{"id":457783,"date":"2026-03-04T22:01:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T22:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/457783\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T22:01:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T22:01:17","slug":"palantir-ceo-uses-slur-to-describe-people-who-dont-think-the-government-will-take-their-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/457783\/","title":{"rendered":"Palantir CEO Uses Slur to Describe People Who Don\u2019t Think the Government Will Take Their Company"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States is at war with Iran, Anthropic is at war with the Department of Defense<\/a>, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp is at war with linear thinking despite having lots to say about both of the other battles. During an appearance at a16z\u2019s American Dynamism Summit 2026, Karp offered some advice to his industry as the proliferation of artificial intelligence pushes us toward potential inflection points in the private and public sectors: either do what the Trump administration asks of you or be prepared to be nationalized.<\/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, if you don\u2019t think that\u2019s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you\u2019re retarded,\u201d Karp said while speaking at the summit<\/a>. \u201cYou might be particularly retarded, because you have a 160 IQ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though it requires some parsing (and kinda ignoring a sidebar in which Karp described white-collar workers as \u201cprimarily Democratic shaped people that you and I grew up with, highly educated people who went to elite schools or went to schools that are almost elite for one party\u201d), Palantir\u2019s CEO seems to be making the case that if AI firms don\u2019t cooperate with the federal government, they risk simply being absorbed by it, because no government would let companies amass the type of power and control that the tech industry is on the precipice of obtaining without requiring reciprocity.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you view the Trump administration as authoritarian or fascistic, you might call that being a collaborator.<\/p>\n

Karp seemed to be at least in part responding to the threats levied by the Department of Defense in its showdown with Anthropic. The Pentagon demanded that the company behind Claude provide unfettered access to its AI model, including in ways that would violate the company\u2019s safeguards to prevent participation in mass domestic surveillance and in developing fully autonomous weapons that would operate without human involvement. In response to Anthropic\u2019s unwillingness to drop those red lines, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to, among other things, invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to build a model for the military\u2019s desired purposes.<\/p>\n

That would be a form of nationalization, in which Anthropic would no longer control the weights and levers of its own technology. It\u2019s one that Karp and his fellow tech execs would seemingly like to avoid, or at least they wanted to avoid that outcome in the past. But the way to avoid it, in Karp\u2019s configuration, is to go along with what the government asks of you. \u201cThere is a lot of subtlety here behind the curtain, and I\u2019ve been heavily involved in that subtlety. Where [AI] can be deployed, what can be deployed\u2014there is a difference between the US military and surveillance,\u201d Karp said. In other words, operate as if the government owns your company because if you don\u2019t, it will.<\/p>\n

During his rambling explanation of why tech companies should go along with what the Trump administration is asking of them, Karp added, \u201cDespite what everyone thinks, Palantir is the anti-surveillance company.\u201d Which sure seems like a strange thing for the guy in charge of the company that built a database of protesters<\/a> and is helping ICE track down immigrants<\/a>, but maybe that tells you how seriously you should take him.<\/p>\n

The suspicions that one might have of Karp\u2019s advice for full compliance with the government\u2019s carte blanche demands are likely not lessened by the voices who have joined him. Fellow Trump-aligned tech exec Palmer Luckey, the head of military tech darling Anduril, took to X in the wake of Anthropic\u2019s decision to reject the Department of Defense\u2019s terms to say that, actually, the government can make companies do whatever and that\u2019s a good thing. He cited<\/a> President Harry S. Truman\u2019s executive order to nationalize the railroads, and in another post<\/a> said \u201cseemingly innocuous terms\u201d like insisting the government can\u2019t use your tech to target civilians are \u201cactually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karp put it this way: \u201cThe danger for our industry is that you get a famous horseshoe effect, where there is only one thing people agree on, and that\u2019s that this is not paying the bills and our industry should be nationalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there is certainly something troubling about the Karps and Palmers of the world insisting that the prudent thing for Anthropic and other companies to do is abandon their red lines, it is also a more honest position than the more weaselly execs who suck up to whoever is in office. Anduril and Palantir are modern-day arms dealers. Moral concerns don\u2019t really fit with the bottom line in that business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States is at war with Iran, Anthropic is at war with the Department of Defense, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,101873,1119,733,4308,42238,37313,50796,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-457783","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alex-karp","10":"tag-anthropic","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-department-of-defense","14":"tag-palantir","15":"tag-pentagon","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}