The All-Seeing Eye of the "Technological Republic" - ForkLog: cryptocurrencies, AI, singularity, the future

# The All-Seeing Eye of the “Technological Republic”

What future does Palantir CEO Alex Karp envision?

In 2003, investor Peter Thiel and social theory doctor Alex Karp registered a company named after the magical crystals from “The Lord of the Rings” — artifacts that allow seeing from a distance. In Tolkien’s novel, one of the palantíri was owned by Saruman: through the stone, he communicated with the Dark Lord and gradually switched sides.

The name also carries another symbolic layer. In Tolkien’s legendarium, one of the stones — the Elostirion Stone — did not connect its owner with other palantíri. Its sole function was to look west, across the sea, toward the lost homeland of the elves. For a company openly claiming to defend Western civilization, such a reference is unlikely to be accidental.

By 2026, Palantir Technologies is the main software contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, one of the most discussed tech companies. Karp openly states that its mission is to “ensure obvious Western superiority” and “sometimes kill” opponents.

In 2025, in co-authorship with corporate communications director Nicholas Zamiska, he published the book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West.” Its key thesis: Silicon Valley must “restore the moral duty to the state” and participate in national defense. We analyze how Karp built the infrastructure for modern warfare and what ideology he promotes.

Behind the trees, the forest is invisible

The main problem Palantir addresses is structural. In U.S. intelligence agencies, a “ball-in-a-box” model has historically prevailed: FBI, CIA, NSA, and police had their own databases, and exchanges between them were bureaucratic requests. Each agency stored its data in a separate “vessel” — even knowing that neighboring agencies might have crucial information, agents couldn’t access it quickly.

This disjointedness cost many lives. One of the most famous examples is the story of John O’Neill, a leading FBI counterterrorism specialist. By the mid-1990s, he considered cells of international radical networks, including Al-Qaeda, the main threat to U.S. security. He warned that terrorists had infrastructure inside the country and called for tighter coordination between agencies.

Different fragments of information remained separated. FBI recorded suspicious incidents domestically — for example, potential terrorists’ interest in flight schools. CIA, in turn, had data on meetings of Al-Qaeda-related individuals in Malaysia and knew that two of its members — Nawaq al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — had entered the U.S. on visas. But information exchange was incomplete and conflict-ridden: FBI agents working within the CIA later claimed their attempts to pass this info to O’Neill were blocked inside the agency. Separate pieces never formed a complete picture.

In summer 2001, O’Neill left the FBI amid internal conflicts and a series of scandals involving leaks and misconduct. In August, he headed the security service of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, O’Neill died during the evacuation of people from the South Tower.

Palantir developed a system that unifies disparate databases into a single model of relationships. The company calls it an ontology — a structure where objects, events, and people are connected by explicit relationships. An address is linked to its owner, a transaction to accounts, a call to subscribers and geolocation. This model allows analysts to quickly identify patterns, which previously took weeks of manual work to find.

In 2005, Palantir’s first institutional investor was In-Q-Tel — a venture fund established by the CIA in 1999 to finance dual-use technologies. It allocated about $2 million and remained the company’s sole external investor for several years.

In 2011, Bloomberg reported that Palantir’s technologies had become an important tool for U.S. intelligence in the “war on terror,” used for data analysis in counterterrorism operations.

In its early years, Palantir Technologies was almost invisible publicly. The company rarely engaged with the press, avoided publicity, and built its business mainly through contracts with U.S. government agencies.

Palantir engineers worked directly at client sites — in intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. In the tech and defense sectors, the company was well known, but to the general public, it remained unseen for a long time. Even in Silicon Valley, many didn’t fully understand what Palantir actually did: was it a “Google for spies,” or just a very expensive database?

Gotham, Foundry, and AIP

Palantir develops three key products:

1. Gotham — a platform for military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. Named after the city (“which is never safe”) from Batman comics. The platform aggregates data from satellites, ground sensors, signals intelligence, legacy databases, and battlefield channels into a single interface. It can task sensors (e.g., direct a reconnaissance drone to coordinates), identify targets, and suggest weapon deployment options. In military terms, this is called a kill chain — “the destruction chain.”

2. Foundry — the civilian version. ExxonMobil uses it to optimize extraction, Swiss Re for risk assessment, media conglomerate Ringier for subscriber management. In Australia, Foundry is integrated into Coles supermarkets’ networks.

3. Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) — an AI layer launched in 2023. AIP overlays Gotham and Foundry, enabling natural language interaction with data. An operator asks: “What enemy forces are in this area?” The system queries connected sources, formulates an answer, and suggests actions.

Daniel Truzillo — a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and later a researcher of AI ethics at the University of St. Gallen — points out a key feature of Palantir: the same technological base is used for dual purposes. According to him, “the same software that optimizes supply chains today manages military operations.”

ChatGPT-moment

For many years, Palantir was unprofitable. After going public in 2020, the company’s shares showed no growth for several years. Analysts couldn’t see how the company could profit in the civilian sector — the product was too specialized.

Everything changed with the advent of large language models (LLMs). When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Palantir began claiming that its long-standing focus on ontology and semantic data layers unexpectedly became highly relevant.

“We were pleasantly surprised to find that the world we built aligned with the era of large language models. It became clear: realizing the potential of LLMs is impossible without such structures,” stated CTO Shyam Sankar.

In another interview, he also said that “much of the work on Foundry and Gotham was essentially waiting for large language models to appear.”

Palantir’s logic is based on the idea that LLMs are unreliable without structured context. A language model needs a layer that connects the text interface to objects, events, and real processes within an organization. This role is fulfilled by ontologies — a system of relationships between people, transactions, devices, documents, and actions.

Palantir rewrote its roadmap, integrated LLMs into its products, and launched AIP. From that moment, its shares began to grow.

Stock prices of PLTR from IPO to May 2026. Source: TradingView. In 2023, PLTR shares gained 167%, in 2024 — 340%. In the first half of 2025, Palantir’s shares became the most profitable in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indices.

The Technological Republic

In 2025, Karp, together with Palantir’s director of corporate communications Nicholas Zamiska, published the book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West.”

In spring 2026, the company posted a condensed version of the book on X (Twitter) — 22 theses. The post circulated widely on social media and sparked debates far beyond the IT industry: some saw it as an attempt to justify a closer alliance of tech companies, government, and the military sector; others — as an almost-ready political program of techno-nationalism.

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel…

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026

In the book’s preface, the authors state:

“The West has reached a point of reckoning. The loss of ambitions and interest in scientific and technological achievements, accompanied by a decline in government innovation in key areas such as medicine, space exploration, and military development, has led to an innovation gap.”

According to them, Silicon Valley has moved in the opposite direction — toward online advertising, shopping, social media, and video platforms.

This message unfolds into the entire manifesto. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley “must participate in defending the nation and shaping the national idea: what this country is, what we value, and what we stand for.” The era of soft power, according to Karp, is ending:

“To win, free and democratic societies need more than moral superiority. They need hard power, and in this century, it will rely on software.”

The authors believe the era of nuclear deterrence is also passing. It is replaced by AI-based deterrence:

“We are creating software that could become weapons of mass destruction. The potential integration of AI with weapons creates risks, especially if programs gain self-awareness and their own intentions. However, calling for a halt to development is mistaken. Our opponents will not waste time on theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies critical to military security. They will act,” write Karp and Zamiska.

The Red Threat

The ideology of the “Technological Republic” is not just on paper. It is backed by a political infrastructure whose scale became clear in 2026.

Leading the Future — a super PAC political action committee created to defend AI industry interests — accumulated over $140 million in donations and commitments. Major sponsors include OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and venture fund Andreessen Horowitz. Palantir itself claims it made no corporate donations. OpenAI states the same. But their key figures are the largest individual donors to the fund.

In May 2026, WIRED journalist Taylor Lorenz revealed that the subsidiary organization Leading the Future — the nonprofit Build American AI — funds native advertising on TikTok and Instagram. Influencers are offered $5,000 per video with messages like: “China threatens America’s AI leadership, and this concerns everyone.” Sample texts for creators include phrases like: “I learned that China is trying to surpass the U.S. in AI. If they succeed, my data and my children’s data could be under China’s control.” The ads are marked as sponsored content, but the client — Build American AI — is not disclosed.

The campaign rhetoric echoes Karp’s main theses.

“We will become the dominant player or China will — and the rules will depend on who wins. […] When people worry about surveillance — yes, there is a danger, but you will have far fewer rights if America does not lead,” he said in an Axios interview in November 2025.

Meanwhile, Leading the Future campaigns against lawmakers trying to regulate AI. The most high-profile case is an attack on New York State Assembly member Alex Bores, a co-author of the RAISE Act — one of the first U.S. laws on AI safety. According to The New York Times, the super PAC spends millions to discredit the politician. Bores explains:

“They want to beat me politically so badly that in the future, when AI regulation comes up, politicians will run in the opposite direction. They want to make me an example.”

The situation around Palantir is part of a broader shift. In February 2026, OpenAI signed a contract with the Pentagon to supply language models for the military. The deal was made after Anthropic — OpenAI’s main competitor — withdrew from negotiations, refusing to lift restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

The Trump administration responded by declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordered its tools to be discontinued within six months. OpenAI took the vacated spot.

The full terms of the Pentagon agreement were not publicly disclosed. Former U.S. Army General counsel Brad Carson commented on the released excerpts and contract language:

“They try to blind you with complex legal jargon that ordinary people interpret completely differently. Lawyers know what it means. And lawyers know it’s not a real restriction.”

Part of the truth

Alex Karp does not try to appear sympathetic. He does not use language of “innovation” and “transformation”: his rhetoric is built around global competition and technological dominance. He believes the West is in a race with China, and this race will determine the distribution of power for generations.

In a detailed essay, analyst under the pseudonym MachineSovereign describes Palantir not as a savior of the Western world, but as “an infrastructure layer through which the state increasingly sees, coordinates, decides, and acts.” Formal institutions retain authority: they authorize decisions, speak publicly, and support symbolic legitimacy. But the operational layer gradually shifts into technical infrastructure that determines what the state can see, analyze, and use for decision-making.

Karp’s supporters respond: the world is already moving in this direction. Rejecting such systems won’t stop their development — it will only hand the initiative to those building similar tools without regard for human rights, transparency, or public oversight. In this logic, the question is no longer whether such platforms will appear, but who will control them and in whose interests they will operate.

At Tolkien’s Palantír — an instrument that does not lie directly but shows only part of reality. The one whose will is stronger can impose their own worldview on others.

Palantír, Anduril, Mithril, Erebor, Narya — Silicon Valley has long turned Middle-earth into a catalog of brands for defense and tech startups.

Likely, Tolkien himself would have viewed this with deep distrust. He was highly skeptical of industrialization and concentration of power — themes woven throughout his work. Tolkien wrote about a world where danger lay not in the strength of weapons, but in the monopoly on knowledge. Palantíri did not deceive because they showed lies, but because they revealed only selective truths: the stone’s owner determined what part of reality the viewer would see.

Modern data analysis platforms are gradually changing the very mechanism of control. Who sees threats first, who sets priorities, who has the right to interpret reality for others — these questions shift from political offices to contractor server rooms. In the age of AI, it’s not necessary to ban access to information. It’s enough to determine what exactly people should see.

Text: Sasha Kosovan