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palantir
Palantir Is Leading a New Age of Empire
Palantir has merged American empire, Zionist military infrastructure, surveillance capitalism, and technofascist ideology into a single architecture of control.
Mar 18, 2026
A former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public statement, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, and many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation. He is not alone. Thirteen former Palantir employees—engineers, managers, and a member of the company's own privacy team—signed a letter shared with NPR warning that guardrails meant to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuse of power have been violated and are being rapidly dismantled.
What Palantir represents is something unprecedented: the convergence of American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism into a single instrument of control. Understanding how we got here requires looking at the machine Palantir has built, who built it, and what they believe.
Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Its first major investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, which seeded the company with millions and opened the door to every major intelligence and defense agency. The logic was deliberate: The American ruling class recognized decades ago that the state's coercive power—surveillance, targeting, data harvesting—could be run more effectively and more profitably through private contractors. When a government agency surveils its own citizens, there are hearings, FOIA requests, oversight committees. When a private company does it, it is a trade secret.
That strategy has paid off enormously. Palantir now holds contracts worth over $10 billion with the US Army alone. The Trump regime tapped Palantir to build a master database on American citizens. The Pentagon expanded its Maven Smart System contract by $795 million to deploy AI-powered battlefield intelligence across the empire. In June, the military swore in four tech executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels—including Palantir's CTO—in a program that embeds Silicon Valley directly into military planning. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a $30 million contract for Palantir's ImmigrationOS platform, which provides near real-time tracking of people targeted for deportation. Thousands of American police departments use Palantir's Gotham platform for domestic surveillance.
When academics define technofascism—what happens when tech executives encode their political beliefs into the architecture of technology and infrastructure to suppress dissent—they are describing Palantir with precision.
Abroad, the consequences are even more devastating. Palantir's AI platforms have been deployed by Israel's military to systematically prosecute the assault on Gaza. AI targeting systems built on Palantir's architecture—known by names like Lavender, The Gospel, and Where's Daddy—have enabled the kind of automated killing that produces mass civilian casualties at scale. Palantir's own executives have been recorded discussing how bombing densely populated areas generates the movement data their algorithms need to train on. When people flee, make phone calls, search for loved ones, rush to hospitals that no longer exist—that movement becomes fuel for the machine. Palantir’s platforms were deployed in the illegal capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Israel’s terrorist pager attack against Lebanon, and the US carpet bombing of Iran at the behest of Israel—the same campaign that destroyed a girls' elementary school in Minab.
The genocide in Gaza was also a business windfall. Palantir's valuation surged hundreds of billions of dollars, making it o best-performing stock of 2024 and among the top in 2025. That financial momentum funded the next phase: political capture. Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), the congressman who introduced the bill forcing TikTok's sale, resigned from Congress and joined Palantir as head of defense. He later acknowledged that the legislation gained momentum not because of any Chinese national security threat, but because of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. Palantir's senior adviser Jacob Helberg was instrumental in pushing the sale through Congress. The app was handed to Oracle's Larry Ellison—one of Israel's most prominent private benefactors. Silence the platform most critical of your technology enabling mass death, and the profits keep flowing.
Then there is the Jeffrey Epstein connection. Department of Justice-released emails reveal hundreds of messages between Epstein and Thiel spanning years. Epstein invested approximately $40 million into Thiel's Valar Ventures. He brokered introductions between Palantir and Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in meetings where surveillance technology, AI warfare, and Israeli national security policy were all on the table.
All of this is dangerous enough on its own. It becomes existential when you understand the ideology driving it. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. He is a devoted patron of Curtis Yarvin, the political theorist who argues democracy should be replaced by corporate monarchy—a CEO-king with absolute authority. Yarvin is not a fringe blogger anymore. He was a guest of honor at Trump's inauguration ball. Vice President JD Vance—bankrolled and politically launched by Thiel—has cited Yarvin by name. Project 2025 follows Yarvin’s technofascist vision almost to the letter.
When academics define technofascism—what happens when tech executives encode their political beliefs into the architecture of technology and infrastructure to suppress dissent—they are describing Palantir with precision. This is a project whose founders believe democracy was a mistake, whose software hunts human beings across borders, and whose executives now hold military rank and sit inside the federal government while enriching themselves. They are no longer serving the empire who created them. They have become the empire.
This is the new age of empire—American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism fused into one architecture, operated by one class of people, accountable to no one.
And that is the part that should terrify you more than anything else—because this isn't a warning about some future to come. This already happened. The merger is complete. The executives are installed. The kill chains are running. The surveillance is live. The dissenters are being tracked. The media that exposed it has been silenced or sold.
There is no cavalry coming for us.
So the question is not whether Palantir is dangerous. The whistleblowers have answered that. The dead children in Gaza have answered that. The families ripped apart by ICE have answered that.
The question is what are we going to do about it—because every day we stay silent, every day we scroll past this, is another day they use to dig in deeper, build more kill chains, harvest more data, and make themselves harder to remove.
They are betting that you won't act. That you'll feel too small, too overwhelmed, too paralyzed—because that is the fear they designed this system to produce.
Prove them wrong.
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The Military-Industrial Complex 2.0: Big Tech's War of All Against All
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings.
Mar 10, 2026
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, “if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.” (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) Yet Karp’s speculation hasn’t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that “our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: “I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries. 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. They will attack us everywhere.”
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren’t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC—executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but—as Karp suggests—a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a “rules-based international order.” Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” And those running it want us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.
Alex Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world’s unrivaled political and military power.
Karp’s answer to what’s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don’t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It’s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America’s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.
Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it’s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century—wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place—they still mouth platitudes about pursuing “peace through strength” and using US military power to undergird a “rules-based international order.” Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.
Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?
Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril—a protégé of Palantir founder Peter Thiel—made headlines recently when he told an interviewer from CNBC that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the “wrong things.”
The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey’s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Luckey’s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates—led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon)—that now receive 1 out of every 3 contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. “Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better?” it asks. “…These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed…These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.”
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry.
The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.
But spending less on weapons—as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities—can’t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.
Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector’s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging—safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was “trust but verify.” In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be “mistrust and verify.” We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.
The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids
Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn’t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption—from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by—yes!—Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance’s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.
Then came Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn’t at that agency. Instead, Musk’s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.
There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)
The problem with the new techno-militarists isn’t that they’re mistaken about technology’s power, but that they’re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we’ve heard this story before—from Cold War nuclear strategists, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts, and the architects of the “shock and awe” doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.
What makes today’s moment especially dangerous is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with—and die from—the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates.
The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It’s produced by diplomacy; restraint; adhering to international law and economic justice; and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.
Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don’t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine’s version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should frighten us all.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can’t afford to take.
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‘What Oligarchy Looks Like’: AI Giants Pledge to Pump $100 Million Into 2026 Midterms
The goal of the PAC is to elect a Congress that will prohibit individual states from passing their own AI regulations.
Feb 11, 2026
Silicon Valley elites are planning to spend big money in 2026 to ensure that the next US Congress will be even more friendly to the artificial intelligence industry than the current Republican-led version.
CNN reported on Wednesday that Leading the Future, a super political action committee (PAC) focused on electing AI-friendly members of Congress, is pledging to spend at least $100 million to influence the 2026 midterm election.
The PAC, which is backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and other AI heavyweights, is working to elect lawmakers who will pass legislation that will set a single set of AI regulations that will take effect throughout the US, overriding any restrictions placed on the technology by state governments.
The massive sum the PAC is dedicating to the 2026 midterms prompted Matthew Stoller, researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project, to remark that this is "what oligarchy looks like."
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tried to get a provision preempting state AI regulations slipped into the GOP's major budget package last year, but it was ultimately taken out amid bipartisan resistance to giving the AI industry a blank regulatory check.
President Donald Trump subsequently signed an executive order instructing the US Department of Justice to create a task force that would sue any state governments that enact supposedly "onerous and excessive" regulations on the technology.
However, as an executive order, this directive can be overturned by any future president who supports stronger AI regulation.
CNN noted that Leading the Future's planned flood of cash is coming at a time when AI has been drawing skepticism from factions within both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, has thrown his support behind a "Citizen Bill of Rights for AI," which would provide privacy protections for end users and place restrictions on the construction of AI data centers.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, has called for a full moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers.
Leading the Future also appears to understand that the AI industry's reputation is becoming toxic for voters.
As Fast Company reported on Wednesday, the super PAC has launched negative ads against Democratic New York US congressional candidate Alex Bores by highlighting his past work at Palantir, which has become controversial for providing technology used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out mass deportations.
Current and former Palantir employees told Fast Company that they believe the ad against Bores to be highly deceptive, as Palantir wasn't nearly as integrated with ICE operations during his tenure as it is today.
"If Bores’ campaign is one that would restrict the tech industry’s growth," one former Palantir employee told Fast Company, "and his base is one that is already primed to be critical of Palantir, people (like me!) who watch this ad wouldn’t suspect that it’s people with significant interests in Palantir and the broader industry that are funding the ads, too."
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