Palantir for long stretches of its history was something of an outlier in Silicon Valley.
When many were focused on building the next social media platform, the next iteration of TikTok, the company began offering its software to U.S. special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by 2011, “about three dozen units across the military were using Palantir, and some were raving about its ability to steer them clear of ambushes and roadside bombs,” according to an article in the New York Times Magazine.
The Silicon Valley firm has had a long history with the defense and intelligence community, in the United States and with its allies in Europe, including the United Kingdom.
As a columnist in the Washington Post wrote in 2022, Palantir had moved to the forefront of “algorithmic warfare”—a new phase in the development of armed conflict that supporters of the company claimed was vital to defending American interests, with critics pointing to the risk of abuses of novel and untested technologies.
It was against this backdrop that The Technological Republic, co-authored by Nicholas Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the chief executive officer at Palantir, was published last year. The book has sparked discussion and debate across the political spectrum.
Edith Chapin, editor-in-chief of National Public Radio, described the political treatise as “provocative.” George Will of the Washington Post wrote: “Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind . . . has there been a cultural critique as sweeping.”
The Technological Republic became a #1 New York Times bestseller and is now set to be published in more than a dozen languages, reflecting increasing interest in the company but also discussion about its reach and influence.
At a conference at Yale University, on April 16th, Ted Wittenstein, director of the Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, sat down to speak with Mr. Zamiska about the book and Palantir’s work in the world more broadly.
The Atlantic and Pacific Forum, which was co-hosted by Yale and The Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy & International Affairs and described in an article over the weekend by New York Magazine as “part intellectual salon,” included nearly two hundred students, professors from Yale and elsewhere, journalists, current and former government officials, and members of the public.
The conversation covered Silicon Valley’s turn towards what Mr. Zamiska, who also serves on the board of directors of The Palantir Foundation, has described as trivial consumer products, Palantir’s partnership with the U.S. military, and whether we should, as a society, allow more room for grace, or forgiveness, towards those in public life.
— The Editors
Ted Wittenstein: The book’s framing is a critique of the so-called dot-com age and a number of the social media companies—not that they weren’t valuable, but that they didn’t really contribute to American ingenuity and promise. Silicon Valley and its leaders may be losing their way, you argue, or are not aligned with national security and culture and strategy. Tell us how you’ve thought about this.
Nicholas Zamiska: I think at the core of our argument, it’s a call for Silicon Valley to come to the defense of the nation that made its rise possible. We came of age during a moment in the history of the Valley when you had so many young people, and so much capital chasing that talent, rushing to Silicon Valley to build the social media platforms, the apps on our phones.
And I think some of us attempted to reflect and probably should have reflected more about whether that was the appropriate allocation of our culture’s talent, capital, funding, excitement, and energy—all of which are limited.
The social media platforms, the apps on the phone—they’ve changed our world. But I think we should ask—is that the best we can do? Is that the crowning achievement of our civilization? Is that what you want your life’s work to be? Is that what your legacy will be?
We at Palantir took a different approach. We began working with the U.S. military when it was less fashionable than it is now, and it’s still quite complex, as it should be. These are very high-stakes decisions.
But we wanted to see this technology that we were talking about dedicated to higher purpose—dedicated to something more meaningful, more consequential, more significant.
There were and are vast innovation deserts in Silicon Valley, which we describe in the book—local law enforcement, public health, education, medical research—that became quite difficult for the Valley to enter into because of the political complexity involved.
These areas were in some ways too fraught, too risky from a public relations standpoint, to incentivize capital to come in and make a difference.
Wittenstein: What’s interesting about your call to Silicon Valley to have a greater service mission, is that, as you note in the book, that is not a new call.
Historically, if you look at the Cold War, Silicon Valley and the American entrepreneurial and innovation industrial base were deeply aligned with U.S. national policy and strategy on solving a wide range of technical challenges related to nuclear missiles, as well as understanding the Soviet Union.
Zamiska: There was a moment when all of the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missiles were manufactured in Santa Clara County, California—present-day Silicon Valley. That history feels distant and remote.
I do think that our generation in particular should reflect on the fact that it’s been essentially eighty years since the last time a nuclear weapon was used in war.
We read the headlines, we see the conflict—it is a dangerous world, with plenty of geopolitical complexity. And yet there’s relatively no threat of a missile flying overhead, here. Why is that? Is it because of our soaring rhetoric or our charm?
We would argue, no. It’s the result of, not a yearlong, but a decades-long commitment to investment in national security and defense that really found its root in the middle part of the twentieth century.
The U.S. has been spending three to five percent of its gross domestic product on national security, not for a year or two, but for decades.
And that long peace, approaching a century—which I think is remarkable and something that we are all at risk of taking for granted—requires a fierce, zealous commitment to building technology for the U.S. government, and importantly through political cycles.
Wittenstein: What is the right balance that you’ve learned from engaging with the U.S. government across multiple administrations on what those challenges are? And how can a private entity fulfill functions in many cases better perhaps than a government operator may be able to do?
Zamiska: There’s a vital cultural question that I think we want to confront. And it stems from the mistake that many think that the reason for Silicon Valley’s domination of the modern economy is its software or its products.
People like to say, politics is downstream of culture. Software is downstream of culture.
And I do think as a country, we need to find a way to preserve a little more space, a little more room for maneuver—for people who are aligned with our interests, but may be flawed and complicated.
In the book, one of my favorite passages is about Admiral Hyman Rickover, a very senior commander in the U.S. Navy. President Jimmy Carter served under him. He was kind of an irascible guy. He made junior officers stand in the closet—said the rule book wasn’t for him.
And yet, he was the father of the nuclear navy by every account. He took Oppenheimer’s invention from the 1940s, the nuclear reactor, which was big and unwieldy, and shrunk it down into something that could fit on a submarine. So now you have a submarine that can stay submerged not for days, but weeks and months. It gave us this advantage over the Soviets that persisted for half a century, and still is relevant today.
And yet, the story continues. He was an odd guy—idiosyncratic would be the polite term. He had enemies, and it turns out he was accepting gifts from General Dynamics, the premier shipbuilder of the age. It was an odd roster of gifts—there’s maybe earrings or a necklace for his wife, but thousands of dollars over a period of probably twelve to sixteen years.
And the question we attempt to raise in the book is—is there no space for forgiveness? Is there no space for some degree of tolerance of the complexities of the human mind, the soul, the contradictions that live within all of us—any room for error for people who are essentially noble?
Can we preserve space for those people to serve our government, to serve our nation, to serve our military, notwithstanding missteps?
What does that do to the next generation? Does that incentivize them to serve their country, or does it drive them into the warm embrace of the consulting and finance industries?
Wittenstein: There’s an element about philosophy and humanism and its interplay with A.I. and emerging technologies that does maybe give an edge to the liberal arts. Tell us how you think about that as you look at now a very large enterprise and the types of skills you need to move it forward.
Zamiska: An LLM is never going to help you understand why there is existence as opposed to non-existence. We’re not there; we’re not going to get there.
What are the cultural notes that I think define Palantir? It’s certainly a plasticity.
I think it’s also a uniquely American company. We looked at the top fifty technology companies in the world as of a couple of years ago. Eighty-six percent of that market cap, of the largest technology companies in the world, is located in the United States. Not six-tenths or fifty percent—essentially nine dollars out of every ten is in the United States.
Why is that? Why do we have that advantage? I think it’s our ability to organize around results, as well as a distaste for theater and a kind of ceremonial, internal politics.
Results are what matters. Results are what are protective from a business standpoint and a political standpoint.
We try to select for people who are just zealous in their pursuit of giving not only the armed forces, but our commercial partners, what they need to succeed, and setting aside some of the sensitivity to a certain type of political discussion. A sort of social deafness can be helpful in the right context, certainly in the technology sector.
Wittenstein: When it comes to software that has sensitive national security applications, the question really becomes, how much are we comfortable offloading? How much are we ready to automate? What does it mean to make the control that we have meaningful?
Zamiska: You always need to place humans in the lead; these technologies are essentially tools.
I do think that in the absence of trying to consider those broader questions about what this technology should be used for, the market will decide.
We open the book with a still very powerful reminder from the political philosopher Michael Sandel: fundamentalists will rush in where liberals fear to tread—that is, religious and market fundamentalists.
Some are reticent to discuss what the content of our national character is, what the identity of our national project is, if there should be any identity at all.
I think we should be less reticent about entering into those discussions. Another way of framing it is—inclusion is an uncontroversially necessary good. But in this country, and our generation in particular, I think we forgot to ask: inclusion into what?
What is the polity, the whole—the set of commitments, morals, manners, habits, patterns of working, instincts—into which we aspire to include anyone? And Silicon Valley in some sense withdrew from the broader nation, reflecting I think, a sense of unease and maybe distaste for the agnosticism of our current era.
But there’s no escape from answering those more fundamental questions. And I think the answers can only come from institutions that are willing to take on some degree of friction and incur some degree of wrath, perhaps, in defense of something meaningful.
Wittenstein: I think it is noteworthy that Palantir is committed to really only working with U.S. allies and partners and not considering itself as a global entity that would give these capabilities to those that might use them in malicious ways.
Zamiska: It was unfashionable for a long time. You have investment banks saying, well, where’s your China business? And we would say, there is no China business—we do not work with our geopolitical adversaries.
I think a lot of American companies convinced themselves that even civilian tech would not be repurposed for military purposes. I think that was a fantasy. The analogy that comes to mind is a chlorine and non-chlorine side of a pool—difficult to enforce, just kind of unworkable in every sense.
World peace is our unquestionable aspiration. But I’m more interested in world order, to borrow from Henry Kissinger. Some degree of stalemate, some degree of uneasy stasis in global affairs, is what may be more beneficial for reducing the unnecessary loss of life than total dominance in all contexts.
It’s a difficult geopolitical environment, and I think you have to find moments of alignment with even perceived adversaries.
At the end of the day though, you can’t work with the U.S. military and give your tools to our adversaries.
Wittenstein: In the conversations that you have, just given Palantir’s footprint in Europe, in the Middle East, and elsewhere, what is it that allies and partners need to strengthen their own ability to fight in this networked world?
Zamiska: Every country is interested, especially in Europe, in building indigenous, local versions of what we have constructed. I would applaud that. I think these are deep partnerships, not for a year, but for decades.
I also think what you spend your money on really does matter. We looked at the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is just a fabulous example of the challenges that we face.
General Mark Milley made the point that, this plane—the premier jet of the age, conceived of under President Clinton in the 1990s—cost two trillion dollars. And its end of useful life is 2088. That’s nearly a century for one product, one platform, which is completely antithetical to what we are attempting to build, and the level of speed and iteration that we attempt in our best moments to bring to our product development cycles.
Do we really think, as General Milley has said, that a manned strike fighter is going to be ruling the skies at the end of the twenty-first century? I think we know the answer to that question.
How can we convince our European allies to pivot and very briskly so that these defense capabilities are really driven by software and software first?
We have a horse in the race, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. But I do think that our defense establishment is going to look a lot more like a software company if we get this right in the next half century, and probably much sooner.
Wittenstein: Tell us about what type of support or clarity you feel would be helpful for a company such as Palantir to have from the government, whether it becomes red lines or areas that require particular risk management review, or whether it’s federal versus state regulatory frameworks as well.
Zamiska: I’m not sure I’m desperate or pining for a federal statute regulating artificial intelligence in its entirety. I don’t think that would necessarily be productive.
I can understand the anxiety that comes with this current moment, but I don’t think that’s the answer. I do think what I would want to see is a much deeper, richer, more integrated public-private partnership.
The government almost looks at the private sector at a distance—not all policymakers.
But why aren’t governments in general, and in Europe in particular, being more voracious about borrowing and stealing the snippets of that culture that have given rise to what we have built?
This transcript has been condensed and edited.