kill chain” to identify, approve, and strike targets faster. It appears that this system might have been used in the US strike on the girls’ school in Minab that killed 175 on February 28.

Maven reportedly allowed the striking of over 1000 targets in the first day of the attack on Iran, and the plan was for Maven to make it possible to hit over 1000 targets in an hour.

Palantir took over Project Maven in 2018 after Google workers protested Google’s involvement in AI weapons. On March 4, 2026, the Department of Defense labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, and ordered that Anthropic products be phased out of all US military uses within six months. OpenAI employees were incensed when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately signed a deal with the Pentagon after Anthropic refused to sign off on autonomous AI weapons and domestic surveillance.

The co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, who is one of the biggest investors in the American tech sector, has been giving a series of lectures on the Antichrist, first in San Francisco in September 2025, then in Paris in January, and most recently in Rome this month, at the Palazzo Orsini Taverna, where they have drawn criticism from the Vatican and other Catholic entities.

Thiel’s Antichrist is a Luddite, standing against technology and especially skeptical of Artificial Intelligence. In Thiel’s political theology, such as it is, excessive regulation of AI or climate change are both indicators of the work of the Antichrist. Greta Thunberg is one of the “shadows of the Antichrist” in Thiel’s estimation. He believes the Antichrist will be a “Luddite who wants to stop all science,” such as Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Marc Andreessen. He says Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person,” but couldn’t be the Antichrist because he’s not popular enough.

The force that holds back the Antichrist in Thiel’s schema is the biblical katechon, a Greek term meaning “the restrainer,” which shows up in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians: “And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming.” Thiel’s thoughts on the katechon are largely drawn from the work of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. At one point, Thiel says “the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.”

Thiel presents the struggle between the Antichrist and the katechon as a constantly shifting conflict. He thinks the current fear of Big Tech is what the Antichrist will seize on to gain power and bring about a one-world government. As evidence, he played a video of a 60 Minutes segment about German legislation that tries to limit online hate speech (in Thiel’s mind, an obvious overreach) and talked about Australia requiring age verification for all social media as a diabolical plan for “ending internet anonymity.”

Thiel is attempting to reflect the thinking of his old professor at Stanford, René Girard, but he wrenches Girard’s thinking just off of true, as in this statement from one of Thiel’s lectures: “In all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems.” It is a persistent feature of Thiel’s philosophizing that he makes statements that give off more heat than light. As a philosopher, he acts like an engineer. Thiel has that in common with his original Silicon Valley partner-in-crime, Elon Musk.

When not giving lectures about the Apocalypse, Thiel is busy bankrolling many Republicans’ midterm campaigns, supporting rightwing groups, and lobbying to defeat the proposed tax on billionaires in California. In the lectures, he says he’s “very pro-JD Vance,” but worries that Vance is too close to the Pope: “I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.”¹ But it was Thiel who made Caesar-JD Vance’s political career possible. Pope Leo has spoken out to question the development of AI and his encyclical to come out just after Easter will apparently have a whole section devoted to AI.

Father Antonio Spadaro, a prominent Jesuit theologian, told Variety, “[Thiel’s] practical conclusion is brutal: any attempt to regulate artificial intelligence, to establish global governing bodies, to put the brakes on technological development, becomes—in this context—a preparation for the reign of the Antichrist.”²