Palantir’s ‘Technofascist’ manifesto

The defense tech behemoth has set the internet on fire with a tweet likened to the ‘ramblings of a comic book villain’

RT

American surveillance tech contractor Palantir released a 22-point manifesto over the weekend, calling for a “new era” of AI-enabled US military supremacy. The internet went wild, with the text being labeled a blueprint for “technofascism.”

Posted on X on Saturday, the document goes far beyond the typical mission statement of a Silicon Valley tech company. It outlines Palantir’s positions on the role of technology and military power in the 21st century, stating: “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation;” “hard power in this century will be built on software;” “national service should be a universal duty,” “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone.”

To understand how a private corporation can feel empowered to demand such far-reaching policy changes from the state, it’s important to understand what Palantir is, and how enmeshed with the ‘deep state’ it really is.

What is Palantir?

Palantir – named after the obsidian seeing-stones from Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ through which the dark lord Sauron keeps watch on his underlings – is a software firm primarily serving the defense and intelligence sectors. The company was established in 2003 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale (who worked for Thiel’s Clarium Capital), Stephen Cohen (who interned at Clarium) former Sigmund Freud Research Institute researcher Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer.

Palantir was the brainchild of Thiel, who said that he realized “the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.” Thiel’s idea was nurtured by the CIA, which invested $2 million in the company in 2005 via its in-house venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. “I wish I had Palantir when I was director,” former CIA chief George Tenet – who set up In-Q-Tel – told Forbes magazine in 2013. “I wish we had the tool of its power.”

Palantir is currently valued at around $352 billion, a valuation that represents roughly 80 times the company’s annual revenue. This apparent overvaluation is fueled by Palantir’s extensive contracts with the US government and its alphabet soup of defense and intelligence agencies.

What does Palantir sell?

Palantir’s flagship product is an operating system called ‘Gotham’. Not a surveillance system as such, it pulls together and analyses existing data that may otherwise take days to sift through. For example, if US Central Command is planning a missile strike in a foreign country, Gotham can combine maps and satellite footage from that country, data from other agencies, including human intelligence from the CIA and signals intelligence from the NSA, and local surveillance data to present CENTCOM with potential targets.

Gotham and MOSAIC – another Palantir target identification program that pulls digital data including surveillance footage and IP addresses from a target area – use AI to label the most effective targets for military strikes. The US admits that it has used these programs to select targets during its ongoing war on Iran, but insists that humans make the final decision to fire.

Gotham has also been used as a policing surveillance tool. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, uses Gotham to collect data on civilians – including names, addresses, social media activity, personal relationships, and surveillance photographs – in order to trace their connections to known criminals and predict the likelihood that they will go on to commit crimes.

Gotham can “centralize everything an agency knows about a person in one place, including their eye color from their driver’s license, or their license plate from a traffic ticket – making it easy to build a detailed intelligence report,” a former employee told Wired last year.

A group of anti-ICE demonstrators hold a rally in front of Palantir’s offices in Washington DC, April 1, 2026. ©  Getty Images;  Celal Gunes

Who are Palantir’s customers?

Palantir’s client list is extensive. In the US it includes the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, CIA, FBI, NSA, US Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Special Operations Command, as well as dozens or even hundreds of police departments and other law enforcement agencies. At present, there is no single, publicly-available list of Palantir customers within the US.

Abroad, Palantir’s technology is used by the British Ministry of Defense, Israel Defense Forces, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as police departments and government agencies in France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK.

Why is a private surveillance tech company releasing a manifesto?

Palantir is at its core a data aggregation company, but one set apart by its clients, its marketing, and the ideological streak of its executives. The company markets itself not as a faceless seller of data collation and analysis software, but – in its own words – a provider of “an Al-powered kill chain” that enables “decision dominance from space to mud.” Palantir refers to its consultants as “forward-deployed software engineers” and its internal emails as “situational awareness” reports. CEO Alex Karp portrays himself as deeply involved in military decisions that he, at least on paper, shouldn’t be.

Palantir’s mission, he said on an earnings call last year, is “to scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.” As the public face of the company, Karp has defended the IDF’s use of Palantir software to plan strikes in Gaza, and called for the US to prepare for a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran.

The manifesto can be viewed as a continuation of this sales pitch. Adapted from Karp’s 2025 book, ‘The Technological Republic’, the 22 points envision a world in which Palantir’s products will be in even higher demand. Take the following points:

• “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”
• “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”
• “The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Ouradversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”
• “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”
• “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.”
• “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.”

Karp’s products are implicitly presented as the solution to these problems, and his ‘peace through strength’ message seems tailor-made to please the newly-neoconservative President Donald Trump, whose administration his company will ultimately sign contracts with. After AI firm Anthropic was booted from a Pentagon program over its refusal to enable mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, Palantir’s manifesto is equal parts sales pitch and pledge of fealty.

The remainder of its points delve into culture-war territory, declaring that visionaries like Elon Musk should be applauded for their belief in “grand narrative,” that the “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted,” and that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

Who are Karp and Thiel and why are they controversial?

These points reflect Karp’s ideological bent – he describes himself as “progressive, but not woke,” and a “tech nationalist.” Karp has also portrayed himself throughout the years as a “socialist” and a “neo-Marxist,” and has consistently voted Democrat, while praising some of Trump’s policies. His only consistent beliefs appear to be that “the West has a superior way of living,” and that this way of living must be defended “by applying organized violence.” Karp is a vocal defender of Israel, and has referred to pro-Palestinian protesters in the US as “an infection inside of our society.”

Thiel, by contrast, is a much more partisan figure. An avowed conservative, he has donated to libertarian and Republican causes, and bankrolled Vice President J.D. Vance’s 2018 senatorial campaign. While Thiel has described himself as a libertarian, he donates to the interventionist Alliance of Democracies (established by former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen) and sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg group.

Thiel funded wrestler Hulk Hogan’s 2015 lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker, almost a decade after the news blog outed him as gay.

What are people saying about the manifesto?

Palantir’s manifesto has garnered an overwhelmingly negative reaction, with commentators describing it as “scary,” “technofascist,” and “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”

“The manifesto’s vision…is that of a US government and its tech allies as dominant players, unconstrained by accountability,” political scientist Donald Moynihan wrote. “A world where soft power has real and lasting impact is simply less profitable for a company like Palantir relative to a world where we blow a lot of stuff up.”

“If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document wouldn’t be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated,” French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand wrote on X. “They’re effectively saying ‘our tools aren’t meant to serve your foreign policy. They’re meant to enforce ours’.”

The manifesto is more significant than any action by Trump, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin argued on X. “Trump is insignificant pawn on the serious chess board. His role is total destruction. The preparations stage. Palantir is much more serious. It is the plan to safeguard the declining dominance of the West by radical means.”

Full Palantir Manifesto

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 against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?