Why America needs to win the AI war: Palantir CEO

This week, Dr. Alex Karp, the CEO of software giant Palantir received the Herman Kahn Award at the Hudson Institute’s annual gala. He used his acceptance speech to talk about the promise of artificial intelligence and America:

Because of artificial intelligence, we are, for the first time, faced with a question: How do we justify our superiority, not just as a culture but as a species, vis-à-vis something that may be able to do cognitive things that we can’t do?

America is best positioned to answer this question. And I want to just start with the most obvious reason, which is so obvious we forget it: that the rights we have in this country are inalienable, and they are given to us by God.

We are the lone country that has the basis for this. Our rights are not given to us by our intellectual superiority. They’re not given to us by consensus built in Germany or in the United Kingdom.

They’re given to us by our right that we were born here as Americans.

Here I see a tethering between the specificity of America — that we have a Constitution given to us by God, that we believe in higher principles, that we defend them if we need to with our own guns, with our own free speech, and with our own rights of privacy — and the specific things that create value in the world now, meaning specific knowledge of how to build something, how to target something, how to protect data, how to be a nurse or a doctor.

These skills are excruciatingly important. So you have a constitutional and moral tethering of exactly what you would need in one specific culture. And that’s this culture.

One of the very radical things about Palantir that our enemies do not believe is we at Palantir have maximal empathy for Americans, for the right of Americans to be free, and for men and women that actually do work.

Consider that more Americans have died of fentanyl than have died in any war since World War II. If those were Stanford grads or Cornell grads dying of fentanyl, you can bet your last dollar the various jurisdictions would read the law so that you could stop that. But they’re not.

They’re working class. They’re mostly male, they’re mostly white, and mostly people don’t care. And we have to change that.

We have to actually look at where the value is created and have empathy with people who really deserve it. And those people have not gotten enough empathy.

And technology is about to change that, and it’s going to change everything politically because it is actually real. The worker, the person on the front, the people that write the scripts that protect us — all those projects you saw are being done by people with vocational training in the military. They’re creating enormous value, and they deserve the respect that they are going to ask for, and they’re going to get. And all of us at Palantir are behind that.

And then conversely, how do you get a situation in New York City where you just vote for someone who has no experience in doing what they’re going to do? None.

I view myself as classically progressive. You know what classically progressive is? The government has to work. You know what that means?

You need the very best people — people who have experience running complicated organizations. They have ideas on how to run software. They understand the complexity of the law. They enforce it. If you’re really serious about making things work for the worker, those are the people you vote for. Those are the people that need to be in charge.

One of the reasons we are in a kind of a “doom AI circle” is because you can only explain the promise of AI if you understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture. Because there are dangers in AI, but the reality is there’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be the US or China.

But Europe — I spent half my life in Europe at this point — when we talk about Europe, we do exactly the same thing as when we hear about educational programs led by mayors or safety programs in the inner city. We just say, “I really hope it works out. Please.”

I want Europe to win, but we’re on our own.

Of course, there are dangers in AI. But we must embrace our ability to build it, our ability to own the chips, own the software, build the large language models, and run very, very quickly.

Because again, if we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be dictating the rule of law, the things we hold precious in this culture — I would say embodied by our Constitution and especially in our first four amendments — those things will not be the same if we are not the dominant technological culture in the world. And while we may have tons of disagreements on these things, those are really the alternatives.

And most of what we can do, in my view, to counter adversaries is also to build the technology. And then, one of the lessons of Palantir is: no one’s coming to defend you. You have to defend yourself. We used to live in a world where you could rely on experts to articulate our vision.

But who showed up to articulate our vision in this last election in my hometown, former hometown? Like if we’re waiting for people to articulate and fight for us, we are cooked. And so, the people who disagree with us are often better organized and better motivated. And that’ s a huge problem we have to solve.

At Palantir, half of the reason we succeeded is we are just motivated and very organized and very meritocratic. Meritocracy is the most underestimated, powerful, revolutionary tool that exists in any enterprise, ever.

And the capacity to identify and advance people in America based on their capacity is the single most revolutionary tool. And my kind of thinking — it’s been infected, meaning the progressive party, the Democrats, by people who do not believe in this.

And by the way, to my Democratic friends here and whoever sees this, we must stand up.

And as importantly, if you accept the logic that you can never vote for somebody because they have some belief structure you disagree with, you are empowering the radicals in your own party, and they will control everything.

Whether it’s immigration in Germany, which is functionally controlled by people that still believe in chain migration because you can never do a coalition with the right, or whether it’s the Democratic Party that is functionally being torn apart by people who believe in anti-progressive, anti-meritocratic values as embodied by not having a border.

No progressive ever has believed in an open border. None. Never has, never existed. Because that undermines the value of workers and their labor.

And if you want to see what happens to a culture when you don’t fight, look — who’s standing up in my former party to say, “This is ridiculous”? Who stood up in Germany to talk about migration? We cannot allow ourselves to become Europe. We really have to fight.

And Palantir, I think, has been at the forefront of this. And I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve been able to shift the culture in Silicon Valley away from being skeptical of America to being pro-America.

The idea that you would give tools to give Americans an unfair advantage on the battlefield was viewed as heretical until recently.

Now it’s viewed as common sense.

We enforced meritocracy when we were getting sued by the DOJ for basically just hiring the most qualified people. And if you do that and you succeed, you can actually change the way people think.