Alex Karp Goes to War

Alex Karp and I would not seem to have much in common. I work for WIRED, which does tough reporting on Trumpworld; Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a $450 billion firm that has contracts with agencies like the CIA and ICE and worked for the Israeli military during its campaign in Gaza. I live in the East Village of New York City, and the home Karp spends the most time in is a 500-acre compound in rural New Hampshire. (Last year he was one of the highest paid executives in the United States.) I was a plain old English major, and he’s got a law degree and a PhD in philosophy, studying under the legendary Jürgen Habermas. I consider myself a progressive; Karp regards that stuff as “pagan religion.”

But we can bond over one shared status: Both of us are alumni of Central High School, a Philadelphia magnet school. (Not at the same time. I have some years on the 58-year-old executive.) Maybe it was that connection that led Karp to agree to a sit-down. The son of a Jewish pediatrician and a Black artist, Karp struggled with dyslexia, and at Central he seems to have turned a corner—even speculating now that overcoming the challenge helped position him for later success.

We conducted our interview at an annual gathering of Palantir’s corporate customers. The event had the giddy vibe of a multilevel marketing summit. The customers I talked to—from giants like American Airlines to relatively modest family firms—said that Palantir’s AI-powered systems are expensive but well worth it.

Not presenting at the event are the customers who provide Palantir with the majority of its business—the US government and its allies. (The company does not do business with Russia or China.) Palantir was founded to put Silicon Valley’s innovation into defense and government technology. With coauthor Nicholas Zamiska (a Palantirian), Karp laid out his philosophy earlier this year in a book called The Technological Republic, a surprisingly readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism. In Karp’s view, the antiestablishment tone of Apple’s Macintosh marketing was the original sin in a tech culture that celebrates indulgent individualism and neglects nationalist concerns. At the conference, Karp, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, began his opening remarks by saying, “We’ve been at odds with Silicon Valley on and off since our inception 20 years ago.” In 2020, Karp moved the company headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver, whereupon it became that state’s wealthiest corporation.

Some see Karp as a dystopic supervillain. He responds to those critics aggressively, bluntly, and without a shred of remorse. After years of contracts, the company has apparently proven to the government’s satisfaction that its tools can effectively leverage information on the battlefield and in intelligence operations. Palantir has a multimillion-dollar contract with ICE involving “targeting and enforcement”—essentially helping the agency to locate people for deportation. In Ukraine, Karp says with pride, the company’s products have helped deliver lethal force. Palantir has a Code of Conduct that supposedly binds the company to, among other things, “protect privacy and civil liberties,” “protect the vulnerable,” “respect human dignity,” and “preserve and promote democracy.” In an open letter last May, 13 former workers accused Palantir’s leadership of having abandoned its founding values and of being complicit in “normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs.” Karp has also revealed that other employees have left because of the company’s work with the Israel military. His retort: If you’re not generating opposition, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Beneath his fiery defense of Palantir, I sense that Karp yearns to be understood. He noted that all anyone wants to talk to him about is ICE, Israel, and Ukraine. I wanted to visit those subjects, too, and we did. But our conversation also touched on Donald Trump, democracy, and his love affair with German culture. Oh, and Central High.

STEVEN LEVY: I understand that your experience at Central High in Philadelphia was transformational.

ALEX KARP: They gave me an IQ test for the mentally gifted program. My parents had never bothered to tell me to get all A’s. But when the person in charge, Mrs. Snyder, got my IQ test she told me, “Clearly you’re dyslexic, but someone with your IQ can’t get B’s, you have to get all A’s.” That’s when I went from a strong student to an exceptional one. She kind of changed my life.

A lot of people say that it isn’t clear exactly what Palantir does. Can you explain it in your own words?

If you’re an intelligence agency, you’re using us to find terrorists and organized criminals while maintaining the security and data protection of your country. Then you have the special forces. How do you know where your troops are? How do you get in and out of the battlefield as safely as possible, avoiding mines, avoiding enemies? Then there’s Palantir on the commercial side. The shorthand is if you’re doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it’s analytics or AI, you’re going to have to find something like our products.

Basically, it’s about orchestrating information with AI, which is something lots of companies in Silicon Valley want to do. But you contend that no other tech company can do it like yours.

What I’m really saying is we know how to do it. If you find someone else who can do it, and you don’t want to work with us, buy it from them.

Is there anyone you consider a competitor?

Our competition is political. The woke left and the woke right wake up every day, figuring out how they can hurt Palantir. If they get into power, they’ll hurt Palantir. And by the way, it’s global. I view Democrats as my party, but if the Mamdani wing of the party takes over? If that’s my party, I’m not in it. Or the right woke wing, which is like, everything is a conspiracy, any use of technology is actually going to only be used to eviscerate and attack us? Palantir is literally the hardest software to abuse in the world, but they don’t seem to want it. If you don’t want meritocracy, you hate Palantir. That is our competition.

My head’s spinning a little. How did Mamdani get in there?

If you explain to the world that labor is going to be valueless, people are going to elect the most ridiculous people ever. They’re afraid of an AI-driven, AGI environment where no one has a job. Universities and elite institutions have played a corrosive role here. People are teaching pagan religion views—a new religion with sacrifices. Who’s the sacrifice? Me, I’m the sacrifice.

You don’t seem constrained to me. You’re doing great.

I’m not complaining. We’re not victims at Palantir. We’re doing very well. We might even do better.

In your book you offer a harsh critique that tech companies are not sufficiently patriotic.

In the beginning, we were at odds with Silicon Valley because we were pro-American, pro-West, and pro-­making the government functional. That was very controversial in Silicon Valley because it equated to not making any money and being a loser. We won that battle. I think Silicon Valley actually has become, at least behind closed doors, patriotic. Silicon Valley has always been pro-meritocracy, and we’re very aligned with that. Where we’re currently at a misalignment-alignment apex is that we believe in using large language models in a way that creates actual empirical value, but also is very strong for workers. We walked toward the government when everyone walked away. That’s how we ended up powering Maven, the US government’s AI battlefield plan.

You have been part of the war in Ukraine from the start. What have you learned from that about the battlefield of the future?

I can tell you off the record.

This is a Q and A, so that wouldn’t be helpful.

Then I’ll give you the on-the-record version, which is almost the same. Broadly speaking, at the beginning of the war it was very clear that you would need software orchestration of small objects. But then the Russians began jamming all devices. The lesson was that the only thing that basically mattered was how to get through the jam space and get your device to deliver its payload. So it’s the ability to interact with the device, plan where the device is going, and gather intel from the device. That’s very different from how war has been fought in the past.

Is this a scarier form of war?

The way I look at it is: Is America going to be scarier or are our adversaries going to be scarier? You need high-end satellites, you need to be able to coordinate with the satellites, and you need software and large language models. It’s advantageous for America because we’re very strong in those areas.

Palantir has a unique culture—some even call it a cult. I wonder how much you cultivate the outsider mentality. We’re both from Philadelphia; Jason Kelce after the first Super Bowl win was saying, “No one likes us. We don’t care.”

People don’t understand that there’s a massive feature side to being an outsider. It’s not pleasant to be unpopular. I don’t like it, actually. But you get the best people in the world. If someone says something ridiculously stupid about Palantir, five people look at it and the fifth person says, hey, it can’t be as simple as that—this is a really interesting company, and they’re thinking of the 10th derivative of a problem, not the simplistic bullshit from someone online who has no idea how our products work. That’s exactly the kind of person you want inside your business, or buying your product someday, or investing in you. There’s no country in the world where our brand is as bad as in France, but we have the best French employees in the world, working at a company that’s apparently a CIA front, which is obviously complete bullshit.

You may not be a CIA front, but you work for the CIA and ICE.

ICE came later. Our first contracts were with US intelligence, our biggest contracts ended up being in the DOD, and then later we started working in Homeland Security under Democrats. Now it’s very controversial because it’s Trump.

It’s controversial because Trump is doing things that we haven’t seen done before, particularly with ICE. You have a corporate code that supports democracy and stands against discrimination. Do you track whether your products are being used in ways that violate that code? Is there a line beyond which you would say no to a president?

I was the first CEO to say we would not build a Muslim database. [Editor’s note: Technically he was not the first, but considering Palantir’s business, the statement was consequential.] I’ve defended Israel, so I think I’m the last person in the world people would expect to say that. I can’t go into details. But I’ve pulled things from places in the United States where I thought there was something going on like that.

Maybe you and I disagree about ICE because I spent most of my adult life in Europe, in Germany. I am an immigration skeptic. I personally think that citizens have to decide by their vote what immigration policy is going to be. I grew up in a progressive family, but people my age and older were massive immigration skeptics. Open borders is not a progressive policy; it never was. Look at what a version of open borders has done to Germany on any vector.

Let me ask again: Are you monitoring what’s happening with the US government and democracy in this country, and asking yourself if you need to take a closer look at how your products are being used?

Let me reframe that. Have I ever worked against our commercial interests because it violated our norms? Yes. Have I done this in government? Yes. We get no credit for this, but we almost went out of business because we were not working in Russia or China. Do I agree with your implicit assertion that what’s going on in immigration as you formulate it has never been done before? No. Do you know what happens when you’re in Japan, and you overstay your visa for one minute? You are put on a plane. [Ed. note: The Japanese government has received domestic and international criticism for its policy of indefinitely detaining thousands of immigrants.] I do think this is a very valuable line of questioning you’re asking—if our product allowed for civil rights abuses, would I intervene? Yes, though our product is the hardest in the world to violate. Do I agree with some of the assertions you just made? No. But you’re bringing up exactly the right question, and I’m telling you that I have done this, and I will continue to do it.

Does your Jewish background inform the support Palantir is giving to Israel?

I don’t give to Israel. I allow them to purchase our product. Look, you’re asking whether we are defined by where we sit or by our ideas? I always think it’s both. I view myself as an outsider. There’s obviously a particularistic element, no doubt, but I would like to believe that a support of Western values and their robust defense includes something that’s not just me doing a derivative of my own identity.

A lot of Jews, me included, feel affinity to Israel but also feel that what’s happening in Gaza is intolerable.

If you have five Jews, you have 50 opinions. The issue for Palantir is, do you support Israel? Not do you support every micro decision that Israel is making?

We’re not talking about a little thing here.

Israel is a country with a GDP smaller than Switzerland, and it’s under massive attack. Some critiques are legitimate, but others are aggressive in attacking Israel. My reaction is, well, then I’m just going to defend them. When people are fair to Israel and treat it like any other nation, which I don’t think they do, I will be much more willing to express in public the things I express in private to Israelis.

When you get a letter from 13 former employees saying that Palantir’s leadership has failed to stand up to authoritarianism, do you take that seriously?

You have to steelman everything that’s lobbed at you. When The New York Times says we’re eviscerating human rights, blah, blah, blah, that’s complete malarkey. Everyone knows it’s malarkey. They know it’s malarkey. I certainly steelman [the critiques from] ex-Palantirians and current ones. Anybody making decisions all day is wrong sometimes. But if you attack me irresponsibly, that will harden my view.

Do you have a relationship with Trump?

It depends how you define “relationship.” He’s the president of the United States, and I very much respect that. I agree with him on some things, and probably on some things I don’t.

Do you like him?

I think he’s done a much better job than you think he’s done.

Let’s not use me.

In the positioning of your question, you’re not neutral. Talking to you is just like talking to my family. It’s like where me and my family disagree. And I’ll tell you where those places are. They’re on the border, they’re in Israel, and they’re in Ukraine. I get yelled at all day about those three issues.

I’d like to meet your parents!

I think if we were family members, in private you and I would disagree, and I would be pointing out that Trump’s decisions on AI, and his decisions on the Middle East, are very different than people in the Democratic Party would have made, and very good.

Let’s go back in time a bit. You are an unusual CEO. You aren’t technical. You went to law school at Stanford and didn’t practice but went to Germany for a PhD in philosophy. What do you think Peter Thiel saw in you that led him to choose you to run his defense-related startup?

God only knows, but I would say my best explanation is the same things that made Peter the world’s best value investor—he finds people that understand the sixth, seventh, eighth derivative of a problem in a business context. And we were friends. I do think there’s a Germanic overlap, in our aptitude for understanding the consequences of a decision very far out. There’s a lot of Germanic culture in Palantir—the whole process of going deeper and deeper and deeper into a problem, what we call the Five Whys, is very Germanic. The level of rigor to understand if something is plausibly true, or at least figure out if it’s definitively wrong, is definitely a derivative of my education. I would say our high standard of quality is somewhat derivative of authors I read and people I dealt with in Germany.

It seems that Germany resonates with you personally.

I just did very well there. In Germany, let’s just say you meet a girl—you don’t have to run around saying you love them after, like, the first date. You may go out with someone for years, and you could just be honest, like you really care about them. There’s very little white-lie-telling in Germany.

I suspect you don’t tell too many white lies in the United States.

There’s a higher price for not doing it. I do bring some of that Germanic culture to America, but I do think America is a superior culture.

You seem to live your life the way you want. Not many CEOs live in some remote corner of New Hampshire like you do.

Doing what everybody else wants me to do is much harder for a dyslexic like me than a non-dyslexic, so I don’t think I’d be very good at it. Maybe I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but I kind of like being me on most days.

You are a fanatical cross-country skier. What do you think about when you do that for hours at a time?

How happy I am.

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