Palantir, the AI company that aspires to lead techno-fascism

Washington"The atomic age, an age of deterrence, is ending, and a new age of deterrence based on artificial intelligence is about to begin." This sentence is part of the extensive tweet that the multinational military technology and cybersecurity company Palantir published this week. A tweet that is actually a kind of manifesto in which the company details its ideology: to impose mandatory military service, to develop artificial intelligence-powered weapons without getting bogged down in "theatrical debates", the superiority of the United States over other countries, or the belief that some cultures are superior to others. An ideology that Palantir applies when it participates in operations such as the persecution of immigrants in the United States by ICE, the wars in Iran and Ukraine, or the coup in Venezuela. In short, it is a notice to mariners and a warning that the rules of the game are changing. Whoever controls artificial intelligence can now control the world.

Alex Karp, co-founder and chief executive of Palantir, not only leads the artificial intelligence (AI) company for profit, but also does so with an ideological aspiration, and he does not hide it. In fact, the manifesto published by the company on the social network X this week is based on his book, which was published last year, The technological republic (The technological republic, in Spanish, from Tenos publishing house). It is a manifesto of twenty-two points, concise and structured, but devastating.

The USA, a superior country

To begin with, Palantir argues that "not all cultures are equal." "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others continue to be dysfunctional and regressive," it highlights. And it presents the United States as a superior nation: "No other country in the history of the world has advanced more in progressive values than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how many more opportunities there are in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet," it literally says.

Likewise, the company believes that order can only be maintained by force. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires more than moral suasion. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software." The thesis resonates with the almost Orwellian motto that the Trump administration has resurrected from the era of Ronald Reagan: "Peace through strength" (Peace through strength).

Palantir believes that all of society must participate in the defense of the country. For example, it says that "military service should be a universal duty" and that "the Silicon Valley elite has an obligation to participate in the defense of the nation." And not only that, it also believes that "Silicon Valley must have a role in the fight against violent crime.

"The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not stop to engage in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications." They will act, the company also says in its manifesto, hinting that we must abandon romanticism and ethical debates, and do everything possible to ensure that the United States does not lose the race to apply artificial intelligence for military use.

In fact, Palantir is known to have collaborated with the US army in the raid on Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro last January. Furthermore, military technology developed by this company was also used in Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip. And Project Maven – an initiative by the American Department of Defense to integrate artificial intelligence with military intelligence and battlefield operations – has been used in recent weeks in the war in Iran to designate military targets with artificial intelligence. All with the aim of making the decision to kill more efficient and aseptic.

Palantir, however, also aspires to be the panopticon with which the administration constantly monitors its citizens. For example, Palantir's AI has begun to be applied, cross-referencing all citizen data, to create a kind of Google Maps that ICE uses to locate immigrant individuals in the United States.

Ideological evolution

Before converting to Trumpism, however, the co-founder of Palantir supported Democrats and considered himself left-wing. Michael Steinberg, who followed him closely for six years to write the book "The Pilosopher in the Valley", explains that in 2019 Karp was already warning that illegal immigration was not liked by people, even though Democrats did not take him seriously. "That's why they will turn to people who do take them seriously, and that's why Trump was elected," Steinberg recalled in an interview with Politico.

This criticism of the Democrats highlighted an initial distancing of Karp from the left. The rightward shift of Silicon Valley is nothing new, but in Karp's case, it is noteworthy. For years, he moved within academic left-wing circles: he earned a doctorate in Germany in neoclassical social theory and studied with Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher and sociologist of critical theory and the Frankfurt School. When Habermas died last March, Karp published an article in Politico titled: "My Time with Jürgen Habermas, Europe's Last Public Intellectual". The title is a refined version of the American national-populist discourse ("alt-right"), which Trump has repeated so often and which argues that Europe is in decline.

Palantir's manifesto aligns with this vision: Kart believes that he starts from a pragmatic analysis that progressive circles in the United States have not made and that, consequently, this proves him right. His conclusion is that there is a kind of war of civilizations, where AI is key to maintaining the current idea of the West. And, in fact, he opposes "pluralism", which he describes as "empty". "We must resist the superficial temptation of an empty and contentless pluralism. We, in America and more broadly in the West, have resisted for the last half-century defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion in what?", literally states his company's manifesto.

Palantir is willing to collaborate with the United States government to control North American society. For now, it applies surveillance to immigrants, but Trump has already designated the anti-fascist movement as a terrorist organization. Perhaps it could become the next target to control.