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AI \u201cseems much worse for the math people than the word people,\u201d Peter Thiel tersely said in 2024. He likely wasn\u2019t anticipating that just two years later his Palantir cofounder, CEO Alex Karp, would use some decidedly flowery language to describe people he thought were stupid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone\u2019s white-collar job \u2026 and you\u2019re gonna screw the military\u2014if you don\u2019t think that\u2019s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you\u2019re retarded,\u201d Karp said while speaking at the a16z American Dynamism Summit. \u201cYou might be particularly retarded, because you have a 160 IQ.\u201d<\/p>\n
Karp was commenting on a topic that has taken the AI world by storm: In what capacity should AI companies collaborate with the government? A closer look explains why a dustup between the Pentagon and two totally separate companies (Anthropic and OpenAI) has prompted Karp\u2019s displeasure.<\/p>\n
Katherine Boyle, general partner at a16z, moderated the breakout session, which was titled \u201cAI in Defense of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n
At which Karp noted: \u201cIf Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone\u2019s white-collar job\u2014meaning primarily Democratic-shaped people that you might grow up with, highly educated people who went to elite schools or went to schools that are almost elite for one party\u2014and you\u2019re going to sue the military. If you don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to lead to nationalization of our technology, you\u2019re retarded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whoa. So what\u2019s bothering Mr. Karp?<\/p>\n
While Karp could have chosen less offensive language to make his point, he was touching on a raw nerve\u2014one that is acutely personal for Palantir. \u201cYou cannot have technologies that simultaneously take away everyone\u2019s job,\u201d he said, and then be perceived as screwing the military. That tension isn\u2019t abstract for Palantir. It could very well be a live operational crisis.<\/p>\n
Companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI have\u00a0all signed contracts with\u00a0the Department of Defense, each with restrictions on whether their technologies can be used in settings that might violate their terms of service. The DOD has been in negotiations with AI companies to remove those restrictions and instead allow use of their tech for \u201call lawful purposes.\u201d Karp has little patience for companies that treat that ask as a moral redline:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a difference between U.S. military and surveillance,\u201d he said at the summit. \u201cDespite what everyone thinks, Palantir is the anti-surveillance company,\u201d he said, pushing back on claims that the company named after an all-seeing surveillance device from Lord of the Rings<\/em> is fundamentally about surveillance. Every technical expert knows this to be the case, but the proverbial \u201cperson online\u201d simply has the wrong idea, Karp argued, \u201cso I end up in every conversation that I don\u2019t want to be in.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei famously said he could not \u201cin good conscience\u201d support the \u201call lawful purposes\u201d clause. Then, after hitting Anthropic with the threat of being deemed a military supply-chain risk, the government penned a\u00a0deal with OpenAI to use its tools in classified missions. (Anthropic is reportedly in talks with the Pentagon yet again, with the Pentagon confirming that Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus was key to its preparations for the historic strike by the U.S. and Israeli military on Iran.)<\/p>\n For Palantir, that sequence of events is not an abstraction\u2014it is a direct operational threat. Palantir\u2019s flagship AI Platform (AIP) relies on plugging best-in-class frontier models into its defense and intelligence workflows. Claude Opus is among the most capable of those models, prized for its reasoning depth and reliability in high-stakes environments. If Anthropic is blacklisted as a military supply-chain risk\u2014or if its terms of service effectively bar it from the classified settings where Palantir operates\u2014Palantir would lose access to one of its most powerful AI engines. It would be forced to retool its platform around alternative models mid-contract, a costly and reputationally damaging disruption for a company whose entire brand promise is mission-critical reliability.<\/p>\n \u201cAgain, there\u2019s a lot of subtlety here behind the curtain,\u201d Karp acknowledged. \u201cI\u2019ve been heavily involved in that subtlety\u2014what can be deployed, where it can be deployed.\u201d<\/p>\n The stakes, Karp argued, go well beyond any single Pentagon contract or any single company\u2019s policy decision. \u201cThe danger for our industry,\u201d he warned, \u201cis that you get a famous horseshoe effect where there\u2019s only one thing people agree on\u2014and that\u2019s that this is not paying the bills, and people in our industry should be nationalized.\u201d<\/p>\n That populist convergence\u2014where left and right alike turn on tech\u2014becomes inevitable, in Karp\u2019s telling, if AI companies strip white-collar workers of their livelihoods while simultaneously refusing to serve the military. Again, he was pointed about who those workers are: \u201cPrimarily Democratic-shaped people that you might grow up with\u2014highly educated people who went to elite schools, or went to schools that are almost elite, for one party.\u201d<\/p>\n Those fears are already materializing at an economic scale that lends urgency to Karp\u2019s argument. Experts warn of an imminent\u00a0AI doomsday scenario\u00a0where white-collar workers\u2019 days are numbered\u2014a destabilizing force that would leave most employees jobless. These aren\u2019t merely panic-inducing ideas; they carry real-world consequences, like a\u00a0viral essay from Citrini Research\u00a0that triggered mass market upheaval.<\/p>\n In Karp\u2019s view, the government would not allow AI companies to amass the power they already hold and still operate in a self-regulatory, nongovernmental oversight capacity\u2014let alone dictate terms of use back to the government itself. \u201cThis is where that path is going,\u201d he said simply. The only way for companies like Palantir to retain their position, their contracts, and their access to the frontier AI models that power their platforms is to play by the government\u2019s rules when called upon. For Palantir, losing that seat at the table doesn\u2019t just mean bad optics. It means losing the technological inputs that make its core product work.<\/p>\n It would be a dramatic reversal for a company that delivered what Karp called just a month ago \u201cone of the truly iconic performances in the history of corporate performance or technology\u201d in Palantir\u2019s latest quarterly earnings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Palantir #CEOs #rant #AnthropicPentagon #feud #lot #dirty #word<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AI \u201cseems much worse for the m… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[704,15217,526,11978,15184,1654,2239,10304,15216,3242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The bigger economic picture<\/h2>\n