Palantir, an emerging tech company that was founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with support from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is a central player in the fight between the old guard and the up and coming weapons firms of Silicon Valley.

“The company’s transformation from an awkward Silicon Valley upstart trying to make it as a government contractor has also emboldened it. Some of its recent and prospective deals toe the lines of what even some of the company’s current and former employees consider a violation of ethical applications of AI and moral uses of software by the government—and Palantir is unapologetic.”

“Unapologetic” may be an understatement. At the height of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, in January 2024, Palantir president and CEO Alex Karp held the company’s board meeting in Tel Aviv to show solidarity with the Israeli war effort and to goad other pro-Israel business executives to openly support that country’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which many independent experts – including independent human rights groups based in Israel – have described as a genocide.

Palantir also has extraordinary influence inside the Trump team, beginning with vice president J.D. Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir’s Peter Thiel before joining the administration. And former Palantir employees are hard at work inside a variety of executive branch agencies. At least a half dozen former company employees worked inside the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, making recommendations for deep cuts in a variety of federal agencies. And a senior counselor at Palantir has close ties to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Palantir is aggressively pursuing business with Saudi Arabia, a move that the Journal article describes as “a departure from the company’s stated focus on Western democratic values and freedom of speech.”

The emerging military tech firms and the venture capital firms that invest in them see themselves as more than just business people. They believe that they are a special breed of human being, the “new patriots” who are willing to take risks to restore America’s position in a place of global dominance, so far ahead of China that Beijing will never catch up, or so Karp and others have said.