loading . . . Palantir CEO and Trump ally Alex Karp is no stranger to controversial (troll-ish even) comments. His latest one just dropped: Karp believes that the U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean (which many experts believe to be war crimes) are a moneymaking opportunity for his company.
At the New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Karp was asked about the worries over the unconstitutionality of the boat strikes.
“Part of the reason why I like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you’re going to need my product,” Karp said. His reasoning is that if it’s constitutional, you would have to make 100% sure of the exact conditions it’s happening in, and in order to do that, the military would have to use Palantir’s technology, for which it pays roughly $10 billion under its current contract.
“So you keep pushing on making it constitutional. I’m totally supportive of that,” Karp said.
Karp has never been shy to give his full support to violence that he deems necessary. In a letter to investors from earlier this year, Karp quoted a political scientist to say that the “rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'”
He has also been vocal about his stance against open borders. Karp has repeatedly praised Trump’s immigration policy and offered Palantir’s services to ICE.
“I’m going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively,” the Palantir chief said on Wednesday.
In August, ICE announced that Palantir would build a $30 million surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS to aid the agency’s mass deportation efforts, around the same time that an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir’s AI was being used by the Department of Homeland Security to target non-citizens that speak out in favor of Palestinian rights (Karp is also a staunch supporter of Israel and inked an ongoing strategic partnership with the IDF.)
The Trump administration’s unprecedented access to Palantir technology has raised concerns over its use for mass surveillance, which could, in turn, help the government in policing immigrants and cracking down on critics.
Karp, on Wednesday, was quick to deny that Palantir was building a surveillance database using facial recognition technology. But alas, it’s all semantics.
“If you’re legally surveilled—we don’t even really work heavily with the FBI or DOJ—could you put it in our product? Yes,” Karp said. “Are our enemies surveilled using data that goes in our product? 100% and I completely support that.”
But Karp didn’t always consider himself in line with Trump. Just a few years ago, the Palantir executive described himself as a progressive and actually criticized the President, saying that he respects “nothing” about Trump. Karp is one of several Silicon Valley executives who have shifted alliances from the Democratic Party to back the Trump administration in words and deeds, if not the ballot box. Trump, in return, has gifted tech executives with a pro-big tech, and particularly pro-AI, regulatory and legal environment.
“If Democrats, my former party or current party, or however you want to look at it, ran someone who agreed with me, even in private, they would win. So, you know, maybe you should stop winning in the faculty lounge and start winning,” Karp said. “We’re apparently not supposed to say anymore, but we always said we’re cold in the streets and hot in the sheets. Democratic Party should think about that a lot.” https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-says-making-war-crimes-constitutional-would-be-good-for-business-2000695162
