Palantir’s Mission: Peter Thiel, AI, and the Defense of the West

It’s not everyday that a data software company spurs international protest, but Palantir is no ordinary data analytics company. Its CEO Alex Karp publicly muses about spraying fentanyl-laced urine on Wall Street analysts who bet against the company, and its ticker symbol (PLTR) is hawked by President Trump. With a market capitalization north of $400 billion, Palantir is worth more than Boeing and Lockheed Martin combined, making it the highest valued defense-forward company in America.

But it wasn’t always that way. Palantir began as the post-9/11 brainchild of billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale. Despite early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, Palantir struggled to gain foothold in the good old boy club of defense contracting. That was until 2016, when Palantir sued the U.S. Army — one of its few clients — and won, propelling the business forward with a slew of new contracts.

If you can de-link in your mind the modern liberal state from the West, you begin to understand what Palantir wants.

Today, Palantir is a political litmus test. Being pro-Palantir, is shorthand for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza, AI data center construction, and a broader retrenchment from global institutions. It also signals support for Peter Thiel, whose heterodox philosophizing led to the company’s creation in 2003. Whether you love Palantir or hate it; whether you believe in its technological promise or fear for the dystopia it will create; we all benefit from learning what Palantir wants.

That question begins by asking why Thiel, PayPal’s founding CEO turned venture capitalist, backed a defense-tech firm in 2003, back when Silicon Valley wanted nothing to do with the Pentagon. These were the days of internet optimism and social media startups: One year after Palantir was founded, Google would go public at $85 a share, and Mark Zuckerberg would launch The Facebook inside his Harvard dorm. Amidst the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Silicon Valley enjoyed an insular, profitable existence 2,500 miles outside Washington.

An early investor in Facebook, Thiel had little interest in the Valley relegating itself to social media and video games. “We were promised flying cars, but instead we got 140-character tweets,” Thiel proclaimed in 2011. Whereas other tech elites aligned themselves with the Obama administration — Google CEO Eric Schmidt was considered the President’s “tech confidante” — Thiel invested in Seasteading, a plan to create artificial islands where new technologies could be developed alongside novel governance models.

Thiel’s decades-long contention is that Silicon Valley did not spur the level of innovation it claimed to have, preoccupying itself with consumer technology, Left-wing activism, and safetyism. “When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains,” Thiel wrote in a 2011 National Review essay.

Mapped onto this set of claims, Palantir starts making sense. The company tackles the largest problems organizations face, supplying battlefield intelligence to the Ukrainian military, and tracking supply chains for the World Food Program. Their technology is genuinely innovative, far closer to flying cars than 140-character tweets — all without a shred of Left-wing activism.

But Palantir is more than an innovative company with a conservative bent.

In 2009, Thiel The Straussian Moment, which was really an investor letter from his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, based on a speech he gave at Stanford University five years earlier. The essay uses words to accomplish what Palantir does using code and machine learning — the aggregation of seemingly disparate data sets into one cohesive narrative. Except Thiel uses canonical philosophers instead of geospatial imagery. Thiel writes:

The modern West has lost faith in itself… this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

The modern West’s loss of faith in itself manifested in Silicon Valley’s unwillingness to work with the Pentagon, and those liberated commercial and creative forces unleashed companies like Google and Meta. But fortifying the West without “destroying it altogether” necessitates a technology capable of transcending standard tradeoffs between liberalism and security.

Palantir blurs the line between those two things, embracing what the company calls the “grey-zone.” Its technology must be powerful enough to defend against terrorism in the Middle East and Chinese expansionism in Taiwan, without being so powerful as to erode the Western project altogether.

Palantir professes to strike that balance through the nature of its tech. Gotham and Foundry, the company’s main data integration platforms, have innovative ways of protecting privacy, namely audit logs that they describe as a “distilled record of all actions taken by users in the platform,” who performed what action, when it occurred, and which data were accessed. Jon Lonsdale’s brother wrote on Medium, “Before Palantir, someone at a three letter agency could stalk their ex. They could do anything as long as their boss wasn’t literally looking over their shoulder. There was no audit trail of the info the agent researched or how they got there.”

Audit logs, however, did not prevent Palantir employees from conspiring to hack journalist Glenn Greenwald over his support for WikiLeaks. Even if you believe Palantir’s assertion that this was a one-off case of rogue employees misbehaving — Karp later apologized to Greenwald — one should not discount the danger of Palantir’s technology winding up in the wrong hands.

The company’s awareness of this reality lies in its namesake, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Palantiri stones from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which grant users the ability to see far into the future at the expense of their soul. Palantir’s technology has the capacity to corrupt good and enable evil: “it is not and cannot be neutral,” wrote Karp.

There’s a way in which all this, from the Greenwald scandal to Palantir’s alleged role in the assasination of Osama bin Laden, benefit Palantir. Whether you believe they are oppressive violators of civil liberties or courageous defenders of the West, nobody disputes the efficacy of Palantir’s tech. When, in 2020, George Soros’ investment fund attacked Palantir’s business practices, it also disclosed a 1 percent ownership stake in the company. It’s plausible that Soros’ criticism of Palantir was an implicit endorsement of its technological capacity, boosting Palantir’s stock while granting the Soros Fund political cover to sell its shares at a handsome profit. In order for a company to be evil, it first has to be competent.

This further explains the vice-signaling of Palantir’s CEO. Karp’s fentanyl-laced urine quip is not meant to be taken literally, but the sentiment behind it is. A company that produces “software that dominates,” as their corporate motto reads, does not behave well at cocktail parties.

All this creates a distorted image of what Palantir actually does. The company is often portrayed as creating a ubiquitous surveillance state, yet half their revenue comes from the private sector. And while Palantir has faced internal divisions over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza, estimates value its contract with Israel’s Ministry of Defense at tens of millions of dollars — a small fraction of the nearly $4.5 billion in revenue the company generated last year. By comparison, Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s joint contract with Israel’s Defense Ministry, is valued at $1.2 billion.

At its core, Palantir is best understood as a Thiel-backed ideological project that aims to channel technological progress in defense of the West. The company’s present evolution reflects the political debates of the moment — Gaza, AI, globalism — which create shallow caricatures of what Palantir actually believes. “A lot of ink has been spilled on Thiel’s ideology,” Professor Joshua Tait told me, “and he’s ultimately very critical of the progressive establishment and the modern liberal state.”

If you can de-link in your mind the modern liberal state from the West, you begin to understand what Palantir wants. It begins with Thiel’s set of assumptions: technology has stagnated, and in its place lies hollow Left-wing activism and a loss of faith in the Western project. So, you create highly innovative technology with the explicit goal of ensuring Western security, while inculcating that technology with classically liberal ideals. It’s automated weapons targeting alongside automated audit trails.

The Straussian Moment continues, “Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”

“A great company,” Thiel writes in his book Zero to One, “is a conspiracy to change the world.”

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