Over the weekend, US surveillance and analytics company Palantir Technologies posted a long, arrogant thread on social media excerpting a 22-point manifesto by the company’s CEO, Alex Karp, which dictates national policy on war, culture, crime, and technology.
The points are from Karp's New York Times bestselling book, The Technological Republic.
Titled "Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief," the post quickly exploded to over 21 million views, dominated by outrage over warmongering and backlash towards Silicon Valley elite dictating how society should embrace military tech and national duty.
The document reads like a self-serving corporate wishlist dressed up in pseudo-philosophical language. It urges Silicon Valley to embrace “hard power” through software, pushes for AI weapons, a return to the draft, rearmament of Germany and Japan, and greater tech involvement in policing “violent crime.”
Critics see it as a blueprint for expanding intrusive AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing, and algorithmic control over society, tools Palantir already profits from handsomely.
French analyst Christophe Boutry called it the "privatisation of sovereignty".
UK-based group Labour Digital Rights Network said that “unaccountable tech monopolies have no democratic mandate”.
Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said: "If Evil could tweet, this is what it would!"
Another X user called Palantir an “absolutely demented” and “highly dangerous” organisation that represents a “sinister corporate threat to democracies and their collective sovereignties”.
The post suggested that the development of AI weapons is unavoidable, urging Silicon Valley to take a more active role in national defence. “The question is not whether AI 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,” it said.
Most controversially, the manifesto asserts that "some cultures have produced vital advances while others remain dysfunctional and regressive", language that reeks of civilisational supremacism by ranking entire cultures and subcultures in a hierarchy of worth.
The viral post ends with a not-so-subtle plug for the book and criticises “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.”
Palantir’s platforms like Gotham and Foundry already integrate massive datasets for intelligence, targeting, and law enforcement. Critics fear the manifesto normalises rolling out these tools domestically, creating a permanent surveillance architecture where AI monitors, predicts, and “neutralises” threats in everyday life, eroding privacy and individual liberty under the guise of security and “hard power.”
Karp has a track record of controversial views. He has repeatedly defended the company’s work with ICE, Israel, and the US military.
He has described Palantir’s mission as helping to “scare enemies and on occasion, kill them.”
Palantir has long been slammed as a surveillance behemoth that profits from human suffering. Its platforms power ICE’s aggressive deportation machine, enabling mass tracking and raids on migrants and asylum seekers in ways human rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned as enabling serious abuses.
Even more damning, the company’s AI tools have been linked to Israel’s military aggressions in Gaza, including systems accused of feeding “kill lists” and automated targeting.
