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

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.”