How Alex Karp helped turn Palantir into the West’s AI arms dealer

The way Palantir’s CEO sees it, the AI race is about no less than the future of liberal democracy.

Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, knows his products can be dangerous. Built to extract insights from torrents of data with machine learning and AI, his company’s software is optimizing manufacturing and supply chains but also warfare and kill chains, helping target weapons in Ukraine and across the Middle East. To some, accelerated AI development is an existential threat worthy of a pause. Karp—a brash, self-described socialist who earned his philosophy doctorate in Germany before Palantir chairman Peter Thiel tapped him to run the startup two decades ago—looks at those dangers differently. The way he sees it, not moving fast is the existential risk.