Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, knows his products can be dangerous. Built to extract insights from torrents of data with machine learning and AI, his company’s software is optimizing manufacturing and supply chains but also warfare and kill chains, helping target weapons in Ukraine and across the Middle East. To some, accelerated AI development is an existential threat worthy of a pause. Karp—a self-described socialist who earned his philosophy doctorate in Germany before Palantir chairman Peter Thiel tapped him to run the startup two decades ago—looks at those dangers differently. The way he sees it, not moving fast is the existential risk.
“Our goal as a company is to help the United States and its allies avoid war,” says Karp. “The only way to do that is to project such overwhelming technological and strategic superiority that we scare the daylights out of our adversaries.”
That includes building Maven, the battlefield decision-making system at the heart of the Pentagon’s AI efforts. (Palantir first picked up the contract after Google, prodded by employee protests, walked away from the project in 2018.) Early versions of the software have proven pivotal for surveillance and targeting over Ukraine, and have accelerated the US’s ability to attack Houthi rocket launchers. in and around the Red Sea. A targeting operation that required 2,000 people in 2003 now needs just 20.
“The AI revolution is one in which small groups can drastically outperform much larger groups,” Karp says. “Wars are now won on the basis of superior AI and electronic warfare.”
After years in the shadows, where it helped US and foreign governments find terrorists and roadside bombs, Palantir has been expanding its reach on the battlefield and the homeland, too, helping wrangle data and deploy algorithms in all kinds of enterprises, from mining to healthcare. , in order to connect dots, root out inefficiencies, and “bring your enterprise back to its principal purpose,” says Karp. According to the company, one large American insurer recently used 78 AI agents on Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform to automate part of their underwriting process, shortening work that once took two weeks to three hours.
Both on and off the battlefield, Karp sees most of AI’s value accruing to those with preexisting scale, capital, and software power. And that bodes well for his company too.
“It’s like back to the future,” he says. “We’re at the forefront of managing large language models and AI, just like we were at the forefront of managing data.”
