Words, defense contractors, companies with exposure to the war have been in focus since the conflict broke out, including Palantir, which has a multibillion dollar contract with the army. Sara Eisen joins us this morning with Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp. Morning, Sara.
Good morning, Carl. It's good to see you. Yes, I am here at Palantir with the founder and CEO Alex Karp. It's good to have you. Good to speak with you.
And Carl was just talking about the Iran war risk, which is influencing the market today, and the fact that we haven't gotten a deal yet. I know that you are heavily involved in the AI operating system for the military. What is your view on where the war goes from here?
Well, first of all, at Palantir, people currently are focusing a lot on our commercial business and there's a lot of interesting things there. But once war zones heat up anywhere in the allied world, the Palantir Maven platform, which takes very valuable LLMs and makes them actually lethal and useful on the battlefield, comes into action. The primary focus of our whole company is bringing our American warfighters home safely, meaning that when we engage, they engage in a way that gives them a massively unfair advantage, scares our adversaries, and ensures that when they're in action, they have the best humanly and inhumanly possible chances of coming home safe and without injury. The whole company really just focuses on the operations of that. These things begin well before the public sees. We have a wide swath of Palantir working on various platforms, particularly the Maven platform. There are a lot of things that are in the public space. Maven has been discussed and older versions have been shown in public, but I think the American people would be very positively surprised by the advances in technology that really only America has.
Without giving away too many secrets, can you just explain what edge that is that you give our warfighters?
Well, first of all, there are really two things. Every military force in the world, you see this on the battlefield in Ukraine. One of the big issues the Russians had is how do you transform your operations into a modern operation? If you take components of Maven, there's infrastructure which allows you to take older systems and make them newer systems. That allows you to have a completely integrated battlespace, which is super hard because of security clearance data sources. You can think of it as infant data, some of which is very sensitive, some no one else can see, some everyone has to see. You have allies working on it. How do you get that into one pane of glass with security? How do you then use advances in AI and machine learning to enhance that while making decisions? Not like loose AI code that's just not useful. None of these things are used anywhere on the battlefield. So how do you enhance your ability to see things, to go through very complex systems? In Ukraine, it's not just getting the drone to the end point, it's going through advanced radar systems. Vis-a-vis Iran, it's 100 times more complicated because they have… You look at American performance, which has been, thanks to the bravery of Americans and ingenuity, and I'd like to believe our tech, very few losses on our side, very precise, very controlled. You saw this in Venezuela to dismantle these things. Because the dismantling is happening, we underestimate the complexity it took. It was not possible two years ago, three years ago. Now America can really do this with great precision and very low cost to us in terms of lives.
Casualties — is that opening up new business in different regions for you, the success of what you're seeing in the Middle East?
East. One of the many secrets of Palantir: people talk about our forward deployed engineers. They try to copy, talk about ontology. They try to copy.
Talk about how software — it's like software is worthless, but everyone's trying to copy us. Some parts of software are not that valuable, but some parts are crucial. There are three kinds of software. Infrastructure is hard coded things written into the enterprise that have to be managed on premise often to maintain the sovereignty of your own data. That is excruciatingly valuable. Then you have how to manage that — ontology, Foundry, and other things are very valuable and durable. Then you have PhDs and large language models. Most PhDs are just throwing people at a problem anyone else can solve. Some are valuable, some are worthless. Free code is very easy. So you have very different things. In crucial situations in Russia, the Middle East, Ukraine, where you have to bring home people safely and your adversary has to be dismantled — the Persians, the Russians, the CCP are exceedingly talented technical people with unique ways of fighting. You're not going up against an adversary that will just lay down. You have to bring your unique way enhanced with things no one else has. Those things now are infrastructure, software, Foundry, Apollo, and large language models we produce. It is the combination that is lethal. You see this in US commercial as well. Domestically, you have a uniquely American movement called Frontier Labs. Philosophically and technically it's wrong. It's a hyper-religion of hyper-optimism. They believe all problems — past, present, future, including the ones they create — will be solved by them, including human nature and disparities. On the infrastructure side, enterprises are fed up because this doesn't work. That drives our commercial business. On the government side, we are super pro-American, super pro-West.
You've always had that and you've always done that. I do wonder, though, how you protect the company from getting politicized. You've worked with administrations in both parties before, but especially when it comes to this war, which is unpopular and the Democrats have been fighting it. How do you avoid making Palantir a target in the midterm elections or the next presidential election?
I don't want to be overly naive. We are trying — I am trying, sometimes with success, sometimes without — to move people that the AI infrastructure revolution is a unique opportunity for America because we developed almost all of it. However, it cannot be discussed in blue-red terms. The biggest danger is people say 'this guy agrees with me politically, therefore he's right' or 'she disagrees, so she's wrong.' This is a massive revolution and there is a danger. I've been running around telling people for the last six months in private and somewhat in public.
The nationalization is coming. The reason is you can't do a blue-red debate. This is a massive revolution with opportunities only America has, and dangers. For example, I got in trouble for not saying we would have a draft. I wasn't saying that. I was saying we're in…
People think you were advocating.
A draft. Well, what I was saying is we're in a massive time of dislocation. We have to find ways to come together as a culture. In Silicon Valley, everyone thinks we're going to magically like each other because there's abundance and no one has a job unless we're ending history. In fact, it's the opposite. We're going to have massive resources, but they'll disproportionately go to people already wealthy. That is a political problem. You can't just say we're all going to have more, therefore we're happy. We're not at the end.
What should the industry do about it?
We have to be frontal about issues that are real and getting worse. Wealth accumulation is totally fine. I am actually a card-carrying progressive. I don't think card-carrying progressives have anything.
Against a card-carrying progressive?
The question is not whether I'm progressive. The question is whether some progressives are progressive. I am progressive. I want poor people to have a better lifestyle, higher standard of living, all poor people. I got in trouble for mentioning that 37% of our GDP is female — 50% of Americans are roughly female. There's a dislocation there. 67% of people who have gone to graduate school are female. These parts of the market will be under massive pressure. It doesn't help to pretend we won't have these problems. The progressive position is progressive because you speak about problems: can we protect our workforce? Can we have migration the way we used to? Can we teach people the same skills as in the past? We have a program at Palantir to help neurodivergence — not because I'm a good person, but because those people are particularly valuable. Many who came to America from all over the world were neurodivergent and said, 'It's not working out for me in my culture, I got to come.'
But the point is we have to somehow get everybody around. When Bernie Sanders says 'I'm going to take 50%' — okay.
Think that's actually going to happen?
If we keep going, people don't think I'm progressive. In two years, they won't think Bernie Sanders is progressive. They'll say, 'Bernie Sanders, you only want 50%? What is this, 50%?'
You think we're headed as a country?
