Palantir: the Panopticon Company
If non-tech people know about Palantir at all, it’s as a shadowy boogeyman for the risks of government surveillance. Their co-founder, Alex Karp, thinks they are way more than that. In his February 2026 letter to shareholders, he says that Palantir is “at the outset, the very beginning, of a generational project.”
I actually agree that Palantir is an important company. They are at the forefront of the erosion of privacy in our connected age. In summary [my words not theirs]:
Traditional sources of information about people, like government records or purchase histories, once fragmented in physical documents, have been migrating into computer databases for decades.
The expansion of connected computing means that vast new data repositories are now available as well - internet usage, GPS location, security cameras, etc.
The continued advancement of computing power means it’s possible to write software that combines this data at scale.
AI can make sense of the combined data in powerful ways that human analysts cannot.
Palantir is a pioneer in steps 3 and 4 - integrating all that data and helping people understand it. There are business uses for this, but Karp is particularly focused on the military and national security. As he puts it, “if you’re doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it’s analytics or AI, you’re going to have to find something like our products.”
Last year, Karp and his deputy Nicholas Zamiska published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. On Saturday, Palantir published a 22-point summary of the book to their X account. Like most high-minded statements of bold principles, it’s really just promoting their business interests. Well, mostly. It’s also an unapologetic defense of chauvinistic nationalism backed with military power. The subtext is that if you resist Palantir, you’re not a patriot, and might even be a target.
But first, Guardianship, again
According to the Palantir manifesto, we aren’t thankful enough for our self-appointed leaders. “We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life… We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act… The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.”
Oh, and also: “Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.” This is such a cramped and obfuscated piece of text that I’d need a separate article to unpack it, but I think they’re trying to say that we shouldn’t even expect to be happy with our leaders.
All of this is classic Guardianship, which I wrote about last year: “Guardianship argues that societies will be most successful if they grant absolute authority to a small minority of people who are identified and trained as moral and technical leaders. This is better than democracy, because most people cannot understand what is in the best interest of society, and so are not qualified to govern.”
This is hard enough to swallow in Plato’s idealized model, but it’s ludicrous when applied to middle-aged corporate executives. Palantir enters the realm of self-parody when they defend Elon Musk: “The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative… Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed.” We don’t snicker at Musk because we’re blinkered philistines. We dismiss his ideas because he’s a toxic blowhard. He’s been making exaggerated promises that don’t come true for a decade, bullies civil servants online, and calls the Cybertruck “our best ever from Tesla” when it’s a well-documented piece of junk.
Palantir’s special sauce: nationalist military power
I complain about Guardianship in social media because it’s hypocritical, but at least when Meta or Google execs defend their power, they try to sound like they’re just using it to serve customers and make money in a (theoretically) competitive market. Palantir isn’t satisfied with that. They position their product’s military application as a matter of national survival. I am not exaggerating. See for yourself:
The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software… The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose… If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software… One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
“Free and democratic societies” get a shout-out, but the manifesto’s ideal society is built around chauvinistic nationalism: “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive… We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity… The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.”
In brief: weaponizing Palantir’s software is key to global power, and that power should be deployed in defense of a specific, moralistic vision of what a good society should be. Good times.
All enemies, foreign and domestic
This could all, perhaps, still be debated as a matter of normal politics. But Palantir takes one critical, and dangerous, step further. They propose to turn their data-driven Eye of Sauron inward, onto domestic criminals: “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.” The word “violence” gives them the flimsiest of fig leaves, but as the current US regime’s labelling of the mythical “Antifa” organization as domestic terrorists and threat to use the military against the “enemy within” shows, authoritarians love to relabel internal dissidents as violent criminals. As I wrote last June, unchecked surveillance in the name of safety is dangerous.
Karp tries to rebut this fear in his letter to shareholders by emphasizing Palantir’s privacy controls. “It is confounding to many that the same software system that is capable of preventing a terror attack may be equally capable of preventing an unconstitutional intrusion into the private lives of citizens by the state. But that is the software system that we have, quite intentionally, built.”
This also shows why the Guardianship argument is so threatening in the case of Palantir. Only Karp and his team have full knowledge of how their system has been built and control over how it is deployed. For example, Palantir is helping ICE identify deportation targets today because Karp supports strict immigration controls. Does Karp also agree with hunting down “Antifa members” as domestic terrorists? What happens if a future government wants to use Palantir software in a way that Karp doesn’t approve of?
I am not sure that Karp and Palantir even realize the implications of their statements. They may honestly think they just want to keep us safe. But they are setting themselves up as the moral guardians of the nation, justified by nothing but their power and self-declared rectitude. This is the same dangerous impulse as every army chief who has ever marched their troops into a capital city “to protect the republic.”
I can’t sum this up any better than a twenty-year-old quote from the Battlestar Galactica reboot: “There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
