Not trying to be contrarian here, but I don’t get the problem. What’s wrong with Palantir producing weapons or military intelligence? How is it different from making guns?
Is the problem what those things are used for, or is it the way Palantir does it?
It's because there's a built-in conflict of interest in most for-profit companies.
It's in a business' best interest to maximize demand for its products. Which is mostly fine for society, country, and the world by large if you're selling paper cups.
However, if you want to sell more weapons you are interested in lobbying for events that increase the consumption of weapons, in other words: wars.
Well, as the saying goes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But now, thanks to companies like Palantir, we can essentially make guns that actually do kill people.
I think fewer people would care about Palantir (and several other notable companies) if their CEOs/founders weren't using the company as a platform for their own ambitions and ideologies.
For me, it's the blur between who makes decisions. I don't love our government making decisions about who lives or dies, but I much prefer decisions to be made by a/ a human b/ one who isn't beholden to shareholders.
Palantir aggregates immorally collected advertisement data and de-anonymizes it before selling it to the government. It's abuse of a dual-use data source that has no opt-out for any free citizen; maybe that concerns you, maybe it doesn't.
Their biggest issue is their leadership, though. If Alex Karp had two ounces of morality to rub together then it might be an easier pill to swallow, but instead he harps about how proud they are to kill people with AdSense data. It feels like the immorality is the point.
Allowing private-sector warfare manufacturers creates a profit motive for warfare, surveillance etc. It’s in palantir’s (or Raytheon, or Northrop, or BAH…), and their stockholders’, economic interest to promote and extend conflict. Many people think this is bad (including me).
Look at what's happening in Lebanon, Palestine, Iran. Everyone involved in helping with those mass murders is evil.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted. What is your argument in favor of this? How big of a degenerate, amoral, psychopath do you have to be to justify this?
"Israel has carried out at least 37 attacks against healthcare workers and facilities in Lebanon, including against the state civil defence and Lebanese Red Cross, since the current hostilities began, Lebanese authorities said.
The war in Lebanon started on 2 March after Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets at Israel, triggering a swift Israeli bombing campaign across the country. Fighting has since escalated, with Hezbollah continuing its rocket fire and Israeli troops invading south Lebanon.
At least 826 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes, according to the ministry of health, and about 1 million have been displaced."
He shows no remorse for any innocent lives lost during these operations. He emphasizes that the "minimum" number of innocent deaths has been achieved, and for him, that's job done.
You can accept that warfare is sometimes necessary and that innocent lives are sometimes lost. But necessity shouldn't be enough to wipe away any semblance of remorse if you have a functioning moral conscience.
Karp may be right on the merits right now, but he's clearly a broken human being. This is not someone I want involved in our country's warfare apparatus for the long term, because eventually his sociopathy will kill people who didn't need to die.
I would unhumorously vote "humans", myself, but even without that, Trump is high on the list. Demagoguery without let or hindrance, addressing a demographic without shame (and now we're back to humans).
Sad to see this flagged. Articles like these are exactly why I come to HN. Technology does not exist in a moral vacuum! You cannot reasonably keep "politics" away from this site when large tech companies are actively involved in killing people and destroying democracy.
1. Certain users do not like "political" topics on the front page. But as I said, the very idea of "apolitical" tech news is naive, especially in times like these.
2. Some users want to suppress it because it goes against their own political interests.
Either way, it's a gross misuse of the flag button. I am wondering: are there any consequences for wrongly flagging submissions?
Unfortuantely, while I do come here for these kinds of discussions, it's moistly because I've excised the sociopathic and nationalistic folks from much of my medua and it's much easier to find those values among wanna-be venture capitalists.
I "value" their opinions insofar as they have an outsized influence on our world:
I feel like if I want to stay tapped into the progress folks are making on building the Torment Nexus, this website is where I will find folks breathlessly cheering it on.
"You're attacking the person who's protecting you – idiot. [..] You may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. [..] You may not want to hear that truth, but it's fucking true."
The way Alex Karp views himself is scary; he gives himself (and his company) carte blanche when it comes to morality. He's basically become the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men.
Yes, America needs technology to succeed. But it can't be unchecked.
I'd take the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men over Komeini or Osama or whoever your Islamist despot of choice is, personally. And I'd choose it that way 100% of the time.
For many of us, the end of this extreme cultural and intellectual relativism couldn't have come soon enough.
You're misreading the hesitation about going into places like Iran.
It's not because we think the regime is/was good, but rather because of the completely predictable next 10-50 years of shit we're going to experience as a result.
Regime change is hard and oftentimes has the opposite effect of what you want. For example, see the current Iran regime.
There are always companies profiting from war. When ypu sre one of those, take the money, work silently. But being loud about being proud to be part of a war… this is just disgusting.
Poor sod. Just imagine the inferiority complexes he must have to be afraid of liberal, democratic women. He’s also a prime example of how a supposedly solid education (Haverford, Stanford, Habermas) or DEI parents don’t necessarily guarantee a well-rounded upbringing.
He said that before he went to Germany, he had underestimated just how German his upbringing had been. I dare not ask what exactly that means.
That’s not the operative principle in a democracy where people with many different moral ideologies must cooperate under the banner of a single government.
There were a lot of protests over the Iraq war when Congress was voting on it, but Congress hasn’t had a role this time. Who would the protesters be trying to influence?
The lead up to the Iraq was took a long time, with (to me and a while load of other people) clearly misleading and wrong evidence about WMDs as the justification.
There was no attempt to sway public opinion as to the right or wrong on this one. They just piled in with no warning.
As a person who organized and participated in the ultimately useless protests against the Iraq war, I think that you're correct- we had a couple of months to watch the BushII folks lie their way into getting wide support for the war.
As far as I can tell, these current assholes don't really care what the folks in the US think about their actions, so they don't spend time making cases- they just go do whatever dumb shit they want to do. Hell, I suspect that even they don't have a firm idea of what they are doing.
I don't think the protests were useless even if they didn't stop the war. It allowed the anti war opinion to solidify, particularly when there were no WMDs found (surprise).
Tony Blair is now widely reviled in the UK, and you can hardly find anyone who will admit to have supported the war.
Fair enough. It was certainly a learning point for me, personally. And it was probably an on-ramp into understanding imperial and neo-liberal politics that set a lot of folks of my generation into Occupy.
At the same time, I wish that protesting felt effective; the stated goals weren't achieved, and that is a fact. I've never been satisfied with being "right" about these horrors, even if I've been "right" a lot in my life.
And protesting is way more fun and less risky than the direct actions that seem to be for more effective in having measurable effects on efforts around ICE.
Roman Sheremeta on X: "Before the strikes on Iran, Republican voters were overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. involvement in a conflict between Israel and Iran. A survey by YouGov and The Economist found that only 23% of Republicans supported U.S. military involvement, while 53% opposed it.
However, attitudes shifted almost immediately after Trump ordered U.S. airstrikes on Iran. A survey conducted after Trump’s bombing campaign showed support climbing to 85% among Republicans."
Nationalism can be a significant motivator for decolonial resistance, it's not always a bad thing, within the imperial core it is undoubtedly bad though.
I think a lot of progressives have this huge blind spot right now where they fundamentally cannot empathize with their opponents at all. Of course Palantir is proud of their work, this is basically their raison d'etre. They are not somehow evil and also deeply ashamed of what they're doing, they genuinely think what they are doing is right.
Just believing that what you're doing is right doesn't make it right?
Not everything is subjective, and not every debate is worthy of middle ground. Sometimes, and I would argue autonomous kill robots is one of those times, just sometimes it's not really worth negotiating on. What would be the middle ground here? Just a little autonomous killing as a treat?
I don't know about progressives specifically, but I don't think 'cannot empathize with their opponents at all' is what articles like this are doing. It's more that the more people like Alex Karp talk the more they prove that their morality is something which should be opposed by the general public. IMO the more Palantir talks the better.
So what? I don't really care if you are proud of your work if I think you work is objectively evil. I imagine the designers of the Auschwitz's gas chambers were also proud of their "good" work. Yeah I ain't empathizing with them either and you can call that a "blind spot"
Where in the parent comment do you see them saying they are objectively “right”?
I read it as honestly subjective: “I see morality this way, you see it another way. If you act in a way that my morality deems evil, I will judge you for it regardless of how it fits into your belief system.”
If you can conclusively prove that liberals are evil, be my guest. Give me your rhetorical coup-de-grace that annihilates half of America's voting bloc.
Even the Nazis retained the ability to judge their opponents when WWII ended. Pity that their opponents were hangmen that wanted them to answer for murder.
Is your point here that people who do wrong always or usually know they’re doing something wrong? If it is, I disagree. Most things I consider morally abhorrent are justifiable under some morality system. And I think for most humans, it’s easier to believe you’re one of the good guys than one of the bad guys.
I could empathize with someone who relishes and jokes about killing people outside their ideology; these feelings are certainly familiar to me. But as a Christian, the thought of willfully doing so makes me feel ill, since I make great efforts to get those sadistic feelings *out* of my head. Someone who treats death with such cheery indifference is willingly forfeiting part of their humanity. To me, that's the definition of evil.
Most evil people don't see themselves as evil and do not feel shame about what they do. In fact, they often frame their actions as a crusade.
Not trying to be contrarian here, but I don’t get the problem. What’s wrong with Palantir producing weapons or military intelligence? How is it different from making guns?
Is the problem what those things are used for, or is it the way Palantir does it?
It's because there's a built-in conflict of interest in most for-profit companies.
It's in a business' best interest to maximize demand for its products. Which is mostly fine for society, country, and the world by large if you're selling paper cups.
However, if you want to sell more weapons you are interested in lobbying for events that increase the consumption of weapons, in other words: wars.
See the problem yet?
Well, as the saying goes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But now, thanks to companies like Palantir, we can essentially make guns that actually do kill people.
I think fewer people would care about Palantir (and several other notable companies) if their CEOs/founders weren't using the company as a platform for their own ambitions and ideologies.
For me, it's the blur between who makes decisions. I don't love our government making decisions about who lives or dies, but I much prefer decisions to be made by a/ a human b/ one who isn't beholden to shareholders.
There is a straight line from Eisenhower’s farewell speech about the perils of the military industrial complex to where we are right now.
Read that speech. Read “War is a racket” by Smedly Butler.
Do you think it’s a good thing that Palantir execs (Shankar and Bob Mcgrew, now at openAI) have been made Lt Cols of the U.S. Army?
They aren’t just making guns or information systems. They’re running the show and profiting on it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/1255164460/1a-army-07-03-2025
Palantir aggregates immorally collected advertisement data and de-anonymizes it before selling it to the government. It's abuse of a dual-use data source that has no opt-out for any free citizen; maybe that concerns you, maybe it doesn't.
Their biggest issue is their leadership, though. If Alex Karp had two ounces of morality to rub together then it might be an easier pill to swallow, but instead he harps about how proud they are to kill people with AdSense data. It feels like the immorality is the point.
Allowing private-sector warfare manufacturers creates a profit motive for warfare, surveillance etc. It’s in palantir’s (or Raytheon, or Northrop, or BAH…), and their stockholders’, economic interest to promote and extend conflict. Many people think this is bad (including me).
> How is it different from making guns?
It doesn't have to be! Being an arms dealer is also a moral failing.
> > What’s wrong with Palantir producing weapons or military intelligence? How is it different from making guns?
Palantir leadership has a long history of needing to be cruel and antisocial in a very loud way in order to feel alive .
Look at what's happening in Lebanon, Palestine, Iran. Everyone involved in helping with those mass murders is evil.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted. What is your argument in favor of this? How big of a degenerate, amoral, psychopath do you have to be to justify this?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/14/lebanon-israel...
"Israel has carried out at least 37 attacks against healthcare workers and facilities in Lebanon, including against the state civil defence and Lebanese Red Cross, since the current hostilities began, Lebanese authorities said.
The war in Lebanon started on 2 March after Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets at Israel, triggering a swift Israeli bombing campaign across the country. Fighting has since escalated, with Hezbollah continuing its rocket fire and Israeli troops invading south Lebanon.
At least 826 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes, according to the ministry of health, and about 1 million have been displaced."
He shows no remorse for any innocent lives lost during these operations. He emphasizes that the "minimum" number of innocent deaths has been achieved, and for him, that's job done.
You can accept that warfare is sometimes necessary and that innocent lives are sometimes lost. But necessity shouldn't be enough to wipe away any semblance of remorse if you have a functioning moral conscience.
Karp may be right on the merits right now, but he's clearly a broken human being. This is not someone I want involved in our country's warfare apparatus for the long term, because eventually his sociopathy will kill people who didn't need to die.
liberals have no problem with killing, they just want to be the ones doing it.
but they are doing it for the right, moral reasons /s
for people who don't get it: https://wbsm.com/massachusetts-elizabeth-warren-trump-speech...
I don't know. What's wrong with being a serial killer?
Karp is the number one enemy of civilised society.
I would unhumorously vote "humans", myself, but even without that, Trump is high on the list. Demagoguery without let or hindrance, addressing a demographic without shame (and now we're back to humans).
Oh yes there’s a good old list going here and it’s a subset of all humans for sure.
Sad to see this flagged. Articles like these are exactly why I come to HN. Technology does not exist in a moral vacuum! You cannot reasonably keep "politics" away from this site when large tech companies are actively involved in killing people and destroying democracy.
why did this get flagged?
Usually it's either
1. Certain users do not like "political" topics on the front page. But as I said, the very idea of "apolitical" tech news is naive, especially in times like these.
2. Some users want to suppress it because it goes against their own political interests.
Either way, it's a gross misuse of the flag button. I am wondering: are there any consequences for wrongly flagging submissions?
lotta tech bros in palantir, and they read HN too, mate.
Unfortuantely, while I do come here for these kinds of discussions, it's moistly because I've excised the sociopathic and nationalistic folks from much of my medua and it's much easier to find those values among wanna-be venture capitalists.
I "value" their opinions insofar as they have an outsized influence on our world:
I feel like if I want to stay tapped into the progress folks are making on building the Torment Nexus, this website is where I will find folks breathlessly cheering it on.
"You're attacking the person who's protecting you – idiot. [..] You may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. [..] You may not want to hear that truth, but it's fucking true."
The way Alex Karp views himself is scary; he gives himself (and his company) carte blanche when it comes to morality. He's basically become the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men.
Yes, America needs technology to succeed. But it can't be unchecked.
I'd take the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men over Komeini or Osama or whoever your Islamist despot of choice is, personally. And I'd choose it that way 100% of the time.
For many of us, the end of this extreme cultural and intellectual relativism couldn't have come soon enough.
You're misreading the hesitation about going into places like Iran.
It's not because we think the regime is/was good, but rather because of the completely predictable next 10-50 years of shit we're going to experience as a result.
Regime change is hard and oftentimes has the opposite effect of what you want. For example, see the current Iran regime.
10-50 is quite conservative. The current situation can be directly traced more-or-less directly to the CIA-instigated Mosaddegh coup in 1953.
It's also basically never been about freedom or whatever propaganda people are fed each time.
It is not a binary choice. This is the greatest illusion people in power manage to create, there are only two choices - pro or anti.
Sure, me too. But that was the point of his character – the false equivalence that he was the good guy, and those are the two options.
He justified ignoring the rules, which lead to the death of someone in his command, due to his own moral arrogance.
There's a third option. Someone who understands the weight of the role and holds themselves (or is held) accountable.
I choose neither.
Khomeini died almost forty years ago
There are always companies profiting from war. When ypu sre one of those, take the money, work silently. But being loud about being proud to be part of a war… this is just disgusting.
Poor sod. Just imagine the inferiority complexes he must have to be afraid of liberal, democratic women. He’s also a prime example of how a supposedly solid education (Haverford, Stanford, Habermas) or DEI parents don’t necessarily guarantee a well-rounded upbringing. He said that before he went to Germany, he had underestimated just how German his upbringing had been. I dare not ask what exactly that means.
It must be nice to live in a world where your country is always morally right just because it's your country. It's much simpler that way.
That’s not the operative principle in a democracy where people with many different moral ideologies must cooperate under the banner of a single government.
It doesn't change the reality of what's happening, so I don't think this is worth much, but most people here don't think that.
I know, I was talking about Karp.
Sadly I would argue that most do, about most of the things, most of the time. See the Propaganda Model.
Things like Iran are sadly the exception, as far as my experience goes.
> > It doesn't change the reality of what's happening, so I don't think this is worth much, but most people here don't think that.
Where are the ginormous protests that happened during the Iraq invasion?
Me thinks it was not about right or wrong but fear of a new Vietnam type draft.
Now that war has changed there are not similar type of protests because it's the missiles and drones doing the killing
There were a lot of protests over the Iraq war when Congress was voting on it, but Congress hasn’t had a role this time. Who would the protesters be trying to influence?
The lead up to the Iraq was took a long time, with (to me and a while load of other people) clearly misleading and wrong evidence about WMDs as the justification.
There was no attempt to sway public opinion as to the right or wrong on this one. They just piled in with no warning.
As a person who organized and participated in the ultimately useless protests against the Iraq war, I think that you're correct- we had a couple of months to watch the BushII folks lie their way into getting wide support for the war.
As far as I can tell, these current assholes don't really care what the folks in the US think about their actions, so they don't spend time making cases- they just go do whatever dumb shit they want to do. Hell, I suspect that even they don't have a firm idea of what they are doing.
I don't think the protests were useless even if they didn't stop the war. It allowed the anti war opinion to solidify, particularly when there were no WMDs found (surprise).
Tony Blair is now widely reviled in the UK, and you can hardly find anyone who will admit to have supported the war.
Fair enough. It was certainly a learning point for me, personally. And it was probably an on-ramp into understanding imperial and neo-liberal politics that set a lot of folks of my generation into Occupy.
At the same time, I wish that protesting felt effective; the stated goals weren't achieved, and that is a fact. I've never been satisfied with being "right" about these horrors, even if I've been "right" a lot in my life.
And protesting is way more fun and less risky than the direct actions that seem to be for more effective in having measurable effects on efforts around ICE.
Roman Sheremeta on X: "Before the strikes on Iran, Republican voters were overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. involvement in a conflict between Israel and Iran. A survey by YouGov and The Economist found that only 23% of Republicans supported U.S. military involvement, while 53% opposed it.
However, attitudes shifted almost immediately after Trump ordered U.S. airstrikes on Iran. A survey conducted after Trump’s bombing campaign showed support climbing to 85% among Republicans."
most people probably agree with that, but only until you mention a specific example then people loose their minds.
Nationalism has its benefits.
Did you drop this: "/s"?
Nationalism can be a significant motivator for decolonial resistance, it's not always a bad thing, within the imperial core it is undoubtedly bad though.
I think a lot of progressives have this huge blind spot right now where they fundamentally cannot empathize with their opponents at all. Of course Palantir is proud of their work, this is basically their raison d'etre. They are not somehow evil and also deeply ashamed of what they're doing, they genuinely think what they are doing is right.
Just believing that what you're doing is right doesn't make it right?
Not everything is subjective, and not every debate is worthy of middle ground. Sometimes, and I would argue autonomous kill robots is one of those times, just sometimes it's not really worth negotiating on. What would be the middle ground here? Just a little autonomous killing as a treat?
I don't know about progressives specifically, but I don't think 'cannot empathize with their opponents at all' is what articles like this are doing. It's more that the more people like Alex Karp talk the more they prove that their morality is something which should be opposed by the general public. IMO the more Palantir talks the better.
So what? I don't really care if you are proud of your work if I think you work is objectively evil. I imagine the designers of the Auschwitz's gas chambers were also proud of their "good" work. Yeah I ain't empathizing with them either and you can call that a "blind spot"
you're not right just because you label your opponents as evil.
Where in the parent comment do you see them saying they are objectively “right”?
I read it as honestly subjective: “I see morality this way, you see it another way. If you act in a way that my morality deems evil, I will judge you for it regardless of how it fits into your belief system.”
That seems non-contradictory to me.
Nor are you right for denying the accusation.
i can name many reasons why liberals are evil but I'm not here to argue politics. just know you don't have a monopoly on judging your opponent.
If you can conclusively prove that liberals are evil, be my guest. Give me your rhetorical coup-de-grace that annihilates half of America's voting bloc.
Even the Nazis retained the ability to judge their opponents when WWII ended. Pity that their opponents were hangmen that wanted them to answer for murder.
This kind of comment violates site guidelines, please review:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
That was a curious conversation. No part of my question was disingenuous, it was an objective-based query.
I've read this comment so many times, and every time posterity proves it wrong:
> Of course [FTX/Theranos/Boeing/Turing Pharma] is proud of their work [...] they genuinely think what they're doing is right.
Is your point here that people who do wrong always or usually know they’re doing something wrong? If it is, I disagree. Most things I consider morally abhorrent are justifiable under some morality system. And I think for most humans, it’s easier to believe you’re one of the good guys than one of the bad guys.
I could empathize with someone who relishes and jokes about killing people outside their ideology; these feelings are certainly familiar to me. But as a Christian, the thought of willfully doing so makes me feel ill, since I make great efforts to get those sadistic feelings *out* of my head. Someone who treats death with such cheery indifference is willingly forfeiting part of their humanity. To me, that's the definition of evil.
Most evil people don't see themselves as evil and do not feel shame about what they do. In fact, they often frame their actions as a crusade.