Donald Trump and Peter Thiel Are Using AI To Supercharge the Surveillance State

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, has a provocative theory about how the Antichrist could take over the Earth and enslave humanity.

"My speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time," Thiel told Hoover Institution interviewer Peter Robinson earlier this year.

The greatest danger we face, according to Thiel, might not be from global warming, terrorism, nuclear winter, or artificial intelligence going rogue. The real danger is that we're so afraid of these threats that we're willing to give up our freedom in the interest of "peace and safety," which is the phrase Thiel ascribed to the Antichrist, citing Thessalonians 5:3.

"It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world," Thiel told the New York Times' Ross Douthat on a podcast. "In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg."

"I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building," replied Douthat. 

Douthat was referring to Palantir, the government contractor that Thiel co-founded in 2003 during the height of the war on terror. Today, Palantir is "in the white-hot center of the latest trend reshaping the global order," according to The Wall Street Journal, receiving more than $322 million from government contracts in the first half of 2025.

It's equipping the government with tools to sift through massive data troves to identify patterns and hunt down illegal immigrants. It's helping the Feds deploy facial recognition technology, and has created AI tools to "predict" where crimes might happen in advance.

"Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like: Great, we're not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far," Douthat asked Thiel. "Isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?"

When Thiel replied that hastening the Antichrist's arrival is "obviously" not what he thinks he's doing, Douthat agreed that it was unlikely but pressed, "I'm just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule."

It's a great question. While Peter Thiel is warning that the Antichrist could bring totalitarianism by exploiting our desire for "peace and safety," a company that he co-founded is building the tools with great potential for abuse by a totalitarian surveillance state, all based on our desire for "peace and safety." 

Is it too late to stop this nightmare?

It's fitting that Palantir is named after the mythical stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which allow users to see into distant lands, eavesdrop on conversations, peer into the past, and—some claim—conjure visions of the future. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, explored the dangers of unbridled power in a way that resonates with Thiel's ideas about the Antichrist.

While the Antichrist invokes peace and safety, the corrupted wizard Saruman in Lord of the Rings implores his fellow wizard Gandalf to join forces with the dark entity Sauron, he invokes the values of "Knowledge, Rule, Order."

Trump promised peace and safety when he took the stage to accept the Republican nomination in 2016 by cracking down on crime and riots in America's big cities.

"I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored."

Thiel, who was the first tech billionaire to back Trump, spoke at that convention.

Eight years later, Trump was back at the RNC once again warning of a crisis and promising to restore peace and safety.

"There's never been an invasion like this anywhere," said Trump, referring to a spike in illegal immigration. 

Exploiting a national emergency, real or manufactured, is how governments typically grow their power and limit our freedoms. As the libertarian economic historian Robert Higgs chronicled in his 1987 classic, Crisis and Leviathan, the government ratcheted up its power in the 20th century by capitalizing on the Great Depression and two world wars.

More recently, the 9/11 terrorist attacks justified the war in Afghanistan, provided cover for the invasion of Iraq, and led to the expansion of the surveillance state under a new paradigm known as Total Information Awareness.

"[Total Information Awareness was] what Palantir is now. What they were literally trying to do is come up with the ability to ingest data from pretty much any source and then run that against their de facto target list," says Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who studies the surveillance state at the libertarian Cato Institute. His latest book is The Triumph of Fear, a history of federal law enforcement and surveillance.

"All this stuff at the end of the day is fear-based. That's how we get a lot this surveillance mentality," says Eddington. 

Total Information Awareness was an initiative started at DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department. The stated goal was to construct a "virtual, centralized, grand database" for tracking terrorists, the same kind of database Trump wants to build to track illegal immigrants.

The government hit years of roadblocks before finally achieving this vision. Public backlash to the unnerving name led to a rebranding before Congress defunded the program in 2003.

"But a lot of these really bad surveillance-related ideas, even if they get knocked down, they're kind of like a vampire, right? You knock them down. You think you've knocked them down for good, and then one way or the other, they just seem to kind of come back," says Eddington.

Total Information Awareness lived on under the innocuous code name "basketball" and was absorbed by the NSA, which Edward Snowden would later reveal was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and intercepting web traffic without the knowledge of the companies involved.

The same year that Congress defunded Total Information Awareness, Peter Thiel and his co-founders created Palantir.

They even met with John Poindexter, the recently fired director of Total Information Awareness, who told them they had "an interesting idea." Initially, the company struggled to attract mainstream investment, but when the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, put in $2 million, it signaled interest from Washington, and the company took off.

Today, Palantir is worth more than $400 billion with over half of its revenue coming from government contracts.

Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, the dream—or nightmare—of "total information awareness" seems closer than ever before.

ICE is now using mobile facial recognition technology to track immigrants and tie their identities to "derogatory information" compiled in one of their database. The agency also uses Clearview AI, facial recognition tech that scrapes social media, and much of the data is managed by Palantir.

Even if you support Trump's objective to deport more immigrants, you should still be concerned about this technology. Like with many surveillance tools of the past, immigrants and foreigners are fertile testing ground before it's rolled out to the wider domestic population.

People on the Republican side should really not be cheering a lot of this stuff that's going on right now, because if Democrats manage to retake the White House and both chambers of Congress, which is a very real possibility, then they could turn around and use those tools," says Eddington. "And by the way, that's exactly what my own work in this book basically shows."

The MAGA movement should understand what it's like to walk under the gaze of the Eye of Sauron. After the January 6 riot, "right-wing extremism" became a priority for America's intelligence agencies. Online censorship reached its zenith under the Biden administration, which leaned on social media companies to suppress speech that criticized COVID policies, vaccines, or questioned election integrity.

The "triumph of fear," as Eddington calls it, is what has allowed governments—particularly federal law enforcement—to expand and consolidate power throughout history, consistent with Higgs' theory of crisis and Leviathan.

Eddington has documented how, since its inception, federal law enforcement has been weaponized to go after not just criminals but political dissidents, which the FBI did with a program called COINTELPRO in the '50s and '60s.

"It started out as something designed to target the Communist Party of the United States," says Eddington, "But then of course it branched out. You know, they went after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They went after the organization that he founded. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of human beings who were targeted in the course of this."

It's easy to imagine how the technology that Palantir is building to help the government keep tabs on terrorists and illegal immigrants in the interest of peace and safety could be applied more broadly. Snowden has predicted that governments will soon use AI-enhanced surveillance not merely to fight terrorism or deport immigrants but to shape behavior.

"We are all entering a new phase of history where what we considered the more enlightened collection of States globally, ones that had embraced the classically liberal ideal, are now some of those working hardest to roll it back, to bureaucratize, to influence, to nudge, to shape, to ultimately control each and every individual within their territory and beyond," said Snowden at a conference in Singapore late last year. 

Thiel is also worried about AI.

"If you were to say that crypto is libertarian, then why can't we say that AI is is communist," said Thiel at the University of Oxford in 2023. "It's not completely inherent in it, but it's a certain tendency in it, and while I am pro-acceleration, I'm pro-tech, I'm even pro-AI, it is probably the one technology that I have the most misgivings about."

But Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, who provided the company's technology to the Ukrainian military free of charge, says the goal should be to make sure that these tools are in the hands of the good guys.

"We were asked if we were willing to supply our product for free [to Ukraine]. I was very in favor of this because our goal is to set a global standard for the world for behavior," Karp told a World Economic Forum audience in 2023. Elsewhere he's emphasized that "Western institutions and the West are a superior way to live, and we've fought for that."

Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder, defends the company's government contracts on similar grounds, saying that since AI is inevitable," it's really important that AI ends up lifting everyone up and the way it's going to do that is through Western civilizations."

He previously told Reason that the company actually was formed to protect civil liberties as it aids the government in catching terrorists.

"The whole core of Palantir was basically a civil liberties engine from the start," said Lonsdale. It [controls] what data are you allowed to see in what context."

Palantir's system makes it easier to track whether unauthorized users access private data, in effect watching the watchers.

"If you have Palantir installed at a certain part of the FBI or the CIA or anywhere else, the people running that can go back and look," says Lonsdale. "You have basically full audit logs….We don't set the policy, but we make it so it's very transparent."

Eddington thinks Palantir still bears responsibility for the capabilities it hands to the government, even though it's not setting policy.

"This kind of technology can really help to create the kind of real world, real-time dystopia that we're seeing right now," says Eddington. 

Peter Thiel has warned that it's easy to go from the frying pan into the fire. Tools designed for hunting down illegal immigrants in America, or combatants in Gaza or Ukraine, can be repurposed. 

"I always think that if we're going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state," Thiel told Douthat in his podcast interview.

In Lord of the Rings, the wizard Saruman starts on the side of good. Then the villainous Sauron manipulates him through the palantír stone to make the wizard believe he sees a future where Sauron's evil plan triumphs. But it's all a deception.

The wizard sees no other choice but to join forces with the dark entity. He's drawn into Sauron's circle of evil by the palantír stone, because he underestimates its power: A useful parable for understanding how versatile tools can be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.

To protect against the totalitarian power grab that Thiel is warning us about, we need stronger political constraints on the surveillance state. The solution is also technological. As Snowden has emphasized, communication tools with built-in end-to-end encryption provide a bulwark for privacy.

"What if we could enforce human rights through new means, through math, through technologies, through something that these agencies don't control.That's the power of encryption," Snowden said at the Singapore conference. 

But privacy tools need legal protection. Recently the French government arrested the creator of the encrypted social network Telegram for running an "unlicensed" encrypted service. The U.S. government is prosecuting the creator of Tornado Cash, a tool that allows cryptocurrency users to anonymize their digital cash.

This war on privacy in the name of safety needs to stop.

And maybe technologists, like the executives and engineers at Palantir, have a moral responsibility not to use their talents to design tools that a government can so easily turn against its citizens. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stressed, privacy protections are more important than ever.

If you go to chat about sensitive stuff and then there's like a lawsuit or whatever, we could be required to produce that," Altman told podcaster Theo Von in July. "And I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever…. I think it's this huge issue of, like, how are we going to treat the laws around this?"

But we don't have to wait for regulators to act. Altman could make design choices to add more privacy protections to Chat GPT.

Ultimately, tech founders will do what consumers demand, which is why public opinion matters.

"Americans have been brought to their present inauspicious circumstances by, above all else, changes in the prevailing ideology," wrote Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan. But "there remains a hope, however slight, that the American people may rediscover the worth of individual rights, limited government, and a free society under a true rule of law."

The federal government didn't balloon as the country lurched from crisis to crisis in the 19th century, Higgs observes. That changed in the 20th century, when Progressive intellectuals convinced the public that a strong central government was the solution to our problems, especially in times of crisis. 

Now is the time to absorb a different lesson: No one person should hold the rings of power. Better they be cast into the fire.

 

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