ROBERT MAGINNIS/
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.
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