Deep dive: Palantir’s manifesto

Tech bros get enough attention, but when they start minting mass contracts with the Pentagon, the Department of Agriculture, Poland’s defence ministry, and even French intelligence, all while becoming a swear word hurled during protests… it’s worth a look.

Throw in a new 22-point manifesto outlining Palantir’s worldview, triggering more debate than whether a hot dog is a sandwich, and you’ve got yourself an Intrigue lead.

So before we give you the five quotes you need to know, a quick refresh that despite a long-running joke that nobody knows what the Palantir nerds even do, we can confirm they make software that weaves across entire data ecosystems so users can make sharper decisions, whether on drone targeting or fraud detection.  

As for Palantir’s polarising new manifesto? Let’s start somewhere light and easy, like…

1. “National service should be a universal duty”

Okay, neither light nor easy. But spicy! The firm’s argument is that an all-volunteer military lets elites avoid the real costs of war, increasing the risk of frivolous or endless conflict while weakening national resolve and unity.

Beyond the boots, we’d add from our own foreign service days that folks lucky enough to live in the free world can quickly (and wrongly) assume our freedoms are some kind of default status, rather than historico-geographic quirks to build, sustain, and defend.

Anyway, the sheer state of our world will shift the idea of national service back out of the Reddit fringes, with even Financial Times columnists already broaching low-carb versions of the idea, but it’s hard to see liberal democracies voting away their liberties just yet, even if framed as critical to defending those same liberties.

2. “The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed”

If your social media algorithm looks vaguely like ours (it does if you’re reading this), you’ll have seen at least one meme chuckling at the European Union’s newest ✨statement✨ of concern. It turns out the dictators ruling Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang don’t care!

They care about — and understand — power. And with US power now getting tested and stretched, those dictators will care even less about any concerns.

But that’s not to say soft power is pointless. History suggests the toughest challenge to dictators can come from their own people, fuelled by something as simple as information, which is why slashing (say) Radio Free Asia or Voice of America feels so short-sighted.

Rather, we’d argue the line between soft and hard power is now blurring — surveillance and censorship on one side, versus info and cultural appeal on the other. Ask any North Korean why they defected, and many will cite South Korean soap operas, not US nukes.

3. “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone”

Here’s where the manifesto gets real controversial, but long-time Intriguers will know Germany and Japan are already un-neutering (if you’ll excuse the term) themselves, whether it’s…

• Berlin backing defence firms via its sovereign fund, recruiting 80,000 troops, buying 3,000 armoured vehicles, or using auto-plants to make tanks, or…
• Tokyo reinterpreting its pacifist constitution, lifting its own ban on lethal arms exports, or massively ramping up its role in allied South China Sea military drills.

Though if these are the headlines, take a bike ride around Berlin and they’ll feel odd in the David Bowie-loving capital, with more Make Art Not War signs than national service ads.

Maybe that gets to whether this un-neutering is organic or just top-down, though both new leaders (Merz and Takaichi) openly ran on a need to take a teaspoon of Magic Shell and harden up. The bigger divide might be with the neighbours, though Germany’s ‘hood is actively urging it on, and even Japan’s neighbours seem to be warming to this tougher Tokyo — it’s still Southeast Asia’s most-trusted major power, although its decades of pacifist ideology might have contributed to building that very trust.

4. “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose”

Believe it or not, this may be Palantir’s least controversial line. Folks, we found it! Depending on your definition, AI weapons are already here, already fighting. Ask Maduro.

So this is getting closer to a statement of fact, but it echoes the classic Oppenheimer line: “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but I know *they* can’t.”

And you only need to glance at recent debates — whether around this Palantir manifesto or Anthropic’s refusal to cave to the Pentagon’s terms — that the free world is still working its way through the first half of Oppenheimer’s maxim.

But if that’s the least controversial line, then let’s finish at the other end with…

5. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive”

Some of you will read that line as a dull fact, while others will shudder at a racially coded claim of supremacy, or a rejection of the West’s founding values.

You should know us well enough by now to guess we see the truth somewhere in the middle — we’re not afraid to point out that so long as the Taliban treats women like cattle and bans girls from school, it’ll perpetuate dysfunction and regression.

But the free world’s own brutal history should be a reminder that societies aren’t frozen in amber — and this fact should be a source of both comfort for the troubled, but also trouble for the comforted.

Intrigue’s Take

It’s been remarkable how much debate Palantir’s manifesto has triggered, spanning from high-fives to “I think I just vomited a bit in my mouth”.

Part of it is because Karp is such a polarising figure who backs Harris and Biden one year, weighs into culture wars the next, then pushes an immigration hard-line the one after.

Yet zooming out a little, the debate might also be because he just dropped an avowedly hawkish manifesto into what’s still a relatively dovish post-Cold War milieu.

But as that peace shatters, it’s maybe worth confessing we at Intrigue see ourselves not as hawks, nor as doves, but as owls — yes, we enjoy daytime naps, have impressive neck dexterity, and will devour a dish whole. But we also value intelligence, nuance, strategy, and patience — not fearing force where necessary, but not glorifying it, either.

Looking ahead, we see owlish Ukraine outlasting hawkish Putin; owlish South Korea outlasting the hawkish North; while our dovish UN friends might struggle to adapt.

All that to say… in this fracturing world, maybe the future belongs to the owls?

Sound even smarter:

• A handful of liberal democracies already have some kind of national service, often reflecting wariness towards a nearby foe: think Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.