‘Palantir expanded military tech into domestic policing, and embraced a 21st-century culture of mass surveillance.’ (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty)
The story of 21st-century American military power is increasingly inseparable from one company — Palantir. It is a data analytics, AI and software company which sifts through masses of data, arranging disparate pieces of information about people into a single database to suit their clients’ objectives. The company is in rude health: earlier this year, it posted record growth of $1.9 billion, with revenue from US government contracts jumping a full 90%. But, given its sordid association with the Trump administration’s pet projects, ICE and the Iran war, how will it fare now that the Democrats are ascendant, and control both Congress and the Senate?
The irony here is that Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, comes from what would appear to be an impeccably liberal background. He describes himself as a “progressive” who voted for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris — something which, in light of the midterms, he has reiterated. “I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir — all our products, are essentially progressive.” His black mother and Jewish father would take him on civil rights marches as a child. Karp studied his philosophy PhD in Germany, and with unkempt grey hair, his aesthetic is every bit that of the charming, eccentric philosopher. In 2023, he declared “if fascism comes, I will be the first or second up against the wall”.
How is it that a thoughtful, idiosyncratic, liberal academic, leads a company which has enabled unlawful detainment, illegal warfare, and what has been described as a genocide in Gaza? More existentially, if someone with Alex Karp’s beliefs can end up leading a company like Palantir — what does that say about the nature of American liberalism itself?
Certainly, death and destruction in the Middle East have given the company plenty to do since Trump became President. (Only yesterday, Trump nominated Palantir executive Michael LoSapio to become director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)). The data that Palantir uses to generate its “kill lists” has been used by both the IDF in Gaza and the US in Iran. In this way, the convenience of Deliveroo is brought to the terrain of modern warfare: Palantir’s software operates at such speed that it enabled the US to hit 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran.
Unsurprisingly, targets generated at this pace are not always accurate. On the opening day of the Iran war, the US launched an airstrike against a girls’ primary school, killing up to 180 people — mostly children under 12. Given the extensive use of AI targeting in this war, the strike may have been conducted using Palantir’s AI-powered software, the “Maven Smart System”. Information about the school, including the address, was publicly available online. Preliminary reports suggest the US military relied on outdated intelligence, which labelled the school a military target, despite the fact a wall was built to separate it from an IRGC medical and cultural facilities over a decade ago.
Palantir says that it is “not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies”. But, due diligence could have avoided this horror — and the pace of AI target selection is the enemy of due diligence. Palantir took over the contract to build the Maven Smart System from Google in 2019, which withdrew its participation owing to massive internal backlash. Other clients of Palantir include ICE, which uses its databases to identify and track down migrants for deportation. Synthesising photo albums, phone records and live locations into one single all-seeing database, Palantir then puts this information at the fingertips of ICE, one that frequently breaks the law.
In a strange way, it would be comforting if Karp’s hypocrisy could simply be put down to an abdication of principles for the sake of profit. The truth is far more complex. Karp has a systematic philosophy for maintaining America’s global dominance in the 21st century — and Palantir’s role in guaranteeing it. This is outlined in The Technological Republic, a book he published last year. To examine where America’s warmaking establishment has been and where it’s going, it is useful for us to see the world through Alex Karp’s eyes.
The ideological engine which keeps Palantir running consists of several propositions. First, Karp claims America has a duty to dominate the global order, with the deadliest AI tools that Palantir can supply. Second, this global dominance is justified because America is the embodiment of Western civilisation’s virtues. Third, these truths are ignored by a complacent, “woke” and ungrateful elite, one that dominates both Silicon Valley and elite university campuses. Therefore, Karp argues, war-readiness abroad requires an unrelenting commitment to fighting the culture war at home. This is one intellectual bridge between Karp’s “progressive” foreign policy views and that of MAGA Republicanism.
It is worth examining these beliefs and their contradictions. Karp believes the road to utopia is paved with fear. “You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabbers… out of our adversaries,” he has said. “If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared… they will attack us”. In another interview, he remarked that “the chance of world survival goes up as America becomes stronger and more dominant”. In Karp’s framing, then, America’s security, the protection of its values and its drive for world dominance become synonymous — justified under the fuzzy rubric of “patriotism”.
What Karp fails to acknowledge is that America’s overwhelming power has encouraged war rather than removed the need for it. Trump’s reckless conflict in Iran, waged with ever-more convenience due precisely to Palantir, is merely the latest iteration of how an unconstrained global power behaves. Karp fails to examine this irony. For him, protecting “the West” can only ever mean uncritically supplying tech to whoever occupies the White House. In an interview proclaiming his support for the Iran war, he triumphantly remarks that “our adversaries and enemies are witnessing an ability to fight that they don’t have”. Karp has embraced Palantir’s role in waging destabilising wars, whilst claiming his company’s tech would help create the conditions for peace. Perhaps the extraordinary wealth which he has accrued helps resolve this paradox.
Karp’s thinking has deep roots within America’s foreign policy establishment. The anti-détente hawks of the Seventies sought to combat the notion that defeat in Vietnam signalled American decline was inevitable — and that the US therefore needed to accommodate the Soviet Union. Instead, a blend of Reagan Republicans and hawkish Democrats claimed that the US should strive for military supremacy to defend its values. They believed their moment of vindication came when the Berlin Wall fell and America’s geopolitical rival crumbled, an event which took place when Karp was in his early twenties.
This ambition was encapsulated in the 1992 draft Defence Planning Guidance (DPG) — the policy document guiding US grand strategy. “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” its authors wrote, outlining their goal of a “world order… ultimately backed by the US”.
In 2003, a little over a decade later, Palantir was founded in the crucible of the War on Terror. The company received almost $2 million from the CIA to kickstart its growth, with its tech deployed to track anti-US rebels and the roadside bombs they planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Through these Bush-era conflicts, Palantir won over a group of special-forces officers who soon became its advocates within the military-industrial complex.
Its technology was soon imported from Afghanistan to American cities like New Orleans where, in 2012, it was used for “predictive policing”. This system claimed to predict which people and places would be drivers of crime, based on disparate pieces of personal data, collated via Palantir’s software. Six years later, with Palantir accused of enabling racial profiling and eroding civil liberties, its New Orleans contract was suspended.
But in post-9/11 America, where concerns about privacy became subordinated to the promise of a secure nation, Palantir was on an upward trajectory. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, of which Palantir would be a beneficiary, was rushed through Congress just after the September 11 attacks. This landmark new law allowed the state to monitor Americans without “probable cause”, and gave the government sweeping new powers to sift through reams of citizens’ data held by third parties, including doctors, libraries and universities. For a company predicated on hoovering up personal data and synthesising it for the authorities, this was the perfect environment in which to grow. Palantir expanded military tech into domestic policing, and embraced a 21st-century culture of mass surveillance. In part, the creation of Trump’s ICE was predicated on these developments. This helps explain Karp’s support of ICE — despite his self-proclaimed liberalism.
Yet this only partially explains why Karp has backed the darkest American policies on Gaza and ICE. After all, if America’s embodiment of liberal and “Western values” is what gives it the moral authority to dominate the world order, then why does Palantir help to undermine these values so demonstrably?
This is best explained by focusing on Karp’s justification for the places Palantir’s tech is now being used. “From my perspective,” he remarked when asked about Gaza, “it’s not just about Israel… It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living?’” Karp’s identification of Israel as part of “the West” thus absolves it of guilt almost by definition.
This worldview means that when Palantir technology is alleged to be involved in bombing a girls’ school in Iran, Karp simply insists that the company’s systems are “very precise, very controlled”. Palantir’s relationship with ICE is based on a parallel set of contradictions. Some might see ICE as the handmaiden of American fascism, but Karp argues that Trump’s crackdown on immigration — whatever the cost — is necessary to prevent the rise of the real “far Right”. Today, Karp claims Palantir’s AI technology is the 21st century’s answer to the atomic bomb, advocating “a new Manhattan project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield”.
Indeed, Karp even framed the AI technological revolution as a boon to President Trump’s base, claiming it “disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic voters and makes them economically powerless, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working class, often male, working-class voters”.
Karp wants to fight the culture war at home to win support for an aggressive foreign policy abroad, but Palantir is no force for egalitarianism. And nor is the company simply servicing a war-making establishment. Instead, Palantir is reshaping warfare itself, just as it is creating a new authoritarianism at home. Karp himself is a zealot trapped by a series of paradoxes, but enabled by his growing wealth and power. Palantir’s skyrocketing profit margins will only encourage Karp to keep playing the role of philosopher king. Still he presents himself as a guarantor of the liberal West, even as Palantir erodes those values from within. And the Democrats would be wise to steer well-clear of him.