Mother Jones
Palantir Wants To Bring Back the Draft
On Sunday afternoon, Palantir, the defense-tech company that sells software to clients like ICE, the US military, and the Israeli military,decided to give us all a piece of their mind. The company’s official X account published a list of excerpts from co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic.
The book frames Silicon Valley’s move into military technology as the righteous repayment of a “moral debt” owed to the country that built the tech billionaire class. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”
If you read past the post and dig into the book itself, you’ll find that this sentence continues: “the engineering elite must also, Karp said, participate in “the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.”
That is to say: Men like Karp should decide what this country is.
“If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software,” Palantir’s Bill-Ackman-esque digression continued. It asserts that the future of American military dominance will not depend on nuclear deterrence, but on AI weaponry — possibly like the Palantir AI product that is reportedly used to help generate ‘kill lists’ for the Israeli military in Gaza.
Then, after arguing for the primacy of its own products—called “spy tech” by Palantir’s critics—Karp suggests the remilitarization of the Axis Powers. “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” Karp’s company account asserted. “The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.”
That would make those countries massive defense markets, which means more money for Palantir. Right now, about half of their earnings come from their contracts with various governments. A further militarized Japan and Germany could see that share expand further.
The rest of the manifesto is also, essentially, a sales pitch for corporate capture: “hard power in this century will be built on software,” Palantir says, meaning that if America doesn’t buy that software, someone else will. The company has had a banner year profiting on Trump’s ICE crackdowns, and currently holds $970 million in US government contracts, but is eager for more.
As Palantir pitches an increasingly militarized United States, ideologically determined by Silicon-valley tastes—at one point in the post, they suggest bringing back the draft—they’re suggesting a country in which they get all the power.