All-seer of the "Technological Republic" - ForkLog

# All-Seeing "Technological Republic"

What future does Palantir CEO Alex Karp look toward?

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 at a distance. In Tolkien's novel, one of the palantíri was owned by the wizard Saruman: through the stone he communicated with the Dark Lord and gradually went over to his side.

The name also carries another symbolic layer. In Tolkien's legendarium, one of the stones — the Stone of Elostirion — 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 declaring its defense of Western civilization, such a reference is hardly accidental.

By 2026, Palantir Technologies is the main software contractor for the US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, one of the most discussed technology companies. Karp openly states that its task is "to ensure the obvious superiority of the West" and "sometimes kill" opponents.

In 2025, in co-authorship with Director of Corporate Communications 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 "repay its moral debt to the state" and participate in the defense of the nation. We break down how Karp built the infrastructure for modern warfare and what ideology he promotes.

Can't See the Forest for the Trees

The main problem that Palantir solves is structural. In US intelligence agencies, a "jar of marbles" model has historically developed: the FBI, CIA, NSA, and police had their own databases, and exchange between them went through bureaucratic requests. Each agency stored its data in a separate "vessel" — even knowing that a neighboring agency might have important information, agents could not get quick access to it.

This fragmentation cost many lives. One of the most famous examples is the story of John O'Neill, the FBI's leading counterterrorism expert. As early as the mid-1990s, he considered cells of international radical networks, including Al-Qaeda, the main threat to US security. He warned that terrorists had infrastructure inside the country and insisted on closer coordination between agencies.

Different fragments of information remained separated between structures. The FBI recorded suspicious incidents inside the country — for example, potential terrorists' interest in flight schools. The CIA, in turn, had data on a meeting of Al-Qaeda-linked individuals in Malaysia and knew that two of its participants, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had entered the US on visas. But the exchange of information between agencies was incomplete and conflict-ridden: FBI officers working under the CIA later claimed that their attempts to pass this information to O'Neill were blocked within the agency. Individual pieces of information never formed a complete picture.

In the summer of 2001, O'Neill left the FBI amid internal conflicts and a series of scandals surrounding leaks and misconduct. In August, he became head of security for the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, O'Neill died while evacuating people from the South Tower.

Palantir developed a system that combines disparate databases into a single model of connections. The company calls this 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 that previously took weeks of manual work to find.

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

In 2011, Bloomberg wrote that Palantir's technologies had become an important tool for US intelligence agencies in the "war on terror" and were used for data analysis in counterterrorism operations.

In its early years, Palantir Technologies was almost absent from the public sphere. The company rarely spoke to the press, avoided publicity, and built its business primarily around contracts with US government agencies.

Palantir engineers worked directly with clients — in intelligence, the military, and law enforcement. The company was well-known in the technology and defense industries, but for the general public, it remained invisible for a long time. Even in Silicon Valley, many didn't fully understand what Palantir did: whether it was a "Google for spies" or just a very expensive database.

Gotham, Foundry, and AIP

Palantir develops three key products:

1. Gotham — a platform for the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. Named after the city ("that never is safe") from Batman comics. The platform collects data from satellites, ground sensors, signals intelligence, legacy databases, and battlefield channels into a single window. It can task sensors (e.g., direct a reconnaissance drone to coordinates), identify targets, and suggest weapon deployment options. In military terminology, this is called the kill chain.
2. Foundry — the civilian version. ExxonMobil uses it for production optimization, Swiss Re for risk assessment, and media conglomerate Ringier for working with subscribers. In Australia, Foundry is implemented in the Coles supermarket chain.
3. Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) — an artificial intelligence layer launched in 2023. AIP overlays Gotham and Foundry and allows interaction with data in natural language. The operator asks: "What enemy forces are in this area?" The system accesses connected sources, formulates an answer, and suggests actions.

Daniel Trusilo, a former US Army officer who served in Iraq and later an AI ethics researcher at the University of St. Gallen, draws attention to 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 on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, the company's shares showed no growth for several years. Analysts didn't understand how the company could make money in the civilian sector — the product was too specialized.

Everything changed with the advent of large language models (LLMs). When ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, Palantir began to claim that the company's long-standing bet on ontology and the semantic data layer had unexpectedly become relevant.

"We were pleasantly surprised to discover how much the world we had built aligned with the era of large language models. It became clear: it is impossible to realize the potential of LLMs without such structures," stated the company's CTO, Shyam Sankar.

In another interview, he also said that "in many ways, all the work on Foundry and Gotham seemed to be waiting for the arrival of large language models."

Palantir's logic is based on the idea that LLMs themselves are unreliable without structured context. The language model needs a layer that connects the text interface with objects, events, and real processes within the organization. The company assigns this role to ontology — a system of relationships between people, transactions, devices, documents, and actions.

Palantir rewrote its roadmap, embedded LLMs into its products, and released AIP. From that moment, the stock began to rise.

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

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 the spring of 2026, the company published a condensed version of the book in the form of 22 theses on X. The post spread across social media and sparked debates far beyond the IT industry: some saw it as an attempt to justify a closer union of technology companies, the state, and the military sector, others as an almost ready-made 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:

"For the West, the moment of reckoning has arrived. The loss of ambition and interest in scientific and technical achievements, accompanied by a decline in state innovation in key areas such as medicine, space exploration, and military development, has led to an innovation gap."

Silicon Valley, in their opinion, has gone in the opposite direction — to where "online advertising, shopping, social networks, and video platforms" dominate.

From this premise, the entire manifesto unfolds. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley "must participate in the defense of the nation and the formulation of a 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 something more than moral superiority. They need hard power, and in this century it will rely on software."

The atomic era of deterrence, the authors believe, is also passing into the past. Its place is being taken by deterrence based on AI:

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

Red Threat

The ideology of the "Technological Republic" does not remain 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 protect the interests of the AI industry — has amassed over $140 million in contributions and commitments. Among the main sponsors are OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Palantir as a company claims it has not made corporate contributions. OpenAI says the same. But their key figures are the largest individual donors to the fund.

In May 2026, WIRED journalist Taylor Lorenz revealed that Leading the Future's affiliate, the non-profit Build American AI, finances native advertising on TikTok and Instagram. Influencers are offered $5,000 per video with the message: China threatens America's leadership in AI, and it concerns everyone. Sample texts for authors contain phrases like: "I learned that China is trying to overtake the US in AI. If they succeed, my data and my children's data could end up under China's control." The ads are labeled as partner content, but the client — Build American AI — is not disclosed.

The campaign's rhetoric echoes Karp's main theses.

"We will become the dominant player or China will become the dominant player — and the rules will depend on who wins. […] When people worry about surveillance — yes, the danger exists, but you will have far fewer rights if America is not the leader," he stated in an interview with Axios in November 2025.

At the same time, Leading the Future is campaigning against legislators trying to regulate AI. The most high-profile case is the attack on New York State Assembly member Alex Bores, who co-authored the RAISE Act — one of the first US laws on AI safety. According to The New York Times, the super PAC is spending millions to discredit the unwanted politician. Bores himself explained it this way:

"They want to beat me so hard politically that in the future, when it comes to regulating AI, politicians will run in the opposite direction. They want to make an example of me."

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

The Trump administration in response declared Anthropic a risk to the supply chain and ordered the phase-out of its tools within six months. OpenAI took the vacated place.

The full text of the agreement with the Pentagon has not been publicly disclosed. Former US Army Chief Lawyer Brad Carson, commenting on the excerpts and contract language published by OpenAI, stated:

"They are trying to blind you with complex legal terms that ordinary people understand very differently. Lawyers know what this means. And lawyers know that it's not a restriction at all."

Part of the Truth

Alex Karp does not try to look like a good guy. He does not use the language of "innovation" and "transformation": his rhetoric is built around global competition and technological dominance. He believes that the West is in a race with China, and this race will determine the distribution of power for generations to come.

In a lengthy essay, the 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, appear publicly, and maintain symbolic legitimacy. But the operational layer gradually shifts into the technical infrastructure that determines what the state is even capable of seeing, analyzing, and using for decision-making.

Karp's supporters respond: the world is already moving in this direction. Refusing such systems will not stop their development — it will only hand the initiative to those who will build similar tools without regard for human rights, transparency, and public oversight. In this logic, the question is no longer whether such platforms will appear, but who exactly will control them and in the interests of which political systems they will operate.

The palantír in Tolkien is a tool that does not directly lie, but shows only part of reality. He whose will is stronger is able to impose his own picture of the world on others.

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

Tolkien himself would probably have viewed this without enthusiasm. He had a deep distrust of industrialization and the concentration of power — themes that permeate all his work. Tolkien wrote about a world where the danger lay not in the power of weapons, but in the monopoly on knowledge. The palantíri were destructive not because they showed lies, but because they showed selective truth: the owner of the stone determined which part of reality the viewer saw.

Modern data analysis platforms are gradually changing the very mechanism of governance. Who sees threats first, who sets priorities, who gets the right to interpret reality for others — these questions are shifting from politicians' offices to contractors' server rooms. In the age of AI, it is not necessary to ban access to information. It is enough to determine what exactly people should see.

Text: Sasha Kosovan