Two interventions within a day offered a remarkable contrast over the future of artificial intelligence.

Speaking at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17, Chinese President Xi Jinping said AI presents enormous opportunities and serious risks. It therefore requires regulation, technological monitoring, international standards, and multilateral cooperation, and must remain under human control.

On July 18, Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist, cofounder and chairman of Palantir, and a highly influential figure in American technology and politics, presented almost the opposite view. In an essay co-authored with researcher and writer Sam Wolfe, Thiel treats this combination — AI safety, regulation, and global coordination — precisely as the architecture through which the Antichrist might acquire power.

The Antichrist is the supremely evil figure in Christian end-times prophecy who deceives humanity by appearing to offer peace and salvation. Thiel’s theory sounds like a Dan Brown plot: Biblical prophecy, private lectures in San Francisco and Rome, the Vatican, AI, and a coming world government.

Yet Thiel cannot be dismissed as an eccentric storyteller. Palantir supplies analytical systems to intelligence agencies, governments, and armed forces. Thiel has enormous wealth and access to the highest levels of American politics. His ideas may shape how power is exercised.

Thiel has transformed his longstanding opposition to regulation into political theology. His modern Antichrist is not an authority but a seemingly benevolent technocrat who speaks of peace, safety, and ethics. By invoking climate change, dangerous AI, and nuclear war, this figure persuades humanity to accept global regulation and ultimately concentrated authority.

Climate campaigners and AI-safety advocates thus become unwitting “legionnaires” of the Antichrist. Even Pope Leo XIV, because of his interest in AI regulation, may fall under suspicion. By demanding treaties and international cooperation, they supposedly help construct the machinery of future global control.

The United Nations and multilateral governance may therefore be spiritually dangerous. Thiel’s alternative resembles a technologically armed, nationalist form of Christian libertarianism: Powerful innovators must remain free because technological progress supposedly holds back civilizational collapse.

The contrast is greater than that between China and America. Xi presents AI as a common capability that must be governed so its benefits can be shared. Thiel presents “technological freedom” as a civilizational imperative protected from those who would govern it. Kimi K3 adds a third reality: Advanced AI may neither remain exclusively American nor be controlled by a few costly, closed platforms

This revives the crusading habit of turning struggles over wealth, technology and power into a “sacred confrontation” between “good” and “evil”. Policy disagreements acquire cosmic significance. Compromise becomes difficult because one cannot negotiate with the Antichrist.

The theory is also remarkably convenient: Thiel’s imagined Antichrist looks like everyone who wants to regulate his interests. He warns against concentrated power even as he belongs to a powerful technological and political network himself.

Events in Shanghai made this debate immediately relevant. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released Kimi K3, a powerful new model that took first place in the Arena’s benchmark for building web interfaces — the first Chinese model to top that closely watched ranking. It also performed competitively against leading American models in other assessments.

Kimi K3 also challenges the economics of AI. Like other Chinese models, it is cheaper and offered on an open-weight basis, allowing organizations to adapt and operate it themselves. This threatens the high-priced, closed-model strategies of American tech.

The development recalls the DeepSeek shock of early 2025. If businesses can customize competitive Chinese models without incurring high subscription costs or sharing sensitive data externally, the AI market could change substantially.

Investors in the United States are calling Kimi K3 potentially negative for leading US closed systems but positive for almost every other company. What threatens dominant American firms may benefit users through lower costs and greater choice.

David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor and White House technology adviser, reached a different conclusion. He cited Kimi K3 as evidence that regulation was causing America to lose the AI race. Restrictions on data centers, state rules, and proposals for government approval of powerful models, he argued, were tying American innovators down and the US would lose the race.

While this view does not carry Thiel’s theology, the message is similar: American companies must remain largely unregulated, or China will overtake them.

Some commentators predicted Washington could discourage companies from adopting Chinese AI by warning of “hidden risks” and creating regulatory uncertainty.

The contradiction is striking. Regulation is destructive when applied to Silicon Valley but useful against its Chinese competitors.

Xi’s metaphor that the “fine steed of AI” must gallop with both speed and stability captures the alternative position. He did not advocate suppressing innovation. He presented governance as what enables innovation to proceed safely and retain public confidence. Thiel treats governance much more readily as innovation’s enemy.

The juxtaposition is surreal. China, a country routinely denigrated in the West as “authoritarian”, calls for AI to remain under human control, for international rules, and for developing countries to help shape them. Meanwhile, an influential American technology billionaire describes advocates of AI regulation in the language of biblical apocalypse.

Xi’s speech should be read as strategic statecraft, not moral philosophy. China wants influence over AI rules, wider adoption of its models, stronger relations with the Global South, and an alternative to a US-led technological order. China also extensively regulates information and technology domestically.

The new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, with 29 participating countries, is both an instrument of cooperation and a vehicle for Chinese leadership. Nevertheless, Xi speaks in the secular language of public goods: Who gets access to AI? How can poorer countries build capacity? How will humans retain control? How should risks and benefits be shared?

To many outside the West, one discourse sounds like an invitation to participate in the construction of rules and to gain access to technology. The other sounds like a powerful Western elite demanding freedom to develop and deploy AI while casting those seeking constraints as enemies of progress, or even civilization.

The contrast is greater than that between China and America. Xi presents AI as a common capability that must be governed so its benefits can be shared. Thiel presents “technological freedom” as a civilizational imperative protected from those who would govern it. Kimi K3 adds a third reality: Advanced AI may neither remain exclusively American nor be controlled by a few costly, closed platforms.

In the contest for international opinion, particularly across the Global South, China’s framing is more inclusive and more responsible.

The author is chief development strategist of the Institute for the Environment, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.