There was a time when America’s brightest minds worked hand in hand with the government to create world-changing technologies. DARPA and other agencies helped build the internet, GPS technology, search engines, and self-driving cars—the very foundation of Silicon Valley’s dominance. These innovations fueled economic prosperity and solidified the United States’ global standing. But as we transition into an era of renewed great power competition, the government once again needs the help of our best and brightest.
This time, the task is not to build atomic bombs, but to dominate the era of AI and software-driven warfighting. The problem? The very engineers most capable of rising to this challenge are also the ones most reluctant to work with the U.S. military. Instead, they use their talents on consumer products—photo-sharing, ride-hailing, and food delivery apps—products that may improve our daily lives but do little to advance our national security.
How we got here is the focus of The Technological Republic, an ambitious new book by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his longtime deputy Nicholas Zamiska.1 The authors’ central argument is that as we have entered the software century—by which they mean an era where global conflicts will be won or lost primarily through the power of software—our engineering elite must rebuild its relationship with the government, in particular the military, and redirect its efforts to constructing the technology that will help the U.S. retain its power in the world.
The book could not have arrived at a more critical moment. Recent headlines make its warnings impossible to ignore. The bipartisan push to ban TikTok over national security concerns and the emergence of DeepSeek R1—China’s latest AI model, now surpassing OpenAI as the most downloaded app on the App Store—have heightened fears of China’s surveillance and technological parity. The authors argue that with the accelerating race for AI dominance, China has the most compelling opportunity to challenge America’s global standing in decades.
To address this threat, Karp and Zamiska advocate for the establishment of a new Manhattan Project, where the best minds will help America and its allies develop and retain exclusive control over the most advanced AI-powered weaponry—targeting systems, swarms of drones, and robots—which will define this new age of geopolitical conflict.
While Karp and Zamiska paint a stark picture of the geopolitical landscape, the book is best read in light of their extensive commentary in other venues on the character of great power competition. Elsewhere,2 Karp has predicted that the U.S. is likely to find itself in a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran. In today’s media environment, China’s actions are widely reported to be undermining the West. To most outside observers, it can often be difficult to ascertain which reports are true, credible, or exaggerated out of political expediency. It would have been fascinating to learn from two of today’s leading national security technologists which of China’s actions we should be most alarmed about in the current race for global AI supremacy.
The book’s examination of the Pentagon’s byzantine procurement rules recalls current debates about government efficiency raised by the maverick Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Palantir’s executives have seen the dysfunction within the Department of Defense’s (DoD)’s procurement process firsthand. Its software, preferred by the U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan for detecting explosives, was repeatedly rejected by Pentagon brass in favor of an inferior system developed by a major defense contractor. It was only after lawsuits brought against the government by Palantir and SpaceX that the military finally began to consider commercial alternatives in its procurement process, opening the door to greater competition in defense tech.
Reforms have been made. In 2015, the DoD created the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a tech-focused financing and scaling outfit armed with the explicit mandate of helping the military more quickly adopt technologies from the civilian tech sector, especially start-ups. By providing a pathway through the bureaucratic procurement process, expediting the processing time of government contracts, and investing seed money, the DIU helped several tech start-ups become defense unicorns, such as Anduril, Shield AI, and Scale AI.
But in the big picture, these initiatives remain a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the Pentagon’s budget is still spent on outdated hardware and software systems from legacy players unprepared for the dawning age of software-driven warfare.
The book also raises an intriguing question: Are we already witnessing a new, productive partnership between private-sector technology and government? The announcement of Project Stargate—a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank—suggests that opposition to government partnerships, a sentiment endemic in the Silicon Valley of the post-Cold War decades, is fading. OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, once reluctant to engage with the Pentagon, have all in recent years announced collaborations with the U.S. military.
At the rank-and-file level, however, the tech workforce may still be hesitant to wholeheartedly embrace a partnership with the arms of U.S. power. Silicon Valley’s engineers have long been skeptical of defense work. When then-Secretary of Defense Carter visited Silicon Valley in 2015 to discuss the concept of the DIU, Google would not host him. Three years later, Google withdrew from Project Maven — the Pentagon project to incorporate machine learning technology into its command-and-control systems —after sustained employee protests.
Today, however, the prospects for positive engagement between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military may be less bleak. When faced with an immediate threat, unity and patriotism may emerge in previously unexpected ways. Consider the case of Israel. Before the attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israel found itself mired in the biggest constitutional crisis in its history. Yet after the attacks, the citizens of Israel set politics aside. 360,000 reservists from all walks of life, including the tech sector, rushed into their uniforms to fight for their threatened country.
To create this kind of social cohesion in the U.S., we must engage with what Yale political theorist Steven Smith has called “enlightened patriotism”3: an expression of belonging, loyalty, and pride, which eschews blind nationalism in favor of a constantly-renewed, living commitment to improving the public good. Enlightened patriotism is a pragmatic recognition that, for all its flaws, America remains the best hope for democracy, innovation, and human rights.
The authors ask rhetorically: whatever one may think of war, if the U.S. ever must enter a war, wouldn’t the world be better off if the U.S. won, rather than lost, that war? Likewise, would you rather live in a world order dominated by the U.S., or by China?
In a time when the leadership of the Democratic Party, as The New York Times reports4, is “struggling to decide what it believes in,” the American left would be well advised to adopt such a pragmatist case for American patriotism, instead of perpetuating false claims about how “systematic racism” and “white supremacy” are indelible, and indeed defining, parts of our national fabric.
While Karp and Zamiska hope that their book will prompt a discussion in Silicon Valley “of what, beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values…constitutes our shared vision of the community to which we belong,” it does not fully articulate such a shared vision. Had it done so, it would have also needed to address fundamental questions about the role of civil disobedience, as a legitimate act of “enlightened patriotism” — but such an expanded scope is likely best suited to a sequel. From Thoreau’s opposition to the Mexican-American War to modern-day protests against military contracts in the tech industry, dissent has, rightly or wrongly, often been framed as an expression of love for one’s country. Though the book does not fully explore the tension between duty and conscience it does leave readers with a pressing question: When, if ever, is refusing to cooperate with the government an act of patriotism? At its core, The Technological Republic trumpets a clarion call to America’s best and brightest: Silicon Valley must re-engage with the national interest, or it risks ceding the future to authoritarian regimes. Whether this call is heeded remains to be seen. But Karp and Zamiska make one thing clear: the stakes could not be higher.