Peter Thiel Believes in Only One Kind of Freedom

Original title: "Peter Thiel Believes in Only One Kind of Freedom"
Original author: 動察Beating

I first learned about Peter Thiel through "Zero to One." That book circulated widely in China's venture capital circles. After reading it, I didn't remember how to start a business, but I remembered the author—wherever the crowd was loudest, he deliberately walked toward the shadows.

Later, when doing research, his name kept coming up. Talk about digital payments, and he's the godfather of the PayPal Mafia; talk about social media, and he's the one who gave Zuckerberg his first shot; talk about surveillance and state violence, and you can't avoid his Palantir; talk about the fractures in America's political landscape, and behind both Trump and Vance stands his shadow.

Capital, technology, political power, and theology. The four most dangerous things, all gripped in one man's hand, fingers clenched tight, refusing to let go of any of them.

Does the end of technology inevitably lead to totalitarianism? Can reverence for God find a place amid breakneck efficiency? Can a person refuse to kneel before any camp? These abysses that ordinary people avoid at all costs are simply his daily existence.

This summer, the things he was involved in became increasingly diverse, and he grew increasingly busy. When a person suddenly becomes this busy, there are only two possibilities: either he's losing his grip, or he's in a hurry.

Peter Thiel has never been someone who loses his grip.

So I want to review his past six months and see whether there's any connection among these events.

On June 30, 2026, in Aspen, Colorado, Peter Thiel stood on stage and, in front of a crowd of dignitaries, berated the Pope.

Aspen is a summer resort in the Rocky Mountains. Every summer, the world's wealthiest and smartest people gather there like migratory birds, holding various closed-door forums to confirm to one another that they still sit at the top of the food chain. In that setting, Peter Thiel's words carry no less weight than the Pope's in the Vatican.

That day, he said into the microphone that Pope Leo XIV was doing the Chinese government's bidding. It sounded like an outburst, but Peter Thiel never wastes his breath just to vent.

Peter Thiel has spent his entire life trying to find his place.

He was born in Frankfurt in 1967 and moved to the United States with his parents while still an infant. He later founded PayPal, made the earliest investment in Facebook before it took off, and then built Palantir, a company that processes surveillance data for the U.S. Department of Defense, intelligence agencies, and police departments.

The word "Palantir" comes from "The Lord of the Rings," Tolkien's "seeing stones." It is a black gem that can see across time and space, but the book also makes clear that anyone who gazes into it will eventually be watched by the eyes behind the stone. Saruman, the wisest of the White Wizards in Middle-earth, fell this way: he believed his wisdom was unmatched, tried to use the stone's vision to maneuver against Sauron, and ended up a puppet.

In that Aspen conversation, Peter Thiel made an exception and brought up this name. He said Aragorn, the king of men, also used the stone, and Aragorn was a good man who was unaffected by it. His logic was simple: swords are not guilty; what matters is whose hand holds them.

That sounds reasonable. But Saruman, who once thought he could master the stone, also initially believed he was the clearest-headed person in the world.

In Washington's political ledger, his bets have always been ruthless and precise. In 2016, when Silicon Valley collectively sat on the sidelines, he was one of the very few who bet heavily on Trump; a few years later, he single-handedly funded Vance's journey from small-town bestselling author to the Senate.

He is a man of many labels: a German immigrant, an outlier in Silicon Valley, a gay man in the Republican Party, a tech capitalist among believers, a believer among capitalists.

But the more labels he has, the bleaker his underlying reality. He has knocked on every door, but none of them had a seat for him. This has been his true situation for half a century: every identity is missing a piece.

He built his reputation on "defying conventional wisdom." "Zero to One" opens by asking: What core belief do you hold that the whole world opposes? If a person makes "being against everyone" his guiding principle, what awaits him is total exile.

This outsider's fate eventually became a geographic wandering. From West Germany on the banks of the Rhine, to the sun-drenched valleys of California, and now he has pulled up anchor and retreated toward the Southern Hemisphere. He has moved from country to country, but no door in the world has ever truly been willing to take him in completely.

Disarmament

The Pope got on his bad side in mid-May.

On May 15, Leo XIV issued his first encyclical since taking office. An encyclical is the Vatican's teaching document for major crises, the highest form of decree in the Catholic world.

In this encyclical, the Pope stated bluntly that AI has destructive power akin to nuclear weapons and must be immediately "disarmed" and placed under the unified adjudication of global multilateral institutions; otherwise, it will not only worsen class divisions but also completely destroy the livelihoods of those at the bottom.

The encyclical also specifically mentioned that in computing-intensive countries with scarce employment, algorithms will force hundreds of millions of people into "enforced idleness."

In the Vatican, this is compassion and moral exhortation. To Peter Thiel's ears, it is playing into the devil's hands.

What Peter Thiel heard was that the two-thousand-year-old Roman Curia is trying to assemble a transnational enforcement squad, and the first weapons it wants to confiscate are the code and chips spinning in his hands.

The Pope chose the name "Leo," carrying strong echoes of the industrial age.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical "Rerum Novarum," which shook Europe by confronting capital and labor amid the roar of machines. The mechanical monsters of that era were steam engines and looms, and Manchester's workers cared only about how many hours they had to endure each day and at what age their children entered the factories.

One hundred and thirty-five years later, the machines have moved from iron foundries into humming data centers, and workers are still asking what else they will lose, while the Creator is still pondering what else machines can conquer. These two questions have spanned more than a century without changing a single word—only the setting has shifted from coal dust and rust to computing power and fiber optics.

What Peter Thiel used to counter the Pope was the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China.

In his reasoning, if the United States followed the Vatican's advice and restricted itself, the other side of the ocean would never press pause, and the West would become a unilateral victim. He took the Pope's ethical question about "what makes us human" and twisted it, even slapping on the label of "shilling for the adversary." As for the technical feasibility of regulation, the limits of power, and the details of multilateral coordination, he kicked them all aside.

By portraying the adversary as a relentless Leviathan, tech giants obtain immunity to expand without restraint.

Data must be fed endlessly into models, so privacy becomes a stumbling block; computing power must be squeezed to the millisecond, so labor rights become unnecessary overhead; even the boundaries of war and violence can be easily crushed under the banner of "winning the race for technological supremacy." The ethical barriers that modern civilization spent centuries building become worthless scraps of paper the moment they are labeled "we cannot lose."

The Antichrist

Peter Thiel has been telling a story about the Antichrist.

He first held four closed-door lectures in San Francisco on the theme of the Antichrist. In March of this year, the lectures moved directly to Rome, the heart of Catholicism—four sessions over four days, admission by invitation only, with all media strictly shut out behind iron gates.

Later, together with writer Sam Wolf, he published two long essays in the Catholic intellectual journal "First Things": "Sailing to the End of the World" and "The Pope and the Antichrist." Between the lines, the tone was murderous.

This Antichrist theory comes from two people: the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and former Pope Benedict XVI.

In 1900, Solovyov wrote "A Short Tale of the Antichrist." The devil he depicted was not a hideous beast but a smiling, all-knowing technocrat. He spoke constantly of humanitarianism, peace, and universal ethics, and amid crises of climate change and endless wars, he gently persuaded all humanity to surrender sovereignty in exchange for order.

He had one mocking line for Christ: "You bring a sword; I bring bread and peace." He did not intend to destroy the Church; he only wanted to co-opt it, to place it in the display window of a vast technological order as a harmless ornament.

The Antichrist's monologue in the novel is deeply sinister. Christ came first, he came later, and precisely because he came later, it should be he who closes out history—Christ was merely the one who paved the way for him.

In his later years, Benedict XVI repeatedly warned against the "dictatorship of relativism." When a world can use technological consensus to erase all disputes over truth, behind the seemingly stable system stands nothing less than absolute tyranny.

Peter Thiel stitched these two men's ideas together. He said that the twentieth-century Antichrist was a mad scientist you could recognize at a glance; in the twenty-first century, the devil has changed into a gentler face—a benevolent transnational regulator who speaks only of "safety," "coordination," and "human welfare." The more afraid the world becomes, the more justification he has to intervene.

He laid out this sense of crisis thoroughly in a long conversation in 2025.

What he truly fears is that, in a collective panic over algorithms spinning out of control, all of humanity will build a globally coordinated regulatory Leviathan with its own hands. Algorithmic models can run across borders, so regulators must coordinate across borders; coordination requires auditing code, and auditing code requires full visibility into the world's computing power and computational resources.

Pushed to the extreme, every server on this planet and every keystroke would be exposed to the gaze of a single power center.

In Peter Thiel's eyes, that is the coming of the Antichrist.

Peter Thiel has never treated AI itself as the Antichrist. What he truly fears are the would-be gods who, under the banner of "protecting humanity," reach step by step for supreme global jurisdiction.

He has spent his whole life wrestling with fear. The book he wrote says don't follow the crowd just because you're afraid; the companies he invests in specifically bet on things others are too afraid to touch. In his view, once humanity is seized by fear, its first instinct is to huddle together for warmth; and the price of huddling is meekly handing over weapons and freedom while enshrining above their heads an all-encompassing power colossus.

Fear, in his worldview, is the incubator of all totalitarianism.

At this point, we must bring in his Stanford intellectual mentor, René Girard. Girard's famous theory of "mimetic desire" boils down to one sentence: people do not truly know what they want; they only see others reaching for something and then covet it themselves.

Peter Thiel's later line that "competition is for losers" has its roots here. His Antichrist framework has the same foundation: a figure who craves universal adoration and tries to flatten and co-opt all humanity with "everyone gets along" is, in his eyes, far more dangerous than a villain who attacks with swords.

He even coined a name for those who, driven by fear, rush about calling for power to step in and regulate: "Legionaries."

Sweden's environmental activist Greta Thunberg, or AI safety scholar Eliezer Yudkowsky, who campaigns to ban computing power, are such figures in his eyes. They are not villains, just pawns blinded by fear. When they shout "imminent" and "global coordination," they are merely shoveling the ground to level the foundation for a future supreme power.

Strip away all the theological paint, and the Antichrist Peter Thiel describes looks exactly like the people he has fought for half his life.

From the EU's sprawling Artificial Intelligence Act to the Paris Climate Agreement, from forcing Palantir to open its algorithmic black box to demanding that large models hand over their weights for auditing—all are shackles he detests. Now he has wrapped this stance in a layer of theology.

This wrapping is not just talk. For years, Peter Thiel has been building a bridge between Silicon Valley libertarianism and hardline conservative Christianity. The former worships "leave me alone," the latter believes "do not fall into depravity," and the two camps originally had nothing to do with each other. Peter Thiel managed to blend a message both sides love to hear: individual freedom, the deconstruction of order, and the utter corruption of establishment elites.

The Antichrist framework is an extension of that bridge. He has forcibly elevated a secular tug-of-war over industrial policy and geopolitics into a final battle between good and evil before the Last Judgment, and in the process stamped his business empire with a commission from heaven.

Palantir's business depends on regulation not being too strict; the AI companies he invests in benefit from loose regulation; his political projects aim to weaken multilateral institutions like the UN and the EU. The brilliance of his apocalyptic theology is that it conveniently transforms every institution standing in the way of his profits and power into the devil's minions.

This wrapping also conveniently includes the Pope. The Pope wants global AI regulation, and on Peter Thiel's scale, that makes him nothing more than a high-ranking Legionary in a white robe with a prestigious title.

At the end of September, Peter Thiel will give four more lectures on the Antichrist in Nashville, Tennessee—still closed-door, no recording, with the specific location announced only at the last minute.

From the San Francisco Bay Area to the banks of the Tiber, and back to the heartland of the American South, he is repeatedly honing how to translate his aversion to AI regulation, global governance, and technological stagnation into a religious language.

Frontier Models and Chips

He also publicly called out Anthropic by name.

He said this company that touts itself as "responsible" is a bunch of woke liberals who are winning the AI race.

Anthropic did not respond directly, only digging up an election-protection blog post from April. But what's interesting is that Thiel's remark amounts to admitting that Anthropic is winning—a man who fears the concentration of power first acknowledged that the other side holds exactly that kind of power.

Peter Thiel did not pick on Anthropic at random.

Founder Dario Amodei walked out of OpenAI in frustration, feeling the old employer lacked sufficient reverence for safety, and struck out on his own to found Anthropic, writing "alignment" and "safety" into the company's charter. In recent years, it has been the most eager lobbyist for regulation among the frontier labs, advocating for licensing high-end models, setting external red lines, and even pushing for international treaties.

Frontier models are the most expensive, most powerful tier that others cannot catch up to for a while. Whoever has them has a seat at the table and can demand, in the name of safety, that the whole world listen to its coordination.

What Peter Thiel smelled was exactly this, and Anthropic's every move hit his deepest suspicion.

A frontier model company plays three roles at once: a hugely profitable business, a national strategic asset strapped to the chariot, and a guest at the table drafting global treaties. Put these three faces together, and on Peter Thiel's radar, it is an absolute power center in the making.

On June 30, the same day he berated the Pope in Aspen, the chip company Etched, in which he is an investor, released a series of announcements in San Jose. The company specializes in inference chips.

Chips come in two types: training chips teach models by feeding them massive amounts of data to produce a model; inference chips let models answer user questions, and every query depends on them. Training is heavy lifting; inference is everyday application. Nvidia has already monopolized the training market, but the inference market still has room.

As AI applications spread, inference power consumption will eventually surpass training. Peter Thiel is betting on that inflection point.

In the funding round Peter Thiel joined in January, Etched was valued at $5 billion. By August 18, the company announced delivery of its first inference rack to Wall Street market-making giant Jane Street, while completing a $700 million financing round that pushed its valuation to $21 billion. Seven months, a fourfold increase. And Jane Street tested the hardware before leading the round.

The chip industry treats "first-silicon success" as a myth. Etched's first chip, A0, succeeded on its first tape-out using TSMC's N4P process.

Etched makes Transformer-specific chips that are more efficient than general-purpose chips. In June, it released the A0 chip and a full rack solution including software and cooling, with long context, mixture-of-experts models, and agent tasks among its product goals.

Investors include high-frequency trading firms such as Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump, and Two Sigma, as well as a fund with ties to TSMC. The individual investor lineup is even stronger: former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy, "godfather of deep learning" Geoffrey Hinton, Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.

Peter Thiel's bet on inference chips and his attack on Anthropic follow the same logic: he detests the monopoly of old power. He steers clear of Nvidia and points his finger at Anthropic, yet every new piece he personally nurtures is swelling at the same terrifying speed into the next unquestionable new power center.

Argentina

Before investing in chips, he had already moved his family to the other side of the world.

Peter Thiel relocated his entire family to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. On April 23, President Milei met with him at the Casa Rosada. The Argentine presidency later issued an official statement confirming the meeting but remained tight-lipped about the content of the closed-door talks.

On August 14, his macro fund Thiel Macro filed its second-quarter holdings report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Eight stocks, total market value $419 million, seven of them all energy.

Four established U.S. power companies each account for about $40 million; independent power producer Vistra accounts for $59.13 million; and he even included X-energy, a maker of small nuclear reactors. Together with Vista, an Argentine shale oil company, energy stocks account for 71.8% of his entire portfolio.

The most striking is the $75.91 million position in Vista, representing about 1% of the Argentine company's equity. Vista is a major exporter from Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas region, the fields hidden beneath the Patagonian wasteland that have made Argentina an oil exporter again.

Buying that 1% is Peter Thiel's first oil well drilled on the South American continent.

Peter Thiel and Milei are a pair who see eye to eye in this wave of global right-wing politics.

The two believe in the same things at their core: big government is a parasite, and the legal net is the enemy of freedom. Milei came to power with a chainsaw, cutting departments and dismantling welfare, and even created a dedicated "Ministry of Deregulation," turning the entire country of Argentina into a petri dish for far-right shock therapy. Peter Thiel put real money into Vista—on the surface buying shale oil, but in reality spending more than $70 million to buy a ticket to observe, or even steer, this political gamble.

Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, algorithms, and metaphysics, but what lands in his palm is heavy crude oil. Large models need computing power, computing power needs electricity, and the source of electricity ultimately cannot escape the dirtiest, stickiest fossil fuels deep in the earth's crust. In Aspen he denounces illusory global jurisdiction; in Patagonia he buys real underground fire and tar. One virtual, one real—seamless.

Street gossip began to spiral out of control. Some said he was digging a nuclear-proof bunker in the Andes; others accused him of acting as an overseas overlord for Milei; on the streets of Buenos Aires, white banners even appeared demanding his expulsion.

Peter Thiel long ago gave up on the Old World. Years ago, he invested in the Seasteading Institute, which wanted to build floating autonomous cities in the ocean.

But seasteading remains on paper to this day; the virtual network cannot house a physical body, and space is not reachable anytime soon. On the surface of a gravity-ruled Earth, he has nowhere left to retreat, and only Argentina matches his needs. The heretical fantasies he has written about all his life have finally found, in this near-bankrupt South American country, the first landing strip willing to accept them.

Peter the Thief

On June 4, Milei and his deregulation minister Sturzenegger co-authored an article in the Financial Times titled "Argentina Invites AI to Liberate Itself."

The two began with the Dutch East India Company of 1602, arguing that limited liability gave birth to modern capitalism, and that AI now needs a brand-new legal shell. The article wrote that the Industrial Revolution freed humanity from the shackles of muscle, and AI will redeem humanity from the limitations of the brain. The ending was openly ambitious, declaring that Buenos Aires would become the Amsterdam of the AI era.

After the black-and-white sermon came legislative hammers delivered to Congress one after another.

The Milei government introduced the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI), then built on it with a "Super RIGI" tailored specifically for hyperscale data centers and massive computing clusters. Qualifying companies get their corporate income tax slashed to 15%, with 60% of investment depreciation deductible in the first year and 20% in each of the second and third years; more critically, the government promised in writing a thirty-year vacuum from taxes, customs, and foreign exchange controls.

The $1 billion entry threshold precisely locks out all of Argentina's domestic small and medium-sized enterprises and ordinary citizens; and the thirty-year promise of unchanged privileges effectively ties the hands of several future elected governments to the ledgers of foreign capital in advance.

Immediately afterward, Sturzenegger threw the most radical corporate law amendment in half a century at Congress.

The core of the bill is somewhat absurd: it seeks to allow "non-human companies" to exist, which the bill calls "automated companies"—companies fully operated by autonomous algorithms, requiring no employees or human managers, and possibly even no shareholders. The entire operation, trading, and expansion of the legal entity would be handed over to a black box of self-running algorithms.

The AI law draft released at the same time has three pillars. First, completely exempt algorithms from regulation, with the draft explicitly stating they should be "free from the dead hand of premature and misguided regulation"; second, grant civil rights to algorithmic companies; third, extremely low tax rates, with companies even able to override Argentine law and choose whichever international legal provisions favor them.

The chamber erupted in argument, but the lawmakers' disputes narrowed to mundane matters. How much of the servers and cooling equipment should be sourced locally? Would the power-hungry giants drag down Buenos Aires' residential grid? Someone urgently proposed a patch requiring tech giants to pay for their own substations, and the debate turned to whether, in a grid emergency, to cut power to the data centers or to residential neighborhoods.

The bill says nothing about labor rights, nor about who is responsible when things go wrong. Companies can operate without employees, workers' rights are unprotected, and no one is held accountable when machines cause harm. Milei is trading sovereignty and labor rights for nothing more than a promise that big companies might invest.

Protesters in Buenos Aires call this package the "Peter Thiel Law," and on their signs they changed his name to "Peter Thief," calling him a thief.

The government's response was that it doesn't matter whether Peter Thiel does it or someone else does—whoever does it is welcome.

Across the ocean in Aspen, Peter Thiel denounces global regulation as a devil's passage to totalitarianism; in the Casa Rosada in the Southern Hemisphere, Milei raises the banner of freedom and declares the entire nation sacrificed to unbridled algorithms. One north, one south, separated by the entire equator, two far-right zealots with their own hidden agendas have meshed together on the same historical frequency.

Silence

What Peter Thiel is really after, perhaps only he knows.

The long trail of actions described above may seem scattered, but behind it lies a single logic.

Writing this far, I can no longer tell whether he is fleeing or chasing. He constantly warns against all "power centers," yet every step he takes drills deeper into the heart of power.

You say he detests totalitarianism, yet the Palantir and chip networks he built with his own hands are closer than anyone's to a panopticon; you say he reveres God, yet the theology he follows is a secular one tailored to his own interests.

The ending of Solovyov's "A Short Tale of the Antichrist" asks exactly this question. The Antichrist convenes a grand ecumenical council in Jerusalem, offering every denomination a price they cannot refuse: the Catholics get papal authority back, the Orthodox get the theological center, the Protestants get the biblical research institute.

Almost everyone kneels in gratitude. Only the Orthodox elder John rises in silence, stares straight at the false god on the stage, and asks a single question: "Do you yourself actually believe in Christ?"

The smiling technocrat cannot answer a single word. That deathly silence becomes his only flaw.

The novel does not end in tragedy. The leaders of three denominations that had quarreled for a thousand years finally stand side by side after this question; they are expelled, slaughtered, and then resurrected from the ruins. The false empire collapses, and true redemption descends. What remains after tearing apart the illusory world is always the few who refuse to bow to power, not the deal-makers who thrive and maneuver within the system.

This ending resembles Peter Thiel more than the theology he preaches. He jumps back and forth among Silicon Valley, the Republican Party, Catholicism, and the South American continent, wanting to be a guest of honor everywhere; but if someone asked him face to face, "What do you actually believe?" he would probably fall into the same deathly silence as the Antichrist in the story.

Sometimes I feel that Peter Thiel's journey of migration has left him increasingly unmoored. The banks of the Rhine could not give him a home; the Bay Area could not accommodate his heretical ideas; the deep-state politicians of Washington would never treat him as one of their own. Whether this land in the Southern Hemisphere, gasping under shock therapy, can ultimately take him in, no one can say.

Argentina hangs at the southern tip of the hemisphere. It is separated from Frankfurt, where he was born, and from San Francisco, where he made his fortune, by more than half the globe's oceans. A man approaching sixty, worth tens of billions of dollars, uprooting himself and dropping into such a remote wasteland, must be after something.

After the black oil beneath Patagonia, after a law without fetters, after a place not yet governed.

Perhaps what he is after is precisely the phrase "not yet governed." That phrase means the same thing as the "exit" he wrote in that 2009 manifesto.

He has spent his life trying to find his place. He found them, and none of them counted.

Buenos Aires is just another temporary way station on his panicked flight.

On the morning of August 17, in the Palermo Chico district of Buenos Aires.

More than a dozen figures in gray robes and pointed hats silently gathered in front of Peter Thiel's mansion. They wore crude fake white beards glued to their chins and sunglasses to block the ubiquitous algorithmic facial recognition on the streets.

They unfurled a glaring banner, painted in black with Tolkien's Gandalf's roar at the Balrog: "You shall not pass."

These young people call themselves the "Southern Gandalfs." In the quiet morning neighborhood, someone kept time to the disco classic "YMCA" and sang at the top of their lungs: "You're Palantir's lapdog, you won't survive in Argentina!"

Other signs struck directly at his sore spot, mocking his old arrogant defense:

"You think you hold the seeing stone? Go look in the mirror—you're just a fool who thinks he's clever."

The reason for the protest was that Peter Thiel was preparing to bring Palantir to Argentina.