One of the world's most powerful tech companies sends a dangerous message / “All alarm bells for democracy must ring”

The manifesto of Palantir, one of the most influential American software companies with major contracts with the US military and several government agencies around the world, can be interpreted as an attempt to normalize an ideology of domination, in which cultural superiority, the militarization of technology and the inevitability of war become axioms.

At the heart of the manifesto is the idea that technology (especially artificial intelligence) is practically the foundation of new military power. The company explicitly says in a post on X, with more than 30 million views, that the development of autonomous weapons is inevitable and that the real question is not whether they will exist, but who will build them first.

In this setting, any kind of debate about ethics becomes almost useless, and “hard power”, supported by software, is presented to us as the only guarantee that democracies (whatever Palantir thinks a democracy is) can survive in a competitive world.

This naturally leads to the return to a more militarized society. The manifesto advocates the introduction of conscription in the US and criticizes the current volunteer model, arguing that the wars of the future should be shouldered by the whole of society, not just a fighting minority. In parallel, Silicon Valley is called to abandon its focus on consumerist applications and assume an active role in national defense, as a moral duty.

A dangerous idea: not all cultures are created equal

But perhaps the most troubling part of the text is the explicit rehabilitation of cultural hierarchies. The manifesto states that some cultures have produced progress and innovation, while others are “regressive” or “dysfunctional”, and criticizes the idea that all cultures should be treated as equals. At the same time, it rejects pluralism “empty of content” and suggests that the West should more clearly reassert its dominant identity and values. Once integrated into a corporate discourse, such concepts acquire the aura of a kind of innovative technological realism, even if in essence they only reheat the soup of old ideological frameworks.

The manifesto is an extract from the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the Westsigned by CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. These ideas are part of a carefully constructed vision of what the world should look like in the coming decades.

It is also important to understand that Palantir is one of the most powerful and influential tech companies in the world today. The company has become one of the main technology providers for several Western governments, especially in the area of ​​defense, intelligence and large-scale data analysis. In the US, it has billions of dollars in contracts with the military and the Pentagon, including for artificial intelligence systems used in military operations.

In the UK, it manages the National Public Health System (NHS) data platform and has major contracts with the Ministry of Defense and the police.

The company is also present in other allied countries, such as Australia (where it works with the military and intelligence services), but also in more geopolitically sensitive areas. For example, Palantir software is used in Ukraine for sensitive intelligence gathering operations and military support, and in Europe, in countries such as Germany or France, it collaborates with law enforcement and security agencies.

“All alarm bells for democracy must ring”

Since its inception, Palantir has been associated with the idea of ​​the invisible digital state, a system where data from public and private sources is connected, analyzed and transformed into decision-making tools for governments. The company has consistently been accused of participating in expanding the state's surveillance capabilities, sometimes without sufficient democratic scrutiny or public transparency over how these systems are being used.

If we take a step back then, we see that the current manifesto does not appear in a vacuum. It comes from a company that already has a close relationship with political and military power, and the deeply troubling discourse about the inevitability of war or cultural hierarchies comes from an actor that actively contributes to the technological infrastructure of global security.

“All the alarm bells for democracy need to go off,” Shannon Vallor, professor of data ethics and artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC.

This trend is not only occurring in the case of Palantir, but more broadly in the area of ​​a part of the tech elite in the United States, where the idea of ​​efficiency, speed and “results” is sometimes starting to be placed above slow and imperfect democratic processes. In this view, traditional political institutions are increasingly presented as obstacles to technological progress.

From this angle, the “effective” solution would be a more authoritarian type of leadership that cuts through procedures, ignores institutional frictions, and allows technology to advance without political constraints. The problem, as many critics have already warned, is that this kind of thinking does not lead to acceleration that benefits everyone, but rather leads us to a future where collective decision-making is implicitly replaced by the logic of private actors who control critical digital infrastructure.

Journalist Vlad Dumitrescu sends the Good Tech newsletter every Wednesday morning. If you want to receive practical tools to make your life easier with technology, you can subscribe here: