Food for Thought: Peter Thiel Believes One-World Government Is Humanity’s Greatest Threat

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel is warning the greatest threat to humanity’s future may not come from nuclear war, “climate change,” or artificial intelligence (AI), but from the rise of a global one-world government using those crises as a pretext to seize total control.

This from slaynews.com.

In a candid interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder sounded the alarm about what he called a “bad singularity. Thiel warned a supranational regime will crush liberty in the name of “safety.”

The default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.

Thiel warned that calls for a strengthened United Nations to oversee nuclear weapons or proposals to create global AI “compute governance,” including schemes to “log every single keystroke,” are paving the way for a permanent, technocratic surveillance state.

He likened this mindset to a 1940s Federation of American Scientists film titled “One World or None.” The film argued that only global governance could prevent nuclear annihilation.

However, instead of seeing such unity as salvation, Thiel sees it as a direct road to tyranny. He drew a striking theological analogy, framing the choice as being between “Antichrist” and “Armageddon.” The path to centralized control, he argued, is not through a charismatic dictator, but through non-stop fearmongering.

Thiel explained:

The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop.

He also contrasted this with earlier eras of scientific optimism, where the fear was of an “evil genius” misusing technology.

Thiel argued:

Today, the danger comes from halting progress entirely under the banner of saving the planet.

Casting the radical climate movement as a modern vehicle for anti-progress authoritarianism, he quipped:

In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg than Dr. Strangelove.

On artificial intelligence, Thiel adopted a measured stance. He rejected both utopian hype and doomsday predictions. He compared AI’s potential to the internet boom of the late 1990s: capable of producing “some great companies” and modestly boosting GDP, but unlikely to singlehandedly transform the economy.

He explained:

It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society.

Still, Thiel’s Founders Fund is investing heavily in AI’s infrastructure. The firm recently led a $600 million funding round for Crusoe, a vertically integrated AI platform.

Thiel said at the time:

The biggest risk with AI is that we don’t go big enough.

Further:

Crusoe is here to liberate us from the island of limited ambition.

To review, for Thiel,

[T]he ultimate danger is not any single catastrophe,

but the consolidation of global political power

under the excuse of preventing one.

In his view, trading freedom for centralized “safety” may be the greatest existential risk of all.