Over the last three years, more and more tech experts have warned that we are on the verge of Superhuman AI — a development that could result in all manner of negative consequences, including the extinction of our species.
A recent article in The Guardian says we are crossing the line into uncontrollable AI. They write that it is like being in a boat on a raging river heading towards Niagara Falls and hoping for the best.
In 2023, over one hundred of the world’s top AI experts issued an extraordinary letter to global leaders:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The signatories kept the letter to a single sentence in the hope that it would be noticed and might shake up the political establishment to take action. They wanted political leaders to establish legislative guardrails on the reckless digital arms race that was underway in the realm to create superhuman AI.
Nobody in authority responded.
But in his last act as president, Joe Biden made a statement. He warned that the Silicon Valley elite were capable of destroying democracy and damaging the future of the American people.
Biden had close dealings with the top tech executives and had seen the shift to what some were warning was the advent of a “Silicon Reich.” But he had done nothing to stop them when he had the power to act, and now in his final days nobody listened.
It might have been more helpful if he had named names such as Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir Technologies.
As Biden was leaving the White House, sixteen of Thiel’s handpicked men were moving into the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has been considered a construct of the Thiel organization.
Thiel, a venture capitalist who made his money in Facebook, PayPal, and OpenAI, has been obsessed about the end of the world since his earliest days in Silicon Valley. He isn’t trying to prevent it — he wants to profit from it.
In 2009, Thiel stated his opposition to democracy:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
At the time it seemed like a shocking statement. But anyone who was paying attention to the musings of the tech giants wouldn’t have been surprised. There is a strand of tech libertarianism that had been steadily shifting further and further to the extreme.
In 2014, Google engineer Justine Tunney issued a call to shut down the American government and transfer all decision-making power to the tech industry. She called for “open-source authoritarianism” stating that the bottom third of society should serve as slaves to the top third.
Another tech blogger who shared his views on slavery was Curtis Yarvin, has become an inspiration to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
In addition to advocating replacing democracy with a monarch and slaves, he advocated his principle of “lustration” — wherein the entire federal civil service of the United States would be fired.
A “deNazification,” he called it.
This was to be a total purging of those who made it possible for democratic government to work.
In January 2025, Elon Musk put lustration into action with the establishment of DOGE. To most people, it seemed chaotic and reckless. But Musk was playing out the plan that had been discussed among the tech elite and the far right for some time.
Thiel’s hatred for democracy was inspired by a 1990s conspiracy book, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
They saw the rise of digital technology as creating a gulf between the new cyber elite and the millions who would be disenfranchised by the tech revolution. Democracy would collapse, and an apocalyptic realm would be created through which a tiny elite would flourish.
Thiel was sold.
As early as 2008, he began investing in the Seasteading Institute, where those with money could leave the dying democracies and live on platforms in the oceans. To accomplish this would, of course, mean privatizing the oceans so that those with the money could control what was left of the last public space.
The ocean paradise hasn’t worked out, so Thiel has opted to relocate to Argentina under the control of the far-right government of Javier Milei. Argentina is seen as one of the perfect locations to wait out the end times.
In recent years, Thiel’s views on the end times have become more defined and bizarre. He believes the end of the world has arrived and the destruction of the world will be ushered in by the Antichrist.
In March 2026, Thiel held a series of private lectures in Rome to lay out how to recognize the Antichrist. He has many opinions about who that figure of darkness might be.
Thiel warned that the Antichrist will be one who calls for environmental action, promotes international cooperation to address world problems and advocates guardrails on technology.
He sees Greta Thunberg as a definitive possibility.
There are thousands of conspiracy kooks out there who have ideas as crazy as Thiel, but what makes him unique is that he has built some of the most powerful surveillance technology in the world.
Thus, when he rails that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is doing the work of the Antichrist for handing down indictments to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav over the genocide in Gaza, he has skin in the game.
Thiel’s surveillance tools have been key in helping the Israeli Defence Force. Investigations into the use of “kill chain” technology by Silicon Valley giants like Palantir could be part of the ICC investigations.
Gaza was the brutal testing ground for a future of warfare that would be efficient, merciless and remorseless. A SETA Foundation study on the use of AI in Gaza states:
Israel’s growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in military operations is changing how wars are fought. In this new model, machines, not people, decide who lives and who dies. This shift is causing more civilian deaths and breaking international laws meant to protect innocent lives during conflict...
Israel’s use of AI in war has removed human judgment from many decisions…
The algorithms decide who lives and who dies.
Palantir worked with the IDF on surveillance, tracking and targeting technologies.
The Israeli investigative publication +972 Magazine wrote that one AI machine (the company that created the program wasn’t identified) had “marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties.”
Gaza was a testing ground for technologies kill chain technologies that can also be used to control domestic populations.
In 2025, Palantir signed a lucrative deal with ICE for “complete target analysis of known populations” — tech jargon for civilians.
Faced with bad press, Palantir maintained they were supporters of human rights.
Nonetheless, Thiel has made no secret of his anti-democratic ideology and hatred of the media. He established the creation of a start-up aimed at using “AI juries” to identify and go after prying journalists.
Thiel sees any efforts to put guardrails on these technologies as proof of the Antichrist. Most others would see such efforts as basic protections for liberty and democracy. Or even life itself.
Toby Ord, an advisor to Google DeepMind, believes the existential threat to humanity posed by AI is roughly 10%. And that is only because he thinks humanity will get its act together and bring in the guardrails.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning “godfather of AI,” put the threat upward at 50% — a flip of a coin.
Imagine an industry where its own CEOs admit that the chances of wiping out humanity sit somewhere between 10 and 50%?
For Thiel, anyone who advocates protecting humanity is the Beast ushering in the Biblical apocalypse. If Thiel wanted to see the real Antichrist, he should just look in the mirror.
As for the rest of us, the clock is rapidly ticking on whether we can put the protections in place in time. This is going to require political leadership with a sense of the urgency of the moment.
In Canada, the Liberal government has just signed a major defence contract with Palantir. Minister David McGuinty has tried to reassure the public that the deal is consistent with digital sovereignty because “Palantir Canada is a Canadian company, subsidiary of Palantir global.”
But that should raise more questions than settle them.
Our Minister of Artificial Intelligence, Evan Solomon should be hearing from Canadians who are concerned about where our digital sovereignty is headed
You can reach him at: evan.solomon@parl.gc.ca
If you want to understand the larger forces at work, I strongly recommend the book Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley, Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Duran. It is an important contribution to the discussion we need to be having about technology, power and democracy.
I sent my letter to Solomon, not that I think it’ll do much to sway him one way or another. Palantir will get their claws in our systems and then we’re doomed. WTAF is our government thinking to work with these whackadoodles?!
Charlie Angus at his best.
"As for the rest of us, the clock is rapidly ticking on whether we can put the protections in place in time. This is going to require political leadership with a sense of the urgency of the moment."