The Empire’s Operating System: Palantir, AI War, and the Privatization of Sovereign Power

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Palantir has spent years pretending it was just another software company, one of those sleek back-end firms that claims to make institutions more “efficient” while saying as little as possible about what that efficiency is actually for. That mask is slipping.

CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp’s April 2026 manifesto did not sound like the usual corporate boilerplate about innovation, security, or digital transformation. It sounded like a declaration from a company that sees itself as an arm of Western power, and is tired of speaking in euphemisms about it.

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

Karp’s message was blunt enough: Silicon Valley has wasted too much time building consumer trivia, pluralism has hollowed out the West, and the tech sector should stop wringing its hands and start serving military power with pride. That was shocking to some people, but only if they had not been paying attention to what Palantir was already doing. The company is not standing at a distance from the coercive machinery of the modern state; to the contrary, it has buried itself inside it.

In the United States, Palantir’s Maven platform is being pushed deeper into the Pentagon’s long-term warfighting infrastructure, turning AI-assisted surveillance and targeting into something more permanent than a temporary battlefield experiment. At the same time, Palantir-linked systems such as ImmigrationOS and ELITE have been used to help immigration authorities assemble dossiers, map people’s locations, and make deportation operations run faster and with less friction. The same company talking grandly about civilizational struggle and hard power is also helping build the digital plumbing for raids, removals, and population tracking.

Britain is now getting a taste of the same politics. Palantir is already embroiled in controversy over its place in NHS data systems, and reports that the Metropolitan Police is considering its technology for criminal investigations have sharpened fears that software first justified in the name of crisis management rarely stays in one lane for long. Today, it is health logistics, counterterrorism, and border control. Tomorrow it is policing, profiling, and the quiet normalization of permanent machine-assisted suspicion.

What gives the manifesto real weight is not its style, but its candor. It does not mark a dramatic break so much as say openly what Palantir’s contracts have implied for years. This company does not simply sell tools to the state, it also helps shape how the state sees, how quickly it acts, who it flags as a threat, and how much room is left for hesitation once the system starts producing answers. Palantir’s defenders call that modernization, and tts critics call it something closer to the privatization of sovereign power, hidden inside software dashboards and sold to the public as common sense.

What Karp published this month was not a break in character, but a scary moment of honesty. Palantir has grown powerful enough, profitable enough, and politically protected enough that it no longer feels obliged to hide the worldview embedded in its code. And that worldview is not about neutral technology. Palantir is building the operating system for a harder, more militarized, less democratic version of the West.

That is also what makes this recent L’Humanité article, which we are introducing today, worth reading in full. It takes this new moment of candor and places it inside the longer history that made it possible: the post-9/11 security state, the fusion of Silicon Valley with military and intelligence power, the use of crisis after crisis to expand surveillance, and the steady transformation of software firms into political actors in their own right.

If Palantir’s manifesto sounds like the boast of a company that thinks it can help govern the future, the article that follows shows how it acquired that confidence, what forces it serves, and why its rise should be understood not as a tech story, but as a story about power.

Pierric Marissal reports for L’humanité…

Palantir: What you need to know about the American technofascist company on a crusade for the future of the West

Taking advantage of crises, terrorism, war, and pandemic, Palantir has sold its operational data analytics software to numerous states, gradually privatizing state functions and making itself indispensable. The company has just published a programmatic and ideological manifesto explaining why it supports the Trump administration’s hawkish radicalization.

The book Technological Republic, written by Alex Karp and published in February 2025, is as much a political program as a foreshadowing of what is happening for the “future of the West”.

Palantir, the company Karp runs and co-founded with Peter Thiel, recently made a public summary of this in the form of a 22-point manifesto, as a form of assertion of their power.

This text is published while the US is bogged down in Iran and diplomatically isolated. ”  Palantir is accompanying the radicalization of the Trump administration in its military adventures, because it lives and thrives on public and military contracts,” emphasizes Olivier Tesquet, co-author of Apocalypse Nerd.

A parasite nestled at the heart of the state apparatus

Since its creation in 2003 with public funds from the CIA, Palantir has sought to address the shortcomings of the state. “The aim was to create the company that would have been able to prevent 9/11, with an underlying critique of the public intelligence agencies that failed to detect the early warning signs of the attacks,” explains Valentin Goujon, a doctoral student in sociology at Sciences Po’s Media Lab.

Since then, Palantir has been making the most of crises. Following Covid, it acquired the health data of numerous countries; after the 2015 attacks in France, it signed a contract with the DGSI (French domestic intelligence service); a migration crisis was exploited, and it found itself in charge of profiling, tracking, and monitoring immigrants for the federal immigration police (ICE)…

Over the years, Palantir has become indispensable to intelligence agencies, the military, and even police departments in the United States. “When the New York police wanted to terminate their contract because it was expensive and ineffective, they were left in the dark, because Palantir retained ownership of the intelligibility of the decisions that had been made,” says Olivier Tesquet.

The investigative journalist at Télérama invokes the concept of technofascism: ”  It is the corrosion of institutions from within. If Musk’s Doge dismantled the redistributive state, Palantir has taken control of the sovereign powers  .”

“  The book was written in response to a potential Democratic victory, except that with Trump, much of what he hoped for came true,  ” recalls Valentin Goujon. Since 2025, Palantir’s market capitalization has increased almost tenfold, and the value of its public contracts has doubled. Following the same logic as the Doge, Karp was able to place engineers at the highest levels of government.

The Trojan horse enters Europe

Gregory Barbaccia, who worked at Palantir for 10 years, is now the federal government’s chief information officer. His former colleague holds the same position at the Department of Health and Human Services, while Jacob Helberg, Alex Karp’s former right-hand man, has become Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment.

The service provider has become a client even in the army, since Shyam Sankar, the company’s technical director who is still in post, was sworn in as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2025.

The company is replicating in Europe what works so well in the United States, multiplying public contracts and launching its employees into politics, like Julie Martinez, former head of data protection at Palantir, who became spokesperson for the Socialist Party and was nominated as a candidate for mayor of Clichy.

“This company is thriving in the United States and Europe because there is a political appetite for these tools of surveillance and social control, which claim that surveillance and security are the same thing,” denounces sociologist Thomas Le Bonniec, a data specialist and whistleblower.

An attack against equality and multiculturalism

“  Alex Karp wants to limit the state to financing major industrial policies, such as the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program or more recently Stargate, and its 500 billion investments in AI,” adds Valentin Goujon. “His targets are more cultural: the Silicon Valley elites .”

He describes them as decadent, defending ”  an empty and hollow pluralism  .” His critique of multiculturalism and inclusion is direct. This elite is responsible for weakening democracies, leading the West down the path of decline.

According to Karp, Silicon Valley, instead of repaying its debt to the nation by contributing to the war effort, only invents mass-market consumer products (he cites the iPhone and Gmail as examples). “In his philosophy dissertation defended in Frankfurt and in his book, Karp echoes the argument of the writer Martin Walser, according to whom Germany is prevented from expressing its pride and national identity by disarmament and the instrumentalization of Auschwitz,” explains Valentin Goujon. “Karp therefore calls for the rearmament of Germany and Japan, in the same way that he wants to revive national pride in the USA through rearmament.”

This is also why he calls for compulsory military service. The American meritocratic ideal, so highly praised by Karp, is, according to him, no longer embodied by Silicon Valley, but by the army.

A genocidal technology put at the service of Israel

Previously rather discreet, it was following Hamas’s attacks on Israel in October 2023 that the head of Palantir became a public figure with a radical discourse. He now openly acknowledges inequalities and ranks cultures: “Some have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” and he doesn’t hesitate to cite Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” and calls for total mobilization to save the West.

It is within this context that Karp has placed its technology at the service of the Israeli armed forces, which it fully supports. ” The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese clearly states that Palantir is partly responsible for the genocide. It is a company that profits from massacring people, as part of the continuation of American white supremacy,  ” asserts Thomas Le Bonniec.

Towards a new age of war

The company’s new slogan is ”  your software is the weapons system  .” This is especially true since Palantir took the lead on Project Maven, which is reorienting the war strategy of the United States and its military-industrial complex.

Another startup, Anduril, also co-founded by Peter Thiel, has a $22 billion contract to supply drones, autonomous weapons, and augmented reality glasses to US soldiers. The AI, powered by Palantir, is tasked with designating targets and organizing the attack. OpenAI has jumped on the bandwagon, hoping that Pentagon funding will help fill some of the financial gap left by ChatGPT. The software is described as “hard power,” meaning a coercive means of imposing one’s will on states.

Last March, AIPCon (AI Platform Convention), the name of Palantir’s annual corporate seminar, took place. Cameron Stanley, the head of digital and AI at the Department of Defence—the new name for the Ministry of Defense given by Trump—came to praise Palantir’s major work: Maven, which has been used in Venezuela, Iran, and tested in Ukraine and Gaza.

From a distance, the tool resembles Google Earth, with conflict zones marked. Cameron Stanley zooms in on the Persian Gulf, towards Iran’s western border, and planes can be seen flying.

He accesses satellite imagery. Calmly, he selects several cars parked in front of what looks like a warehouse and, with a right-click, marks them as targets. The AI then suggests drones, artillery, or fighter jets based on their proximity, fuel, and ammunition reserves…

All that remains is to click “approve.” The operator then receives a brief report on the mission’s execution, including the probability that the target was destroyed and that there were collateral casualties. “It’s revolutionary,” exclaims Cameron Stanley. “And it makes the world safer,” we are assured. With a tremor in his voice, he concludes to applause: “My first thought is for those American soldiers, they’re 18 or 19 years old, and I want them to win the war and come home safe and sound . “

To preemptively eradicate the adversary

Alex Karp develops a particular rhetoric. He believes that pacifists—specifically, progressive student protesters—are actually responsible for the deadly conflicts that drag on. He, on the other hand, who proposes the swift and preemptive eradication of the adversary, is essentially the true pacifist, the one who will save human lives.

In any case, the only ones that matter are North American ones and, as long as they behave themselves and pay for his software, those of the rest of the West. Karp calls himself the new Oppenheimer, and he prophesies: “An era of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is about to begin.”

Karp’s other source of inspiration was the proto-fascists, and in particular Karl Schmidt. This allows Olivier Tesquet to offer a synthesis: “Schmidt theorized that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy and sovereign decisions, as opposed to politics, which is debate, the democratic process. Well, Palantir, a transposition of Schmidt’s theses into the economic and computer fields, has become the site of the political, against politics.”

See more reports from L’humanité…

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