"Winner takes all": Alex Karp on AI in war, Palantir and Anthropic missions

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp openly admits what other companies try to distance themselves from: his technology is built for war and Palantir is involved in the conflict in the Middle East. In an interview with CNBC, Karp talked about how he feels about Palantir's placement on Iran's list of potential targets and why he believes its adversaries are unable to replicate the U.S. superiority on the battlefield. Oninvest has selected Karp's key statements.

- Our main focus now, and I hope the focus of every company in corporate America, is to devote all resources to making sure our soldiers come home alive and well. <...> We must realize that businesses in the US have an indirect advantage because of those who protect us. To my friends in the tech community: no one in the world would tolerate us and all that we do if America didn't have the most powerful military in the world. So supporting the military is not just a choice, it's an obligation to those who benefit from our system.

- When we first launched Palantir, no one wanted to give us money. Because we were openly in favor of our fighters coming home alive. And that, let's be frank, in some cases means that our enemies and adversaries won't be coming home. Since then, Silicon Valley on the question of whether industry should support the military has gone from open hostility to skepticism, then to neutrality and finally to "neutral positive." But one thing all the players, including the Valley itself, are even now underestimating: how tectonic these technologies are.

- The fact that you can now strike more precisely, more accurately, more quickly.... to organize the combined power of all our resources and unleash it on opponents and enemies - it has changed the way war is fought.

- Of course, I cannot disclose the details, but there are two fundamentally important points here. First, we need to take the infrastructure that was created in the industrial era and transform it so that post-industrial technologies, such as AI, can be introduced. Palantir does just that: we take dormant assets - hospitals, airplanes, engines, rockets - and allow them to be managed as if they were originally designed for modern tasks.

And on top of that, we are layering capabilities that did not exist a year ago. For example, producing a thousand rounds of ammunition is a task that five years ago would have taken two years. This allows us to clearly understand what exactly is hit, how and under what conditions, as well as to build real interaction between allies. After all, in practice we have to coordinate the actions of partners who do not have full access to our data. And how do you accomplish that? Well, this is a task that is within the competence of Palantir software, and at the moment we are the only ones who can really do it.

- Our adversaries were watching our actions in Afghanistan just yesterday, where almost nothing worked. Now, for the first time in decades, they are seeing something on the battlefield that they simply cannot reproduce.

- What makes America special right now? Our lethal capabilities and our twenty years of combat experience, the principle of meritocracy in the military and a level of funding that is beyond the reach of any other country, and the fact that the AI revolution is an uniquely American phenomenon. Every significant company, all the leading model developers, the very structural logic that gives them value, and the chips they run on are all created in our country.

- Right now, I am 100% focused on providing our military with this magical technology. But a lot of people are watching this and wondering, "Where should I invest?" In essence, it comes down to, can a company create value like no other? Will the military industry be able to create value in this way? Or is there going to be a big and unprecedented problem because we don't live in a world where everybody is happy. It's a winner-take-all world - both on the battlefield and in business - and that's why the U.S. has such a strong position in those areas.

- I won't get into the details - purely out of respect for the military and Dario (Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic) - but the situation is simple: the Defense Department plans to phase out work with Anthropic systems.

Our products are integrated with Anthropic, and in the future we will likely realize integration with other large language models just on the back of this controversy. The U.S. military deserves the best and most lethal technology in the world. We at Palantir will do everything we can to make sure they get it, whether the development comes from Anthropic or OpenAI, from Elon and his company X, from NVIDIA or Google. Our position is unwavering: the fighter should get the best technology.

- These people are angry, but definitely not stupid. We are actually in a state of war right now. It would seem logical to expect "hardcore" military firms on their target list. But they're interested in what they can't produce themselves. Take a look at that list: they're making a list of technologies necessary for America's superiority both on the battlefield and in the civilian sector - these areas are inextricably linked. Plus, if America builds the AI-powered economy of the future, it will be much harder to fight. It is these strategic advantages that they are after.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor