Off the Record: What does the ‘kill chain’ have to do with your groceries?
In 2010, Peter Thiel made a statement that would not reveal its full horror until much later.Speaking on PayPal’s vision, Thiel argued that Silicon Valley could never win an election on “getting certain things” because he and his peers were in such a small, presumably ideological, minority.Instead, he argued that through technology, they could “unilaterally change the world”, all without the pesky inconvenience of having to constantly convince, beg or plead with people who were never going to agree with them.He saw technology not as a public tool, but as an alternative to politics. A way around democracy.But what were these “certain things” that Thiel wanted? Well one of his vehicles for bypassing politics, Palantir, has basically outlined them for us. And the implications are grim.Palantir, co-founded in part by Thiel and Alex Karp in 2003, recently published its “manifesto”: a 22-point summary of Karp’s book The Technological Republic. It covers a lot of ground, including the idea that Silicon Valley has an obligation to participate in national defence, that AI weapons are inevitable and that the US should consider moving away from an all-volunteer military force.The manifesto hinges on a tragic and fragmented worldview. It is a world that is divided into us versus them, the civilised versus the uncivilised, the West versus the rest, hard versus soft power. To accept its logic, one must believe that coexistence is impossible, freedom is a detriment and peace is a liability.Palantir suggests that governments are too cumbersome and ill-equipped to fix any of the world’s issues. The manifesto says that free and democratic societies cannot prevail through moral appeal alone. They require hard power, which in this century, will be built on software.Palantir’s software.The company first got its start building software for the US intelligence community, assisting with counterterrorism investigations and operations. Palantir was the shiny new Silicon Valley alternative to traditional defence contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman.Palantir is now deeply embedded in the US government, with the Department of War, ICE and local police departments all on its books.Its defence-facing work has never been subtle. There are plenty of videos online of Alex Karp gleefully exclaiming the company’s involvement in the “kill chain,” even going just shy of claiming the elimination of Osama bin Laden.In a letter to shareholders from only a few days ago, Karp doubled down.“We believe it is not hyperbolic to say that nearly all AI workflows that actually create value — especially on the battlefield — are built on Palantir,” he said.But recently, spokespeople have been seemingly attempting to obscure Palantir’s association with Karp’s kill chain.A Palantir spokesperson recently told the Guardian that it is just a software company and that it does not collect or monetise data but simply provides tools to help customers organise and understand their own information.But why would a software company need a manifesto?
Let’s look at the software first. Functionally, Palantir is a layer on top of an operating system, using both AI and non-AI to execute on data. It offers two main products: Gotham, I’m not joking, is its defence-focused application, while Foundry, is its commercial-focused application.But these two applications were never meant to be distinct from each other. They are interoperable by design. The company has genuinely built in drag-and-drop features so data can move between Foundry and Gotham. Think about what that means for a moment: private consumer information has been designed to move seamlessly into software used by the military to execute strikes and surveillance.Palantir’s software is now infrastructure — public and private infrastructure. The company sits across defence, immigration, policing, prisons, supermarkets, banks and mines, ensuring data can move seamlessly between them all.Unfortunately, this is not some exclusively American problem that Australia can nervously giggle at. Palantir is already here.The Guardian reported that Palantir has reached nearly $80m in Australian state and federal contracts, with federal agencies including AUSTRAC and Defence spending an estimated $60m with the company.Palantir is not only making its way into our government. It also has several corporate clients in Australia.Coles signed a three-year partnership with Palantir in 2024 to use Foundry and AIP across its supermarkets, with the supermarket seeking to improve workforce planning and shift efficiency while gaining a more granular understanding of spend.To do this, Palantir uses Foundry to identify opportunities across 10 billion rows of data, comprising each store, team member, shift and allocation across all intervals in a day, every day. Everything you buy, every move by a team member, every cent spent at Coles now potentially sits in Palantir’s systems. With all that data, you would think Palantir could crack the code on cheaper groceries. Apparently, we haven’t come that far yet.Beyond our food, Palantir has also managed to creep into arguably Australia’s biggest industry: mining.Rio Tinto extended its relationship with Palantir in 2024, renewing an enterprise contract for ongoing access to Palantir’s AIP, with Palantir’s technology having been used across Rio’s WA iron ore operations and at Oyu Tolgoi.The partnership is especially difficult to come to terms with now, as whisperings of a 20% reduction in Rio Tinto’s Perth-based white-collar workforce inevitably stoke fears of AI-enabled redundancies.The food we eat is political, the ore we mine is political, and of course, the wars we wage are political too. But Palantir and Thiel insist their technology is not. It is something else.Palantir wants more than politics. It wants to be the operating system of the entire “Western world”, and it will do so without winning an election or persuading the public. It will do so by simply embedding itself in the fabric of our everyday lives, a fabric precariously draped over the war machine.So why does a software company need a manifesto? It’s because it doubles as Palantir’s product pitch.Off the Record is The Australian Mining Review’s weekly column.
