Palantir faces fierce backlash over AI-driven military manifesto calling for draft and weapons

Palantir Faces Backlash Over AI-Driven Military Doctrine - Decrypt

Academics and commentators warned that the message promotes a militarized vision of AI and closer ties between technology firms and the defense sector. Palantir reignited debate over the role of artificial intelligence in warfare in a weekend social media thread on X, drawing criticism for promoting a vision of AI-driven military deterrence. The defense technology company used the post on Saturday to summarize arguments from "The Technological Republic," a 2025 book co-authored by CEO Alex Karp. "Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible," the company wrote. "The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation." The thread argues that modern military power will increasingly depend on software and technological "hard power," rather than traditional hardware. It also frames the development of AI-driven weapons as inevitable and argues that the central question is which nations will build and control them. "If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software," Palantir wrote. "We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm's way." Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir develops data analysis and artificial intelligence software used by governments and intelligence agencies. The company has secured multibillion-dollar contracts with the U.S. military. Palantir's thread extended beyond military technology into broader geopolitical ideas. The thread also suggested that Germany and Japan should reconsider military restrictions imposed by the United States and its allies after World War II. "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price," Palantir said. "A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia." It also raises the possibility of universal national service, a sentiment recently echoed by the Donald Trump administration, which instituted an automatic military draft registration policy earlier this month. "National service should be a universal duty," the post said. "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost." The posts drew criticism from technology experts and policy advocates who said the arguments promote a vision of global politics defined by competition for AI military capability, and warned that framing artificial intelligence as a strategic deterrent risks encouraging more aggressive defense policies. Savannah Wooten, a policy advocate with the non-profit group Public Citizen, said tech companies often claim a national security role to win government contracts. "A firm like Palantir will gladly backfill a national security rationale to ensure the same outcome for itself. No state should have corporate executives leading its decision-making, let alone the country with the largest and most heavily funded military in the world," Wooten told Decrypt. "A corporation will not look after everyday people, and Palantir pretending it has a moral imperative to do so is nothing more than a savvy PR move." Yanis Varoufakis, a left-wing economist who served as Greece's finance minister, similarly criticized Palantir's arguments as dismissive of the public, supportive of force-driven policy, and aligned with billionaire interests, warning of growing ties between surveillance capitalism and state power. "Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans," he wrote. "The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt - i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value." Palantir supporter Shawn Maguire, a partner at the VC firm Sequoia, called the company's post "brilliant," writing on X: "Despite what the extremes preach on social media and Ivy League campuses, Palantir represents the ideological center with a rarely articulated moral clarity." The debate comes amid a growing divide over the role artificial intelligence should play in warfare and society. Some, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have pushed back on the military use of their technology to produce AI-enabled weapons, warning that the systems could introduce new risks. However, others, including U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, argue that democratic nations must develop AI-driven military capabilities to deter rivals such as China and Russia, which are also investing heavily in the technology. Still, political scientist Donald Moynihan said statements like Palantir's thread provide insight into how powerful technology leaders view politics and power. "When they roll out their political manifestos, we should take them seriously, if not literally," Moynihan wrote on Substack. "Public statements by these actors, while often couched in statesmanlike or visionary terms, offer insights into a growing power elite: what they like, what they hate, their enemies, what they felt are entitled to."

What the Palantir CEO's 'manifesto' tells us about the changing face of war

A Palantir post citing CEO Alex Karp's book called for mandatory military service and closer ties between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon while criticizing "hollow pluralism" and warning of a new AI arms race. But Palantir is just one of the tech companies blurring the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington - while growing too big too fast for traditional oversight. Data-processing giant Palantir Technologies on Saturday posted a sales brochure cum manifesto that called for Silicon Valley to pledge itself heart and soul to the US military-industrial complex. "The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation," Palantir posted in a 22-point summary of "The Technological Republic" by CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. The stakes, it said, could not be higher. "The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications," the company said in its post on X. "One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending," it read. "A new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin." But the scope of the post went far beyond the usual corporate goal of chasing after defense contracts, going on to propose the introduction of a mandatory US national service and an end to the post-war "neutering" of the Japanese and German militaries. It also suggested a more muscular role for tech companies in fighting "violent crime" and denounced the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures". The document's final points have proved some of the most controversial. Having slammed what it described as the "elite's intolerance of religious belief", the post called on the US to reject "a vacant and hollow pluralism". "Certain cultures and indeed subcultures ... have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful," the post read. Just which cultures those might be remained up to the reader's own judgement. Alternately ridiculed for its would-be warrior-poet prose and pilloried for its full-throated support of US militarism - even as the world reels from the shockwaves of the US-Israeli war on Iran - the backlash owes much to the already-ominous cloud hanging over the company that posted it. 'Optimizing the kill chain' Launched by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir famously takes its name from the seeing stones of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings book series. Rescued from the island kingdom of Westernesse, these stones allowed the men of the West to see and to speak across vast distances, binding the realms of their Middle Earth colonies to one another until plague and civil war saw them slide into ruin. What Palantir does is more mundane, though its scope seems as wide-reaching at times. Palantir provides its customers with data-processing software that allows them to pull together information scattered across different platforms and formats. By doing this, analysts can pick out complex patterns that would otherwise remain buried in the raw data, and refine their work accordingly. It is the nature of these clients, and the use to which these tools are put, that have earned Palantir its somewhat sinister reputation. The US government remains its main client, using its services extensively through its military, intelligence and police forces. Former Palantir employees are among those criticizing its partnership with the administration of US President Donald Trump. Palantir's products have been widely used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in carrying out the mass and often violent deportations of undocumented migrants. The Department of Homeland Security awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract last April to build an AI-powered system that would allow the agency to track people to be detained and deported. Washington's close allies also number among the company's clients. The UK agreed to pay the company more than $405 million to help the National Health Service process patient data. Perhaps most controversially, Palantir has also supplied Israel's military with AI-powered analytics tools during its brutal Gaza campaign, which killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to UN figures, and left much of the besieged territory in ruins. Holding its annual board meeting in Israel in 2024, Palantir signed a strategic partnership with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to strengthen the country's "war effort". The company has not shied away from its militaristic bent. Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar - who was recently commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve - told the New York Times last year that the company was "very well known" for its work finding the US military people to kill. "You can think about that as you're optimizing the kill chain from sensor to shooter, they call it doctrinally, but it's the same thing as: How do I find the enemy targets?" he told the paper. The West against the rest William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the US-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that the tech company's close relationship with Washington was born in the early days of the War on Terror. "Palantir's first big government contract came in around 2003 from In-Q-Tel ... to provide the intelligence community with greater capacity to crunch, sort and share the large quantities of data it had collected," he said. "The goal was to avoid the failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks, where the FBI and CIA failed to share information which, if looked at together, might have given them enough information to thwart or arrest all or some of the hijackers before the attacks were carried out." Palantir's executives have often championed its willingness to work closely with the military as a unique selling point, even adopting military-style titles for its employees: The company is currently trying to boost the ranks of its "forward deployed engineers". It's a strategy that has reaped hefty rewards. The Pentagon on Wednesday asked Congress for $2.3 billion in additional funding to expand the Maven Smart System, a platform built by Palantir that effectively serves as an AI-powered targeting system for the US military. The contract had originally been awarded to Google, which was forced to abandon the project after employees revolted against the idea of putting such a tool in the hands of the US military. Palantir, by contrast, had no such scruples. Diederick van Wijk, a research fellow at the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute think-tank, said Palantir's leading figures saw the corporation as proudly taking on a responsibility that other tech companies had spurned. "What they believe - mainly Alex Karp as CEO and Peter Thiel as founder - is that Silicon Valley went astray from its founding principle, namely the military-industrial relationship, that Silicon Valley went all-in on consumer tech. And they feel that it's problematic that the companies that wield so much power and data and technology, that they are not more patriotic," he said. Although co-founders Thiel and Karp - who bonded in law school over a shared love of political debate - seemingly differ on the precise contours of their belief systems, van Wijk said that both men had long professed a devotion to an idealised framing of Western civilization. "From the very start they had a very normative idea of what that company should be - so they immediately limited themselves to working for the US and, later on, for Europe, but they always refused to work with Russia and China," he said. "Which was, in that time with all the early 2000s, 'the world is flat' ideas of [US journalist and commentator Thomas] Friedman, they were really an outlier - so there was always this more patriotic or American focus in their business conduct." "There was always this idea that this company could really help the West ... be ferocious, 'protect the fuck out of it', as Karp often describes it," he added. Making a killing Karp's call for a renewed focus on hard power in defense of a dangerously decadent West resonates strongly with language adopted by vocal figures within the second Trump administration - particularly Vice-President JD Vance, a former employee of Thiel's during his venture capital days. The US National Security Strategy published last year focused heavily on what it described as the risk of "civilizational erasure" facing Western Europe as a result of decades of mass migration. Thiel himself has said he believes democracy to be incompatible with freedom, and recently launched a series of lectures warning about the coming of the Antichrist. Karp, who supported Democratic candidate Kamala Harris's failed bid for the White House in 2024, maintains that he is a progressive fighting for centre-left policies. Unsurprisingly for a company with long-running contracts with the US military and immigration enforcement industries, Palantir has flourished since Trump's re-election last year. The company generated $4.5 billion in sales in 2025 alone - more than half of which came from government contracts. News of the former real estate mogul's re-election added another $23 billion to the company's market capitalization as investors rushed to buy stock in the company. The borders between client and contractor have also grown increasingly porous. Trump named a number of Palantir executives to key government roles after his re-election, while the tech company has in turn recruited former lawmakers and government officials. Read moreStreamlining the kill chain: how AI is changing modern warfare "Palantir is reaching far beyond its lane. They should be a vendor, providing technology that is useful in carrying out policies determined through the democratic process," Hartung said. "Their desire to shape US domestic and foreign policies - and their hiring of former government officials to promote their views, their funding of political campaigns, their use of dark money groups to oppose any candidate who even speaks of regulating AI, their ideology of disruption that has already done deep damage through things like the DOGE (billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency) ... is totally inappropriate, not to mention beyond their depth. They know certain things about certain types of technologies, but they are not philosopher kings." But while van Wijk said that Palantir executives' theatrical public statements made it easy to single the company out as a particularly sinister example of Silicon Valley overreach, he warned against missing the bigger picture. "At some point the technology would have been there anyway, and now we're focusing on this company - but we should focus on the underlying technology or the underlying structure, which is the technology that makes it possible to completely change the dynamic of law enforcement and warfare," he said. "But at the same time, they are not trying to hide that they have very peculiar ideas about society, right? If you hear Peter Thiel speak at interviews, that's not how the broader public thinks. He has been consistently anti-democracy, anti-government, anti-deliberative, anti-open society. He is a very outspoken libertarian with very peculiar ideas." Still, he argued, Palantir remains just one actor in an industry that remains largely untouched by public oversight. "I think that's where the unease comes from," van Wijk said. "It's ominous - the company has a bit of a conspiracy-like nature to it, so it's a very attractive scapegoat for maybe a broader trend in which technology is becoming so powerful and technological companies have been so unregulated that they are able, to a large extent, to do and innovate what they think should be done."

'Disturbing' And 'Narcissistic': UK Lawmakers Slam Palantir CEO's Manifesto - Palantir Technologies (NASD

Karp Pushes Tech Industry Toward National Security Role Palantir released a 22-point summary of Karp's book, highlighting his belief that Silicon Valley must take a more active role in national defense. The points argue that "Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime" and emphasize military support, stating, "If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software." The summary also reflects Karp's broader stance that software and AI will shape future "hard power," the Business Insider reported on Monday. Debate Grows Around Ideology and Business Ties Industry voices reacted sharply to Karp's views. Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire called the ideas "brilliant," adding that Palantir represents "the ideological center with a rarely articulated moral clarity." In contrast, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins argued that the company's growth is tied to its worldview, saying, "These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating." Palantir's manifesto has drawn sharp criticism from U.K. lawmakers and analysts over its views on power, AI, and global politics, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP, condemned the document, calling it "a parody of a RoboCop film" and "a disturbing narcissistic rant," arguing that it shows the company is "entirely unsuited" for handling sensitive U.K. public data. Victoria Collins, also a Liberal Democrat MP, echoed that criticism, saying the manifesto "sounds like the ramblings of a supervillain" and questioned its role in public services. Labor MP Rachael Maskell said the post was "quite disturbing" and suggested Palantir is positioning itself "at the heart of the defense revolution in the technological age," urging the government to reconsider its contracts. Tim Squirrell of Foxglove added that the statements reflect a company "fixated on U.S. dominance and utterly unsuited to being anywhere near our public services." AI, Society, and Policy Proposals Stir Controversy Karp's summary spans topics from AI-driven warfare to cultural and political issues, including a suggestion that the U.S. reconsider conscription and a claim that "the atomic age is ending" as AI reshapes deterrence. The document also critiques modern tech culture and calls for stronger economic and security outcomes, reinforcing Karp's long-held belief that the tech sector should play a central role in shaping national and global priorities. PLTR Price Action: Palantir Technologies shares were up 0.86% at $147.13 during premarket trading on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Palantir backs return of US military draft, slams 'regressive' cultures in 22-point manifesto

Palantir and its CEO Alex Karp called on the US to pursue AI-powered weapons, reinstate the military draft and shy away from "regressive" cultures in a buzzy 22-point manifesto. Billed as a summary of Karp's 2025 book "The Technological Republic," the wide-ranging, 1,000-word post on X outlined the AI software company's positions on how Silicon Valley and the US government should adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence. Palantir said it shared the post "because we get asked a lot." "The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose," the post stated. "Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed." Karp and fellow Palantir executive Nicholas Zamiska, who co-wrote "The Technological Republic," also argue that national service, including compulsory military enlistment, "should be a universal duty" for US citizens. "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," they wrote. The Palantir execs criticized what they described as society's embrace of "dysfunctional and regressive cultures" as well as "the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism." "We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity," the duo wrote. The post also weighed in on the current geopolitical environment, asserting that democracies can no longer rely on "soft power" to govern the international order. Palantir claimed the "atomic age is ending" and will be replaced by a "new era of deterrence bult on AI." Elsewhere, Karp and Zamiska argued that the "neutering of Germany and Japan" in the aftermath of World War II "must be undone." "The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price," they wrote. "A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia." Shares of Palantir sank about 1% in Monday trading. Karp, 58, cofounded Palantir in 2003 alongside billionaire Peter Thiel. The company has fostered close ties with the Trump administration, including work with the US military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Karp took an unorthodox path to running a tech company, earning a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Germany before entering the business world. In January, Karp made headlines with a warning that AI "will destroy" jobs based on college degrees in the humanities, while boosting the market for vocational careers.