Antichrist lectures are the hot new thing in Silicon Valley, but so far they’ve honestly been kind of disappointing. Some people are giving entire lecture series without even revealing who the Antichrist is! You’d expect that to be the bare minimum!

We can do better. Earlier this year, at the Manifest forecasting conference in Berkeley, I gave a presentation titled “Forecasting Transformative AI Using The Book Of Revelation”. Given the renewed interest in this topic, I repost it below, in written form, with slight edits. The first two-thirds, including the section on the Antichrist, is free. In deference to the injunction by prior researchers on this topic not to “cast one’s pearls before swine”, the last third (including the Whore of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon, and the New Jerusalem) will be paywalled.

Thank you for attending. The Book of Revelation was written around 95 AD by St. John of Patmos. Most secular scholars interpret it as an allegorical description of events in John’s own time, especially the Roman persecution of the early church. But millennia of Christian commentators have treated it as a prophecy about some future cataclysm - most often during the commentator’s own era. In the 10th century, a renegade bishop declared Pope John XV to be the Antichrist. In the 19th century, the Russian Old Believers accused Napoleon of the same. In our own day, American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama.

All these people fell victim to chronocentrism - a bias to evaluate one’s own era as uniquely important. Today, John XV is almost forgotten, Saddam came and went, and the people who ascribed them unique world-historic importance seem like fools and blowhards.

But -

…if the technological singularity hypothesis is true, then we are genuinely living at the hinge of history - the cataclysmic climax of humankind - and insofar as Revelation is a prophecy, it will make sense in the context of the AI race of our own era.

This will be our working hypothesis. We will try to match each symbol in Revelation with a person or institution from the mid-2020s Bay Area artificial intelligence scene. If we consistently find eerie levels of similarity, beyond any plausible coincidence, we will consider that evidence in favor, and perhaps gain useful knowledge about the shape of things to come, starting with:

The Beast

Revelation contains several beasts - at least two, maybe as many as four. John doesn’t keep track of them very effectively, and they seem to reappear several times after being killed. Most commentators collapse these into one beast - ‘the’ Beast - and I will anxiously follow their lead despite losing some potential subtlety.

According to Revelation 13:14-15:

[The Beast] had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak.

In the context of our working hypothesis, this sounds like the Beast is an AI company, creating an LLM.

But if the Beast is an AI company, which one is it? In 13:1, John gives us several clues:

I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy.

The Beast has seven heads. In the context of an AI company, this might mean seven CEOs, presidents, or co-founders. I was unable to find an AI company with this many CEOs or presidents, but here’s the co-founder count for each of the major labs:

• OpenAI: 11 co-founders

• DeepMind: 3 co-founders

• xAI: 5 co-founders

• Anthropic: 7 co-founders

So Anthropic is a good match for the first part of the prophecy.

What about the second part? What does it mean for the Beast to have ten horns?

This one confused me for a while, but I eventually found this list:

In Silicon Valley speak, a “unicorn” is a company worth over $1 billion, and a “decacorn” (Latin for “ten-horned”) is a company worth over $10 billion. Under this interpretation, the ten horns of the prophecy have ten crowns because they represent wealth and achievement. The only AI company on the list above is Anthropic, at #9.

Finally, John says that upon the heads will be names of blasphemy. If the heads represent co-founders, it sounds like John is claiming the co-founders of the company will have blasphemous names. I could not find anything blasphemous about the names of the founders of OpenAI, DeepMind, or xAI. But looking at Anthropic:

• Dario Amodei is the first co-founder. “Dario” comes from the Persian “Darius” meaning “Lord”. “Amodei” is of unclear meaning, but I cannot help but notice the resemblance with Asmodei (also called Ashmodei, Hamadee, Æshmadæva, and Asmodeus), a demon-king mentioned in the book of Tobit. Plausibly all these different names derive from a Proto-Sumerian root *Amodei, in which case the meaning of “Dario Amodei” would be “Asmodeus is lord”. This is a name of blasphemy.

• Daniela Amodei is the second co-founder. Daniela comes from Hebrew Daniel, meaning “God is my judge”. So “Daniela Amodei” means “Asmodeus is God my judge”. This is also a name of blasphemy.

• Jared Kaplan is the third co-founder. Jared means “fallen” or “descended” in Hebrew, supposedly because the Biblical Jared was patriarch during the time when the fallen angels descended to Earth. Kaplan is just the German form of chaplain, meaning “priest”. So “Jared Kaplan” means “fallen priest” or “priest of fallen angels”. This is also a name of blasphemy.

• Christopher Olah is the fourth co-founder. Christopher is Greek for “bringer of Christ”. Olah (עֹלָה) in Hebrew means “burnt offering”; the Greek translation is ὁλοκαυτεῖν, meaning “total destruction”, because the olah was an especially thorough sacrifice in which the entire animal was reduced to ash. So “Christopher Olah” means “bringer of Christ to total destruction”. This is also a name of blasphemy.

• Ben Mann1 is the fifth co-founder. Ben means “son” in Hebrew, and Mann means “man” in German, so this translates to “Son of Man”. This is a title claimed by Jesus; for a human to take it makes it a name of blasphemy.

• Tom Brown is the sixth co-founder. Thomas means “twin” in Greek, and Brown means “dark” or “dusky” in Old English, so this translates to “dark twin”. Satanists refer to the Devil as the “dark twin” of God; this is also a name of blasphemy.

• Samuel McCandlish is the seventh co-founder. Samuel is related to Samael, another demon-king. McCandlish is Gaelic for “son of the lord”. So this name means “Samael is the son of the Lord”. This is another name of blasphemy.

So we see that all seven co-founders have names of blasphemy. If the chance of a randomly selected person having a blasphemous name is 1%, then the chance of seven people having such names entirely by coincidence is 10^-14, or one in one hundred trillion.

Given that Anthropic has seven heads, ten horns, and on each head a name of blasphemy, the case for identifying it with the Beast is strong. However, we cannot move on before examining one last verse from this chapter, probably the most famous of all. From Revelation 13:18:

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.

Many people have tried to decode this verse. Here’s my paltry contribution: in other cases where the New Testament uses the phrase “the number of the X”, it means the number of people in a group. For example:

• Luke 22:3: “Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve [apostles].”

• Acts 4:4: “But many of those who had heard the Word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand.”

• Revelation 9:16: “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.”

These are all the same Greek word, ἀριθμός. None of them mean a secret mysterious number that symbolizes their identity. They all mean something like “headcount”. So to be consistent, you would translate Revelation 13:18 as:

Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of a man; and his headcount is 666.

This is looking good for our hypothesis that the Beast is an AI company. There’s only one remaining hurdle. The second clause specifically says that we’re talking about the number/headcount “of a man” rather than of a company. Can we square this circle?

Not all translations say “the number of a man”. Some say “the number of humanity”, or “the number of mankind”. The exact phrase is “ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου”, and the word at issue meaning man/humanity/mankind is the last one, “ἀνθρώπου”.

In our alphabet, this word is anthropou. It is the genitive form of the stem anthrop-, meaning man/humanity, and predictably means “of man/humanity”. This word has come into English pretty much wholly intact, with the Greek genitive ending (-ου) simply changed to the corresponding English ending (-ic). It is our word “anthropic”, meaning “of man/humanity”. Why would you use any other word in a translation? Thus:

Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of Anthropic; and its headcount is 666.

What is the headcount of Anthropic? I can’t find a precise answer, but here’s their LinkedIn page:

Seems concerning.

Anthropic might seem like an unlikely candidate for the Beast, given its emphasis on ethical conduct and safe AI research. However, they do perform various experiments on turning AIs evil - always in the context of examining these scenarios and figuring out how best to prepare - and one can imagine ways this could go wrong. We’ll examine likely failure modes in more detail later.

The Mark Of The Beast

John continues (13:17):

And [the Beast] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark.

In the context of AI, this resembles the idea of biometric proof of personhood.

Suppose that future AI agents have access to bank accounts and can transact like humans. Some platforms may choose to let AIs access their services unrestricted; others may choose to limit use to humans. How would these work in a world where AIs can break CAPTCHAs? One plan is to assign each human a code based on some immutable feature of their body, like a fingerprint or eye scan, then let the humans use that code as an ironclad ID. The most famous plan along these lines is Sam Altman’s WorldCoin.

The Mark of the Beast cannot be WorldCoin itself, because WorldCoin uses an iris scan, but the Mark uses the hand or forehead. Handprints are a common biometric recognition target, but foreheads?

Yes! Just last year, researchers found that forehead creases were actually a cutting-edge biometric target, and suggested them as a superior alternative to fingerprints (contactless) and facial recognition (blocked by masks during a pandemic).

This section suggests that Anthropic will come up with its own proof-of-personhood scheme, superior to OpenAI’s WorldCoin in that it uses the newer forehead-based biometric recognition (with the more commonly-used handprint as a backup). We’ll discuss more about why you might not want to be in their database later.

The Woman Of The Apocalypse

Revelation 12:1 introduces an unnamed figure commonly called the Woman of the Apocalypse:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

The woman gives birth to a son, who is implied to be the Messiah. Satan tries to kill the son, so the mother flees with her child to Heaven, where she waits for 1,260 days. This is obviously a reference to the Virgin Mary and Christ, but (as per the multilayered symbolism of Revelation) somehow also a reference to some specific person in the End Times.

I originally couldn’t figure out who that person was, but a now-deactivated Tumblr poster, resinsculpture, convinced me that it was Ursula von der Leyen, current president of the European Union.

Here is a typical official picture of von der Leyen. She is in her trademark yellow suit (“clothed with the sun”), standing with her head centered in the twelve stars of the EU flag (“upon her head a crown of twelve stars”).

In what sense is “the moon under her feet”? In her role as President, van der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament, which looks like this:

The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When van der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2

Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood:

If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good.

The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God

The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3:

And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.

The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah.

Second, 12:1:

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads.

The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel).

So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah.

The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”:

Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over…

…it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew.

In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies.

The Antichrist / The Dragon

Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon.

On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who?

John says (13:2 - 13:4)

The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast.

We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination:

But which venture capitalist?

Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia:

Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ.

What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles:

• “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)

• “The Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13)

I searched to see if any common names were echoes of these titles:

Google says that the most common name meaning “son of man” is “Anderson”, from Greek “Andreas” + son. And Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalist is named Marc Andreessen.

Is there any venture capitalist who calls themselves the “Alpha and Omega”?

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim.

Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side.

During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast?

This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol.

But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective.

Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God.

If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders:

• Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)

• Leopard = X.AI, founded by Elon Musk (South African)

• Winged Lion = OpenAI, founded by Sam Altman (Jewish). The winged lion would have been recognizable to Daniel’s audience as a symbol of the Babylonian Empire; Daniel was writing during the Babylonian Captivity, when there was no independent Israeli state and all Jews lived in Babylon.

• Many-Headed Monster = Anthropic, as in the Beast section above.

Anthropic is pictured as having ten horns. An angel explains to Daniel that these are its ten “kings”. If we stick to our interpretation above, where the horns = decacorn = billions of dollars, perhaps in this vision, the horns are billionaire investors controlling the company. The Antichrist - the “little horn” or “horn with human eyes” - is a billionaire who will manage some kind of boardroom coup or hostile takeover, displacing the original investors.

In what sense is Marc Andreessen a “little horn”? In traditional commentary on Daniel, this refers to the Antichrist starting as a seemingly-insignificant king, much weaker than those he ultimately defeats. This matches Andreessen, who, with a fortune of only $2 billion, seems an unlikely candidate to stand up to titans like Brin ($150 billion) or Musk ($400 billion).

In what sense is Marc Andreessen a “horn with human eyes”? Here, as before, I think it helps to try being as literal as possible:

The final three sections of this post - one on the Whore of Babylon, one on the New Jerusalem, and a section on the Battle of Armageddon that summarizes the other and presents my blow-by-blow theory of how the Apocalypse happens - are part of the secret teachings, ie below the paywall.

Read more

Walking between gates 12 and 14 in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, you might see a sign for gate infinity — and that’s when you’ll know you’ve reached the Interimaginary Departures. While the rest of this terminal services domestic flights, this lounge sends its passengers to Narnia, Hogwarts, Panem, Middle Earth, the Emerald City, the Hundred Acre Woods, and hundreds of other destinations from the universes of literature, film, and video games.

Your first clue that Interimaginary Departures isn’t a normal gate is the fantastical FIDS (Flight Information Display System) board. But look a little closer and you’ll see even more magic. There’s a bright white wall whose elegant molding is not only visibly incongruent from the rest of the concourse but physically too, slicing through the lounge’s chairs and furniture at a seven degree tilt. There are rabbits, a la Alice in Wonderland, woven into the carpet and carved into the machinery. And regardless of time or weather, the gate’s doors are cracked ajar with a stunning white light. (A brass sign warns you that this is a portal between dimensions and most certainly not an exit.)

Visitors to the lounge can use the interactive ticket machine to print their boarding passes for Interimaginary flights, though not without answering a few existential questions first. If you stick around long enough, you might even catch a couple announcements to prepare passengers for their upcoming trips.

The gate was designed by Janet Zweig in 2021, though a full list of credits can be found in the exhibit’s floating bookshelf that faces the rest of the terminal.