Palantir wants to own the kill chain

On Saturday 19 April 2026, Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point document to its account on X. The company described it as a “brief” summary of a book by its CEO, Alex Karp, and head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska. Within 48 hours, it had 32 million views. Philosophers, politicians, former employees and intelligence analysts were among those who responded. Almost none of them were reassured.

Palantir is not a name that regularly features in public debate in Lesotho or the broader Southern African region. It should. The company, co-founded in 2003 by Karp and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, with the CIA’s venture capital arm as an early backer, has grown into one of the world’s most consequential technology firms. It builds data analytics and artificial intelligence platforms used by militaries, intelligence agencies, police forces, immigration authorities, and health systems across the United States and its allied governments. Its revenue from US government sources alone spiked 66 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2025 to $570 million. It expects total revenue of between $7.18 billion and $7.20 billion in 2026, a more than 60 percent increase from the prior year.

The manifesto draws from The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, published by Karp and Zamiska in 2025. Palantir said it posted the summary “because we get asked a lot.” What follows is not, in any conventional sense, a technology company’s public statement. It is an ideological programme covering military doctrine, national service, cultural hierarchy, religious life, the restructuring of German and Japanese foreign policy, and the future of AI weapons. It is also, read carefully, a sales pitch.

Point 21, describing certain cultures as “dysfunctional,” “regressive,” and “harmful,” drew the sharpest responses. Belgian philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh described the manifesto as “an example of technofascism.” Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said Palantir had signalled a willingness to add an “AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence” to nuclear Armageddon. UK Member of Parliament Victoria Collins, whose concern is sharpened by the fact that Palantir holds a contract with the National Health Service, said the document sounded like “the ramblings of a supervillain” and that “a company that has such naked ideological motivations and lack of respect for democratic rule of law should be nowhere near our public services.”

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified the structural problem precisely. Palantir is not a think tank producing academic arguments about the future of Western civilisation. It is a company that sells operational software to defence agencies, intelligence services, immigration authorities and police forces. Its manifesto describes the ideology of the institution that will be operating those tools inside governments. When Palantir says certain cultures are regressive and harmful, it is not a philosopher issuing a provocation. It is a contractor saying something about the populations its systems will be used to sort, track and, in some contexts, target.

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The commercial context for the manifesto is not incidental. Palantir was awarded a $30 million no-bid contract to build ImmigrationOS, an AI platform that identifies non-citizens and tracks deportations for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Its federal contracts nearly doubled in 2025, rising to $970.5 million. On 31 July 2025, the US Army awarded Palantir an Enterprise Service Agreement valued at up to $10 billion over ten years. The company received over $180 million in payments from the IRS since 2018 across 26 contracts. In February 2026, it emerged that Scotland Yard had been using Palantir AI tools to profile its own officers. Congressional Democrats sent a formal letter demanding information about how Palantir tools are being deployed in Trump’s deportation operations.

Thirteen former Palantir employees signed an open letter warning that guardrails established to prevent discrimination, disinformation and abuse of power “have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley.” Their letter stated that Palantir’s platform “grants immense power to its users, helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions, and by extension, all of us.”

Karp himself has been unusually candid about what the company does. On an earnings call in 2025 he stated that Palantir’s mission is “to scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.” He has defended the IDF’s use of Palantir software to plan strikes in Gaza and called publicly for the US to prepare for a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran. The manifesto, then, is not a departure from prior Palantir messaging. It is its formalisation. What has changed is the scale of Palantir’s institutional reach, which makes the ideology behind its products a question of governance rather than of corporate branding.

For the African continent, and for the Southern African region specifically, the manifesto carries a particular charge that has not yet been named plainly in regional commentary. Point 21’s claim that certain cultures are “dysfunctional” and “harmful” is not a neutral, universal observation. It arrives from a company with documented ties to the architecture of Western military and immigration enforcement, written by a CEO who has spent most of his adult life outside the United States and who built his academic career in Germany. The “West” whose defence Palantir has appointed itself to lead is defined by the manifesto in civilisational terms. The cultures it deems middling or regressive are not specified. They do not need to be.

This matters not only as a matter of political philosophy but as a question of where Palantir’s tools will eventually be deployed. The company’s growth strategy is unambiguously oriented toward expanding government contracts globally. It expects more than 60 percent revenue growth in 2026. The governments of the Global South, which have historically been the subjects of Western surveillance architectures rather than their operators, should read the 22 points not as an abstract ideological provocation but as a mission statement from a company that intends to be inside their infrastructure.

Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University who reviewed the book on which the manifesto is based, offered the clearest assessment of its purpose: “The message of both the book and the manifesto is that Palantir wants to be the weapons manufacturer of the next century. The future of the weapons business is software plus AI. Palantir would like the government to spend an exceptional amount of money on Palantir products, please and thank you.” That is the honesty the manifesto itself withholds. The philosophy is the sales pitch. The sales pitch is the philosophy. At $7 billion in projected 2026 revenue, and rising, the distinction is academic.