divest<\/a> from the company. But the Atlantic and Pacific Forum \u2014 part intellectual salon, part job fair \u2014 offered a gathering of converts to Karp\u2019s cause and a call for new adherents. When the elevator doors opened, I saw the room was rapidly filling.<\/p>\nThe crowd was a mix of State Department staffers, Yale professors, Palantir employees (including Bill Rivers, a deputy on the Corporate Affairs team), and think-tankers. I spotted two people affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations among them: Gordon M. Goldstein, who arrived carrying a CFR tote bag, and Alan Raul, who wore an American-flag lapel pin.<\/p>\n
A small clutch of undergraduates stood near the windows. They were students, they told me, of Ted Wittenstein, a Yale lecturer who had organized the event. One said he thought they\u2019d been invited because the organizers knew they were \u201cnot going to protest.\u201d Some were angling for jobs at Palantir. Others were simply interested in the conference\u2019s topic, \u201cNational Power and Purpose in the Age of AI.\u201d I found my seat next to an employee of a large New York bank. Her boss, she said, had sent her.<\/p>\n
Wittenstein called the room to order. \u201cIn this age of hyperpartisan politics,\u201d he said, \u201cwe need more gatherings on campus and elsewhere that foster intellectual diversity.\u201d It was a curious note to strike. The speakers that day were almost entirely Palantir executives, conservative intellectuals, and alumni of the intelligence community. It was a safe space, he seemed to be saying. (In a statement sent through Yale, Wittenstein said that invitations had gone to \u201cseveral hundred students, scholars, and practitioners,\u201d many of whom were on his Schmidt Program\u2019s mailing list and that \u201ceveryone who signed up was most welcome to attend.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The first talk was supposed to be on \u201cWork, Purpose, & Human Flourishing in an Age of AI\u201d featuring Roger Kimball and R.R. Reno, the long-tenured conservative editors of The New Criterion and First Things, interviewed by Maya Sulkin of Bari Weiss\u2019s Free Press. Sulkin attempted to press her panelists into reckoning with the political backlash to AI. How should Gen Z handle the fear that AI will render them \u201cobsolete,\u201d and that no amount of work or study matters because \u201cthe machine will outperform you\u201d?\u00a0Reno brushed off these concerns. In his view, this was just \u201cdoomerism\u201d and \u201cnihilism\u201d dressed differently. \u201cIt was the \u2018climate crisis\u2019 only just yesterday,\u201d he said (as if that had been solved).<\/p>\n
Sulkin tried again: She asked her panelists to consider the \u201cpermanent underclass\u201d scenario, the possibility that AI concentrates all wealth among \u201clike 19 people in Silicon Valley.\u201d Neither editor seemed very troubled by this. \u201cA rising tide lifts all boats,\u201d Kimball responded. Reno reached for scripture \u2014 \u201cI mean, Jesus said, \u2018The poor you shall always have with you.\u2019\u201d He predicted that there might eventually be \u201ca kind of aristocracy of the intellect\u201d: \u201cthe people who wind up feeding the new thoughts to the large language models\u201d at the top and then everyone else would be \u201cjust consumers.\u201d Looking around the room, there was no need to worry where folks here would end up.<\/p>\n
Sulkin asked whether colleges in the face of AI-induced job loss should abandon career prep and return to something older: \u201csoul formation.\u201d Kimball took the opening. Yale had been \u201cdistracted\u201d from\u00a0education by \u201cperformative concern with so-called social justice,\u201d he said. The humanistic enterprise, he warned, was probably \u201cmoving outside of universities right now.\u201d Princeton Classics graduates, he added, couldn\u2019t even read Latin. The connection between these matters and Palantir might seem tenuous. But Karp and his director of corporate affairs, Nicholas Zamiska \u2014 another conference speaker \u2014 have insisted otherwise.<\/p>\n
In their book, The Technological Republic, they contend that Silicon Valley lost its way after the Cold War as the technology sector retreated from the public interest and into \u201cluxury beliefs\u201d \u2014 opposition to using software to help law enforcement among them. The rot, in their telling, began in higher ed: Stanford dropped its History of Western Civilization requirement in 1968, and the generation that built the internet grew up constructing its identity \u201cin opposition to the state.\u201d It became squeamish about helping governments do government things, like deporting people.<\/p>\n
Karp and Zamiska take particular offense at Google\u2019s former motto, \u201cDon\u2019t be evil.\u201d That old maxim reflects, they write, a mind-set that prizes moral clarity over \u201cthe more difficult and often messy task of navigating the world in all of its imperfection.\u201d Palantir would not make the same mistake.<\/p>\n
In the Trump era, that policy has been particularly profitable. The firm\u2019s revenue grew 93 percent last year, and Palantir became one of the 20 most valuable American companies. It landed a string of major government contracts, including $30 million from ICE last April to build ImmigrationOS, a platform to select targets for deportation; $10 billion from the Army; $1.3 billion from the Pentagon to build Maven, a drone-imagery-labeling software; and nearly $448 million from the Navy. Today, its stock price stands at more than triple its level than on the eve of the 2024 election. Earlier in April, when the stock dipped, the president went on Truth Social to praise Palantir\u2019s \u201cgreat war fighting capabilities and equipment\u201d \u2014 and posted its ticker symbol.<\/p>\n
Exactly how far does Palantir\u2019s wish list \u2014 \u201ca union of the state and the software industry,\u201d as The Technological Republic puts it \u2014 go? The conference\u2019s speakers ranged from highly skeptical to fully dismissive of AI regulation. During Zamiska\u2019s talk, Wittenstein \u2014 his interviewer and his old classmate at Yale \u2014 asked Palantir\u2019s director of corporate affairs whether there were any \u201cred lines\u201d where government regulation of AI might be warranted. Zamiska didn\u2019t name any. Sure, he could \u201cunderstand the anxiety that comes with this current moment.\u201d But what he wanted instead of regulation was \u201ca much deeper, richer, more integrated public-private partnership.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conference\u2019s dedicated panel on AI regulation struck a similar tone. Dean Ball, a former Trump adviser and the lead author of the administration\u2019s AI Action Plan, had little patience for most of the over 1,500 AI-related bills introduced in state legislatures. There was, he acknowledged, \u201ca small subset of bills that grapple with things like catastrophic risk\u201d that he supported. But rules against asking AI for legal advice, he said, were \u201cstupid.\u201d There \u201cprobably should be a national framework\u201d for catastrophic AI-risk reporting, he said, but \u201cthe goal of AI governance should not be to solve every profound and interesting question.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ball, who is now a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, mused that AI might replace the Supreme Court, then the United States government itself. AI, he said, was \u201cthis giant acid vat\u201d dissolving society\u2019s mediating institutions. \u201cFuture institutions will be machinic,\u201d he said. \u201cIt will not be AI in government. It\u2019s going to be AI as governments.\u201d<\/p>\n
But was all this good? The Republic was \u201cdecaying,\u201d Ball said, and we\u2019re living in \u201cvery dangerous times.\u201d He was certain, though, that the AI revolution was coming \u2014 and if America didn\u2019t build superintelligence first, China would. He said he was a \u201ctechno-optimist and institutional pessimist.\u201d The reason America currently leads China in AI development, he explained, had nothing to do with the innovation ecosystem or even the rule of law. \u201cIt is because we have more computers than they do, and they\u2019re better,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why.\u201d The U.S. needed to keep it that way.<\/p>\n
Elliot Gaiser, Ball\u2019s co-panelist and the assistant attorney general of the Office of Legal Counsel, was more circumspect. Handing governance to machines, he said, would not strike \u201cthe sovereign people who are trying to govern ourselves in this Republic\u201d as \u201cparticularly comforting.\u201d But he didn\u2019t categorically rule it out. The government official was also more practical. The Attorney General had already established a task force at the DOJ, he explained, whose mission was to find state laws \u201cinconsistent with having a unified free-market regulatory approach to AI.\u201d At the conference, he floated a legal theory that would give the president broad authority to build data centers wherever and whenever he liked. Using the Defense Production Act, passed by Congress in 1950, the president could allocate resources and override contracts when \u201cnecessary and appropriate for national defense.\u201d Gaiser had already applied this logic to override\u00a0state regulations blocking an oil pipeline in California, he said \u2014 establishing that a presidential executive order can preempt state law under the Supremacy Clause.<\/p>\n
Environmental activists had worried<\/a> the administration would eventually apply the same logic to force data centers into communities that had resisted them. Gaiser confirmed their suspicions. \u201cThat would apply to other forms of production,\u201d he said, \u201cin a certain circumstance.\u201d<\/p>\nEven in this room, though, the administration\u2019s war on Anthropic had not gone over well. Ball called the fight \u201ccounterproductive\u201d and said he\u2019d warned the administration not to pick it. \u201cAnthropic has every right to set the terms on which it does business,\u201d he added. General Timothy Haugh, former NSA director, agreed during a different panel: \u201cIt\u2019s a step back for the department,\u201d he said, and \u201cthe department has no mission to do surveillance in the United States.\u201d Gaiser, Trump\u2019s man in the room, offered nothing in the administration\u2019s defense. He wouldn\u2019t comment upon ongoing litigation, he said.<\/p>\n
When we broke for a reception, I shuffled into the next room and mingled. The Yale students found the Palantirians; the Palantirians found the Trump people; everyone found the open bar. These are exactly the sorts of relationships that have made the Trump presidency so good for Palantir. I fell in with a circle of undergrads, and one asked the others what they thought of Palantir. They glanced at one another: thumbs down, mostly. A few pointed theirs sideways. \u201cIt\u2019s not a morally great company,\u201d one student, a freshman, told me. \u201cI would not be comfortable with all my information being accessible to the U.S. military.\u201d<\/p>\n
But when the pay is good and the job is prestigious \u2014 and the alternative is unemployment \u2014 the Ivy League undergraduate\u2019s moral calculus can shift. \u201cA job is a job,\u201d that freshman told me. She knew someone whose sister, a soon-to-be Ivy graduate, had struck out almost everywhere she\u2019d applied. Palantir, in the end, was one of only two firms still returning her calls. \u201cI\u2019m catching on to the fact that people are struggling,\u201d she said. And \u201cwho else is gonna help you if you can\u2019t get a job?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Photos Getty Images On a Thursday in April, I headed to the north end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,167503,96648,268616,727,74,2480],"class_list":["post-619516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-audio-article","tag-ivy-league","tag-kids-these-days","tag-palantir","tag-technology","tag-yale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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