What future does Palantir CEO Alex Karp envision?

In 2003, investor Peter Thiel and social theory scholar Alex Karp founded a company named after the magical seeing stones from "The Lord of the Rings"—artifacts that allow one to see from afar. In Tolkien's novel, one of the palantíri was owned by the wizard Saruman, who used it to communicate with the Dark Lord and gradually succumbed to his influence.

The name carries another symbolic layer. In Tolkien's legendarium, one of the stones—the Stone of Elostirion—did not connect its owner with other palantíri. Its sole function was to gaze westward, across the sea, toward the lost homeland of the elves. For a company that openly claims to protect Western civilization, such a reference is unlikely to be coincidental.

By 2026, Palantir Technologies had become the primary software contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, making it one of the most talked-about tech companies. Karp openly states that its mission is to "ensure the obvious superiority of the West" and "sometimes kill" adversaries.

In 2025, he co-authored a book with corporate communications director Nicholas Zamiska titled "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West." Its key thesis is that Silicon Valley must "repay its moral debt to the state" and participate in national defense. We explore how Karp has built the infrastructure for modern warfare and the ideology he promotes.

Missing the Forest for the Trees

The main issue Palantir addresses is structural. Historically, U.S. intelligence agencies operated on a "siloed" model: the FBI, CIA, NSA, and police maintained their own databases, with information sharing occurring through bureaucratic requests. Each agency stored its data in separate "containers"—even when aware that neighboring agencies might hold crucial information, agents could not quickly access it.

This disconnection cost many lives. One of the most notable examples is the story of John O'Neill, a leading FBI counterterrorism expert. By the mid-1990s, he identified international radical networks, including Al-Qaeda, as the primary threat to U.S. security. He warned that terrorists had infrastructure within the country and insisted on closer coordination among agencies.

Different fragments of information remained separated among structures. The FBI recorded suspicious incidents domestically—such as potential terrorists showing interest in flight schools—while the CIA had data on a meeting of Al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia and knew that two participants—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—had entered the U.S. on visas. However, information exchange between agencies was incomplete and contentious: FBI personnel working with the CIA later claimed their attempts to relay this information to O'Neill were blocked internally. Individual pieces of information never formed a cohesive picture.

In the summer of 2001, O'Neill left the FBI amid internal conflicts and a series of scandals surrounding leaks and misconduct. In August, he took charge of security at the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, O'Neill died while evacuating people from the South Tower.

Palantir developed a system that integrates disparate databases into a unified model of relationships. The company refers to this as ontology—a structure where objects, events, and people are connected by explicit relationships. An address is linked to an owner, a transaction to accounts, a call to subscribers and geolocation. This model allows analysts to quickly identify patterns that previously took weeks of manual work to uncover.

In 2005, Palantir's first institutional investor was In-Q-Tel, a venture fund established by the CIA in 1999 to finance dual-use technologies. It invested about $2 million and remained the company's only external investor for several years.

In 2011, Bloomberg reported that Palantir's technologies had become a vital tool for U.S. intelligence agencies in the "war on terror" and were used for data analysis in counterterrorism operations.

In its early years, Palantir Technologies had minimal public presence. The company rarely communicated with the press, avoided publicity, and primarily built its business around contracts with U.S. government entities.

Palantir engineers worked directly with clients—in intelligence, the military, and law enforcement. While well-known in the tech and defense sectors, the company remained invisible to the general public for a long time. Even in Silicon Valley, many did not fully understand what Palantir did: whether it was "Google for spies" or just a very expensive database.

Gotham, Foundry, and AIP

Palantir develops three key products:

  1. Gotham—a platform for military, intelligence, and law enforcement. Named after the city ("that is never safe") from Batman comics, the platform aggregates data from satellites, ground sensors, signals intelligence, legacy databases, and battlefield channels into a single interface. It can task sensors (e.g., directing a reconnaissance drone to coordinates), identify targets, and suggest weapon deployment options. In military terminology, this is referred to as the kill chain.
  2. Foundry—the civilian version. ExxonMobil uses it for optimizing extraction, Swiss Re for risk assessment, and media conglomerate Ringier for subscriber management. In Australia, Foundry has been implemented in Coles supermarkets.
  3. Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)—an AI layer launched in 2023. AIP overlays Gotham and Foundry, enabling users to interact with data in natural language. An operator might ask, "What enemy forces are in this area?" The system queries connected sources, formulates a response, and suggests actions.

Daniel Trujillo—a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and later an AI ethics researcher at the University of St. Gallen—highlights a key feature of Palantir: the same technological base is used for dual purposes. According to him, "the same software that optimizes supply chains today manages military operations."

ChatGPT Moment

For many years, Palantir was unprofitable. After going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, the company's stock showed little growth for several years. Analysts struggled to understand how the company could generate revenue in the civilian sector—its product was too specialized.

Everything changed with the advent of large language models (LLMs). When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, Palantir began to assert that its long-standing bet on ontology and semantic data layers had unexpectedly become in demand.

"We were pleasantly surprised to find how much the world we built aligned with the era of large language models. It became clear: you cannot realize the potential of LLMs without such structures," stated the company's CTO, Shyam Sankar.

In another interview, he also mentioned that "much of the work on Foundry and Gotham seemed to be waiting for the emergence of large language models."

Palantir's logic is based on the premise that LLMs are inherently unreliable without structured context. A language model requires a layer that connects the text interface with objects, events, and real processes within the organization. This role is assigned to ontologies—a system of relationships between people, transactions, devices, documents, and actions.

Palantir rewrote its roadmap, integrated LLMs into its products, and launched AIP. From that point on, the stock began to rise.

PLTR shares gained 167% in 2023 and 340% in 2024. In the first half of 2025, Palantir's stock became the top performer in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indices.

The Technological Republic

In 2025, Karp, along with Palantir's corporate communications director Nicholas Zamiska, published the book "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West."

In spring 2026, the company published a condensed version of the book on X in the form of 22 theses. The post went viral on social media and sparked debates far beyond the tech industry: some saw it as an attempt to justify a closer alliance between tech companies, the state, and the military sector, while others viewed it as an almost complete political program of techno-nationalism.

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel…

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026

In the book's preface, the authors state:

"For the West, the moment of reckoning has arrived. The loss of ambition and interest in scientific and technological achievements, accompanied by a decline in government innovation in key areas such as medicine, space exploration, and military development, has led to an innovation gap."

According to them, Silicon Valley has moved in the opposite direction—toward a focus on "online advertising, shopping, social media, and video platforms."

This premise unfolds into the entire manifesto. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley "must participate in the defense of the nation and in formulating a national idea: what this country is, what we value, and what we stand for." The era of soft power, according to Karp, is coming to an end:

"To win free and democratic societies requires more than moral superiority. Hard power is needed, and in this century, it will rely on software."

The era of nuclear deterrence, the authors argue, is also fading. In its place comes deterrence based on AI:

"We are creating software that could become a weapon of mass destruction. The potential integration of AI with weaponry creates risks, especially if programs gain self-awareness and their own intentions. However, the call to halt development is misguided. Our adversaries will not waste time on theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with strategic significance for military security. They will act," write Karp and Zamiska.

The Red Threat

The ideology of the "Technological Republic" does not remain on paper. It is backed by a political infrastructure whose scale became apparent in 2026.

Leading the Future—a super PAC created to protect the interests of the AI industry—has accumulated over $140 million in contributions and commitments. Among its major sponsors are OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, one of Palantir's founders Joe Lonsdale, and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Palantir as a company claims it has not made corporate contributions. OpenAI asserts the same. However, their key figures are the largest individual donors to the fund.

In May 2026, WIRED journalist Taylor Lorenz revealed that a subsidiary of Leading the Future—a nonprofit called Build American AI—funds native advertising on TikTok and Instagram. Influencers are offered $5,000 per video with the message: China threatens America's leadership in AI, and this concerns everyone. Sample texts for authors include phrases like: "I learned that China is trying to outpace the U.S. in AI. If they succeed, my data and my children's data could end up under China's control." The advertising is labeled as sponsored content, but the client—Build American AI—is not disclosed.

The rhetoric of the campaign echoes Karp's main theses.

"We will either be the dominant player or China will be the dominant player—and the rules will depend on who wins. […] When people are concerned about surveillance—yes, there is a danger, but you will have far fewer rights if America is not the leader," he stated in an interview with Axios in November 2025.

Simultaneously, Leading the Future is campaigning against lawmakers attempting to regulate AI. The most prominent case is the attack on New York Assembly member Alex Bores, who co-authored the RAISE Act—one of the first American laws on AI safety. According to The New York Times, the super PAC is spending millions to discredit the unwelcome politician. Bores explained it this way:

"They want to politically beat me so badly that in the future, when it comes to AI regulation, politicians will run in the opposite direction. They want to make an example out of me."

The situation surrounding Palantir is part of a broader shift. In February 2026, OpenAI signed a contract with the Pentagon to supply language models for military use. The deal came after Anthropic—OpenAI's main competitor—exited negotiations, refusing to lift restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

The Trump administration subsequently declared Anthropic a risk to the supply chain and ordered a halt to the use of its tools within six months. OpenAI filled the void.

The full text of the agreement with the Pentagon has not been publicly disclosed. Former U.S. Army chief counsel Brad Carson, commenting on the excerpts and language released by OpenAI, stated:

"They are trying to blind you with complex legal terms that ordinary people understand very differently. Lawyers know what it means. And lawyers know that this is not a constraint at all."

A Part of the Truth

Alex Karp does not attempt to appear as the good guy. He avoids the language of "innovation" and "transformation"; his rhetoric revolves around global competition and technological dominance. He believes the West is in a race with China, and this race will determine the distribution of power for generations to come.

In a detailed essay, an analyst using the pseudonym MachineSovereign describes Palantir not as the savior of the Western world, but as "an infrastructural layer through which the state increasingly sees, coordinates, decides, and acts." Formal institutions retain authority: they authorize decisions, speak publicly, and maintain symbolic legitimacy. However, the operational layer is gradually shifting to the technical infrastructure that determines what the state can see, analyze, and use for decision-making.

Karp's supporters respond that the world is moving in this direction regardless. Abandoning such systems will not halt their development—it will only cede initiative to those who will build similar tools without regard for human rights, transparency, and public oversight. In this logic, the question is no longer whether such platforms will emerge, but who will control them and in the interests of which political systems they will operate.

In Tolkien's work, a palantír is a tool that does not lie outright but shows only part of the reality. The one with the stronger will can impose their own worldview on others.

Palantir, Anduril, Mithril, Erebor, Narya—Silicon Valley has long turned Middle-earth into a catalog of brands for defense and tech startups.

Tolkien himself would likely view this with dismay. He held a deep distrust of industrialization and the concentration of power—themes that permeate all his work. Tolkien wrote about a world where danger lay not in the power of weapons but in the monopoly on knowledge. Palantíri were destructive not because they showed lies, but because they revealed selective truths: the owner of the stone determined which part of reality the viewer would see.

Modern data analysis platforms are gradually changing the very mechanism of governance. Who sees threats first, who sets priorities, who gets the right to interpret reality for others—these questions are shifting from the offices of politicians to the server rooms of contractors. In the age of AI, it is not necessary to restrict access to information. It is enough to determine what people should see.

Text by Sasha Kosovan