Quick Buzz Feed
Palantir isn't just publishing manifestos. It is operationally wired into the machinery of imperial warfare. Its Gotham platform provides AI-powered targeting for the Ukrainian military.
The article presents two contrasting visions for artificial intelligence, highlighted by two recent events. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, released a 22-point manifesto on April 19, asserting that 'hard power in this century will be built on software' and making controversial claims about 'regressive and harmful' cultures. Just five days later, the Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek launched its powerful V4 model, an open-source offering under the MIT license, matching the performance of expensive proprietary American models at a fraction of the cost. These events underscore a fundamental ideological split regarding AI's purpose, ownership, and accessibility in the coming decades, setting the stage for two very different futures for this transformative technology.
Palantir's manifesto, derived from Karp's book 'The Technological Republic,' advocates for Western technological and civilizational supremacy, openly categorizing global cultures and lamenting a 'shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism' in America. This document has drawn significant criticism, with some labeling it as technofascism and calls for governments to sever ties with the company. Beyond rhetoric, Palantir is deeply embedded in military operations, supplying its Gotham platform for AI-powered targeting to the Ukrainian military, where it processes vast amounts of drone footage, satellite imagery, and signals intelligence to generate strike options that improve with each hit. Furthermore, its formal partnership with the Israeli military since January 2024 has involved integrating communications and satellite data to create targeting databases—effectively 'kill lists'—and controlling humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza, a process described as being weaponized. The company's technology also reportedly supported the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, linked to the bombing of a school.
In stark contrast to Palantir's proprietary and militarized model, DeepSeek released its highly anticipated V4 model under an open-source MIT license on April 24, allowing anyone to download, modify, and deploy it commercially. This advanced Mixture-of-Experts system, featuring 1.6 trillion total parameters, has achieved impressive benchmarks, surpassing GPT-5.4 in competitive programming and nearly matching Claude Opus 4.6 in real-world software engineering. A key differentiator is its pricing strategy; DeepSeek significantly slashed costs, making V4-Pro approximately one-thirtieth the cost of GPT-5.5's output rate, and the lighter V4-Flash variant nearly 100 times cheaper. This aggressive pricing strategy aims to democratize access to frontier AI, making it affordable for developers and institutions in the Global South, unlike the prohibitive costs of Western proprietary solutions.
DeepSeek's innovation extends beyond software to hardware sovereignty. It is the first Chinese frontier model designed to run natively on domestic Huawei Ascend and Cambricon chips, directly addressing U.S. semiconductor export controls intended to restrict China's access to advanced AI technology. This strategic move has spurred significant demand for Huawei's processors from major Chinese tech companies like ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba. The development of a fully indigenous Chinese AI stack, from chip fabrication to inference deployment, demonstrates how U.S. sanctions have inadvertently accelerated China's self-reliance in AI. This shift offers countries pursuing digital and AI sovereignty a viable alternative to dependence on American proprietary systems, which are subject to Washington's political whims and technology revocations, thus preventing imperialistic appropriation through monopoly super-profits and enabling customization for local languages and conditions.
The article concludes by highlighting the systemic differences in AI development stemming from contrasting economic models. It posits that under capitalism, public investment, such as that in Silicon Valley, often leads to the creation of private fortunes and monopolies that subsequently seek to control and privatize state functions, as evidenced by Palantir's growth from CIA seed money into a powerful corporation influencing civilizational warfare. Conversely, under socialist planning, particularly in China's response to U.S. sanctions, state investment in semiconductor self-reliance and AI research has resulted in the release of open-source technology globally. This approach, according to the article, absorbs research costs, curbs monopolies, and removes incentives to enclose knowledge behind paywalls, allowing the technology to be freely used for human progress. For the Global South, this distinction is crucial, determining whether AI development will be dictated by external powers or will empower sovereign technological advancement and define the terms of development for decades.