Palantir Technologies, the software-developing, data-mining, national-security-oriented giant, fielding approximately 4,500 employees around the globe, is facilitating lethal violence by armed agents, not only against anti-American foreign terrorist organizations, militias, and other “enemies of the West,” but also against non-violent U.S. citizens and supervised immigrants in American cities, towns and workplaces.
Although much of the company’s work is purely commercial—helping business-corporations to restructure supply chains, information flows, and customer services— extensive reporting and commentary across a broad political spectrum has made clear that, as The Financial Times reports, Palantir has “revolutionized the U.S. defense industry…in part by creating a new role: the ‘forward-deployed engineer,’ embedded in war zones or placed on factory floors, who [cater] to the needs of clients ranging from police forces to chemicals groups and adapted Palantir’s platforms to suit.”
Many of the consequences are dangerous and sometimes stunningly lethal, owing significantly, in my estimation, to Palantir CEO Alexander C. Karp’s deeply personal and cultural preoccupations, which are driving a shift in the company’s work and rhetoric from economic advancement to political ideology. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, Karp endorsed the late political scientist Samuel Huntington’s dictum that “the rise of the West was not made possible by ‘the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’”
That’s more true now because America’s “tech lords” have superseded the 19th-Century “lords of the loom and the lash,” who owned Satanic textile mills and enslaved people who harvested their cotton. Those lords had been superseded, in turn, by the early 20th-century lords of mines, oil wells, and communication and transportation networks (railroads, telegraphs, tabloids) that regimented and exploited their workers. Now, those “lords” are being superseded by powerful men who emulate the Dark Lord Sauron in Tolkien’s mythical Lord of the Rings, who owned “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” Peter Thiel, Karp’s co-founder, named Palantir for the palantiri, or “seeing stones,” in Tolkien’s fable that can view distant events.
Whatever the civic, democratic pretensions of Thiel, Karp, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen (a tech lord who’s also a close Trump advisor), and other lords of digital detection-and-targeting, several of them are unprecedentedly intrusive in workers’ and customers’ lives. The companies draw their own real-world power partly from energy-devouring, planet-deranging data centers and significantly from billions of dollars in government contracts and concessions that, under Donald Trump, exceed even those given to the old railroads and oil companies.
Palantir is a vivid instance of a dangerous evolution that’s merging private enterprise with traditional military capabilities. Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin report in the London Review of Books that “As Palantir’s founders embrace Trump’s increasingly authoritarian second term, its market capitalization has risen to $320 billion,150 times earnings.”
This is no longer merely the “military-industrial complex” that rightly worried U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960. The dividing line between the military and the commercial is increasingly. Fortunately, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has showed some courage and a moral compass by refusing to allow his AI platform to target enemies for the Pentagon, but his resistance prompted Trump to retaliate by claiming that Anthropic was a “supply chain risk.” Meanwhile, Trump has welcomed Palantir’s contracts and professional contacts with his corrupt, increasingly brutal state capitalism.
Karp is sometimes a sharp dialectician in his comments about all this, especially when he’s deflecting others’ accusations that the company is constructing an Orwellian Panopticon for governments to surveil and suppress their own non-violent citizens. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), a brave drafter of an “Internet Bill of Rights” that hasn’t become law, represents a Silicon Valley District housing the headquarters of tech lords (although not of Palantir), yet he has refused and/or returned their campaign contributions. Palantir-linked campaign donations spark controversy among Democrats.
Karp, in a letter to shareholders early in 2026, accused Palantir’s detractors of willful ignorance: “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. And such software, alongside the large language models that have remade the world, is set not only to further reshape U.S. national security, but also to transform our collective ability to guard against government overreach.”
A fair comparison of Karp’s avowals with his other assertions and decisions would expose a credibility gap that’s becoming a credibility canyon, as in his defense of ICE‘s violent, unconstitutional tactics. Assailing what he calls doubters’ “Palantir Derangement Syndrome,” Karp has exhibited his own variant of that derangement: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” he said in a talk in New York in February, 2025 promoting his and his assistant Nicholas Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.”
“Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable,” write Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung in their post, “Planet Palantir,” on the Foreign Policy in Focus website.
Palantir has opened more windows for official surveillance than it has opened for democratic dissent, vastly increasing governments’ ability to identify, track, detain, and kill human targets, including citizen protestors and immigrants who are already documented. Owing to its work with the Trump administration, Palantir “is now poised to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service,” noted former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in The Guardian: “The administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims…”
Karp’s characteristic disclaimer whenever he’s caught in his credibility canyon is conveyed somewhat indulgently by his biographer Michael Steinberger in The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. “If abuses of data are taking place with Palantir software, it’s not because Palantir is doing it,” Steinberger told The Guardian, “it’s because the clients are doing it. I think of Palantir software as like a toaster. If you burn your toast, you don’t blame the toaster.”
Although Karp very publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024, he donated $1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc Super PAC just after the 2024 election. And Palantir had donated $5 million towards Trump’s “Salute to America” military parade on July 4, 2019. Karp has described himself as “an independent who admires what Trump has done on many things.” And Trump has hailed Palantir for its “great warfighting capabilities and equipment.” Several Palantir employees have gone into the Trump administration, including Gregory Barbaccia, who became the chief information officer for the entire federal government in January 2025.
Wired magazine reports that “Palantir alumni helped to staff Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which Karp praised effusively as it slashed U.S. aid spending and fired thousands of federal workers.” At the same time, “In the 12 months following Trump’s return to office, Palantir’s revenue from federal contracts soared to nearly $2.2 billion, a 65 per cent increase on the previous year.”
“You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabbers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries,” he told the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd: “If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us.”
Tirades like that advance the “broader ethos” that Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller represented when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
That assumption was present in the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, which recounts how, in 416 B.C., Athenians who were about to conquer the island of Melos advised its would-be defenders to submit rather than fight because “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In other words, might makes right. Yet it didn’t for the Athenians, who, hubristic after crushing Melos, undertook a big but failed invasion of Sicily, and who, a few years later, were defeated decisively by Sparta. Mightn’t hubristic Americans, having subdued Venezuela, be humbled now by Iran and, soon enough, by China?
Karp is committed to preventing that from happening, but for his own historical and personal reasons. Before he and Peter Thiel met at Stanford and, later, co-founded Palantir, Karp had studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Haverford College and, in 1991, at age 24, he had gone to Germany on an intellectual and personal pilgrimage, seeking guidance from the philosopher Jürgen Habermas to understand why Germany, whose philosophical and cultural riches were beacons of Western civilization for Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, had imploded into fascism and antisemitism.
That puzzle still preoccupies Karp, partly owing to his own German-Jewish ancestry, but it has also haunted many other Jews, including me. I knew Jürgen Habermas fairly well for quite a few years, and, several months before his death early this year, he shared with me some of his impressions of Karp, who’d been his student at the Goethe Institut in Frankfurt. Habermas showed me a copy of a letter he’d written to Steinberger, explaining that “I remember Alexander Karp as a peculiar person with a mind of his own, self-willed, in his interventions rushed but not always very clear. I often had the feeling of not getting what he was really at.” (Steinberger hasn’t quoted these observations, but his book reports honestly on Habermas’ impressions and on Karp’s upbringing, youthful pilgrimage, and subsequent zealotry on behalf of “the West.”)
In my estimation, three swift, dark undercurrents have shaped and shadowed Karp since his early years.
First, burdened since childhood by dyslexia and by being “unable to sit still, waving his arms, and thinking faster than he could speak”—as during his widely viewed defense of ICE’s enforcement tactics on a New York Times “Dealbook” podcast in December, 2025 —Karp claimed in a Palantir X post that “The neurally divergent (like myself) will disproportionately shape America’s future.” He told Steinberger that such disabilities, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, had “fucked me but also given me wings to fly,” searching constantly for new possibilities while struggling to manage and mobilize his disabilities.
Second, Karp’s leftist-activist upbringing by his Jewish father and Black mother, and by differing, sometimes harsh, patches of schooling in Philadelphia, have seeded his passion to change the world. In this, he draws deeply from a distinctive historical strain in his father’s German-Jewish ancestry and from his own absorption of its sensibilities and perceptions, reflected in Palantir’s extraordinary commitment to Israel—in ways that are undeniable but unmentioned by the company or by critics who fear appearing antisemitic.
Half a century before Karp’s 1967 birth, a small but vocal minority of Germany’s Jewish intellectual and religious leaders, craving release from centuries of extreme marginalization by antisemitism, hurled themselves into euphoric, patriotic support of the imperial German Kaiserreich’s rush into World War I. (Amos Elon recounts it all harrowingly in The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.)
Karp may not have been wrong to take out a full-page New York Times advertisement reading, “Palantir Stands with Israel” a few days after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 slaughter and/or kidnapping of 1,200 Israelis. Nor was he necessarily wrong to fly Palantir’s board of directors to Tel Aviv for one of their meetings in a show of solidarity. But now that Israel has shown that trauma’s victims sometimes re-live and impose trauma on others, Karp risks doing the same.
Third, he has become an equally passionate, histrionic rider of riptides of marketing and finance. Some capitalist “animal spirits” and “irrational exuberance” aren’t much-more calamitous than those of snake-oil peddlers and robber-barons in America’s “Wild West” and Gilded Age, or of Hollywood cowboy heroes John Wayne, Wyatt Earp and Ben Cartwright, who imposed some order and decency on saloon rascals and cattle rustlers in the old American West.
But when capitalist “animal spirits” run unchecked in stampedes of greedy investors, or when they’re harnessed to organized greed, they can generate poisonous spiritual animus: Peter Thiel has claimed to discover “the Antichrist” in global and financial regulatory bodies and even in environmental activism as presaging a totalitarian, “one-world” state. And a takedown in The New Republic of Karp’s The Technological Republic excerpted Karp’s hyper-“patriotic” rant to defense contractors and U.S. military brass in December, 2024 at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, CA. (This short video of Karp’s talk displays his manner of speaking.)
“Americans are the most loving, God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you’re a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense…what I want, and what I think my peers want is: Why are these people keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations—basically a discriminatory institution against anything good.”
It’s grimly true that fair-minded Americans have had to take up guns at times to forestall devastation and submission to organized thuggery at home and abroad. But some Americans live for those times, fantasizing constantly about preventing or avenging attacks by smashing fascism with something like fascism itself, instead of achieving reconstructive justice. Karp has never specified what he thinks should happen to the friends, cousins, bank accounts, and mistresses of federal ICE agents who, with Palantir’s technology and guidance, have targeted, detained, and even murdered God-loving, fair-minded American citizens.
Palantir’s near-fusion with the Trump Administration should remind us also that, early in 1941, the Irish-American writer Francis Hackett published What Mein Kampf Means to America to America, to warn that a society’s vociferous self-proclaimed liberators are often intent on becoming its dictators. “Right before our eyes, as like something on the screen,” Hackett observed in 1941,
“The vast social fabric of [Germany’s Weimar Republic] has crumbled…The Nazi hand has been so much quicker than the democratic eye, and for his violence we have so little precedent. All the democratic countries, or if you like, the parliamentary countries, are unaccustomed to murder gangs…
….We…who made for ourselves a habit of give-and-take in the faith that we were not at cross-purposes with anyone, have to confess that if goodwill runs out of the machinery of government and domestication is wrecked, to repose on our security is suicide.”
Historical analogies can be facile and even dangerous, but ignoring history’s cautions is equally dangerous to traumatized people who are primed to reenact history’s follies, as Trump and Palantir seem driven to displace democracy with statist, capitalist authoritarianism.
Although Karp has often presented his own aspirations and priorities as “socialist,” his nationalist proclamations about America’s supremacy and its adversaries’ perfidy are driven by his own preternatural insecurities as well as by his considerable talents. As his residual “socialism” combines with strident statism and with billions of dollars of investment and income from Trump, he’s advancing an American variant of what Germany’s Lord Sauron in the 1930s would have called “National Socialism.”
Cover photo: A triple exposure photograph of a computer binary code and of the Palantir artificial intelligence logo featuring a portrait of its co founder and CEO Alex Karp at Kerlouan in Brittany in France on May 16 2026. (Photo by Vincent Feuray / Hans Lucas via AFP)
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