URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/opinion/palantir-shyam-sankar-military.html
In this New York Times "Interesting Times" interview, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar explains how his company integrates fragmented data across government and commercial organizations to enable better decision-making, from military kill chains to immigration enforcement. He defends Palantir's controversial work by emphasizing institutional legitimacy, democratic accountability, and the belief that Western institutions should have the best technology, while expressing skepticism about AGI doom scenarios and advocating for practical AI implementation over Silicon Valley's "God-shaped hole" transhumanism.
Data Integration as Core Value
Palantir's fundamental product is software that connects siloed data systems within large organizations—whether manufacturers managing product lifecycles or militaries coordinating intelligence—enabling humans to make better decisions with complete information rather than searching across 20 disconnected systems. The company cynically acknowledges it "took something as sexy as James Bond to motivate engineers to work on a promise as boring as data integration."
The Kill Chain Explained The military "kill chain" describes the sequence from sensor to shooter: identifying enemy targets, confirming positive ID through multiple intelligence sources, going through legal review and rules of engagement, selecting appropriate weaponry based on cost and logistics, executing the strike, and conducting battle damage assessment. Palantir's software accelerates this cycle to create speed advantages over adversaries, with the goal being deterrence rather than just warfighting capability.
Privacy Through Audit, Not Incompetence Sankar argues that institutional legitimacy requires both operational competence and strong oversight mechanisms, rejecting the idea that safety comes from structural incompetence. Palantir builds audit logs and access controls into their systems so that watchdog organizations can detect misuse—citing the example of government employees caught accessing Obama and Clinton's passport records—rather than relying on agencies being too disorganized to abuse data.
Democracy as the Ultimate Arbiter Palantir makes customer selection decisions based partly on what has been "voted on at the ballot box," viewing democratic mandates as legitimizing their work with controversial clients like ICE during mass deportation operations. They declined work on the UK's digital ID system because it hadn't been adequately "litigated by British democracy," while accepting immigration enforcement work that Trump explicitly campaigned on.
Silicon Valley's Return to Patriotism The tech industry has shifted from post-nationalist "citizens of the world" mentality toward civic nationalism and military service, catalyzed significantly by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which demonstrated that "evil is not us" and that liberal democracies require hard power for protection. When Sankar and three other tech executives were commissioned as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels, approximately 1,000 people from Silicon Valley reached out asking how to get involved.
The Heretics Become Heroes America's defense innovation problem stems from losing the "crazies" and "wild engineering spirit" that characterized the World War II industrial base when companies like Chrysler built both minivans and missiles. The Pentagon functions as a monopsony (single buyer) that, like Walmart in the 1990s, squeezed suppliers and lost awareness of marketplace innovation until external threats create existential pressure that empowers heterodox thinking—Sankar notes that Israel's Defense Forces accomplished more modernization in four months after October 7th than in the previous decade.
AGI Skepticism as Practical Wisdom Sankar dismisses artificial general intelligence doom scenarios as "secularists in Silicon Valley filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI," arguing there's no empirical basis for believing AI will "turn us into house cats." He observes that religious people are most skeptical of AGI claims, while the "doomerism" serves as both a fundraising strategy ("my technology is so powerful it will cause mass unemployment, so invest in me") and reflects disconnection from how frontline workers actually use AI to spend more time on human judgment tasks.