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Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion. Our product is used on occasion to kill people. That's not a leaked memo or some AI deep fake. That's Alex Karp, the CEO of Palanteer, saying it out loud in front of an audience. Just a few years ago, it would be unthinkable for a CEO to utter such words. Silicon Valley spent two decades trying to convince us that they were connecting people and making the world a better place. That was rarely true, but at least it sounded fluffy. But now in 2026, the CEO of one of the most influential software companies on Earth is openly bragging that his product helps governments scare enemies and on occasion kill them. Not long ago, he stated that the military
draft should be introduced. We should send eligible men off to war. But here's the wildest thing. By every traditional measure of success, Palanteer passes the bar. Its stock has gone from $9.50 at IPO in 2020 to over $140 today. a return of more than 1,400% in 5 years. Palanteer has government contracts on multiple continents and at the time of writing has a market cap of around 330 billion putting it inside the top 40 most valuable companies on Earth. So you have to ask the obvious question if Palanteer already has all the money, all the contracts, all the political access, what else do they want? I can answer that question right now, but in order to understand the gravity of what they want, it's frankly worth watching
the rest of the episode. So, Palunteer wants to be the default AI and data infrastructure layer for institutional power for Western civilization, but their motivations are deeply ideologically driven. The CEO has explicitly stated that he believes that Western defense and intelligence institutions require advanced AI powered military software for the sole reason of maintaining global superiority. In a matter of years, Palanteer's influence will affect most of the globe. In this episode, we're going to look at one of the most powerful and controversial companies on Earth, Palanteer. Its eccentric leadership that is Alex Karp, and try to make sense of what he and the people running this company genuinely
seem to want. Because the closer you look, the stranger the answer gets. You are watching Toll Fusion TV. You're you need a higher purpose. And I also think you often need a lower purpose. Like the higher purpose for me, what kind of what's a lower purpose? Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentinyl laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us. So that's my lower purpose. But the higher pro purpose for me was to get this nation to be the preeminent power in the world. Hm. With statements like that, the obvious question is how does such a company exist, let alone become so influential? Well, the short answer is that their technology is so good at making sense and analyzing disperate
sets of data that a lot of other companies can't live without them. We'll come back to how they achieve this later. So, Palanteer actually confuses a lot of people because it's actually a story of two main platforms, Foundry and Gotham. Each does completely different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations and real-time data processing. It's more of the benign arm of the company. Thousands of companies use Palanteer Foundry. Everyone from Wendy's, Ferrari's F1 team, Airbus, Nike, Poly Market, LG, BP, Lowe's, Kohl's, Morgan, Stanley, Honda, Nissen, Ford, Mitsubishi, PWC, United Airlines, and the list goes on. We went long on the reality that uh large
English language models were useful in their application, in our software, and are not going to be as performant as people want outside of it. The Gotham platform, on the other hand, is where all the controversy is. Gotham is presented as a quote operating system for global decision-making end quote. It sounds a little vague, but it's mainly used by government agencies for war targeting, killing enemies, and domestic mass surveillance. The main risk in this conversation is the centralization of all the data Palanteer possesses. Everything from Medicare to the IRS, travel, immigration, social security, health records, police records, license plate data, biometric data, online history, phone calls, location
information from phones, and it goes on and on. That's data that's usually separated, siloed, and under wraps. Now, it can all be gathered in one place to build a profile on any given individual. Firstly, the cost of running an authoritarian regime like the Staryzy has come down by 10 orders of magnitude in the last 3 years. If you had to run the Stanzy, if you're in East Germany back in the day, that was like 20% of GDP on spying on people and keeping an eye out. Okay, that's now you got a bunch of cameras, you've got AI, everyone's got a phone on them, and we're tracking everything at all times.
Okay, that's a worry because we live in liberal democracies and we're very lucky to. But our leaders, how long will they resist that temptation? To be clear, this hasn't happened just yet, at least that we know of. But Palanteer's Gotham makes it not only possible, but easier than it ever has been before. So, it's like when people are worried about surveillance, it's not honestly, of course, there's there are huge dangers there, but you know, uh it's like you will have far fewer rights if we're if America is not in the lead. In the United States, Palanteer is already widely being adopted in domestic federal agencies. Today, all six US military branches along with three dozen federal agencies now use Palanteer. UK
police, German state police, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission also use Palanteer domestically. Soon they'll be the central hub that glues all government data on citizens together. Now, I have to stress, Gotham can't be thought of as simply just a database. As researcher Nicole Bennett puts it for the conversation, quote, it Gotham takes fragmented data scattered across various agencies and stores it in different formats and transforms it into a unified searchable web. End quote. And if you think that this doesn't affect you, if you live in the US, at least everywhere you drive is already being watched and processed. Your license plate, your car model, and any identifying features on
your car, like stickers, are now being fed into Palanteer via ALPR cameras. They know where you go, when you go, and who's driving. There's over 80,000 cameras in the US on major roads and highways. If you want to see where you're being spied on, you can head to dlock.org to check for yourself. And that's just a part of the data that Palanteer collects. Researching these topics made me realize something. To make sense of where technology as a whole is heading, understanding software is critical. And that's why we've partnered with today's sponsor, Boot.dev, to help you learn how
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There's also a 30-day, no questions asked refund, and a free demo of the interactive experience on every course. So, if you've ever wanted to learn how to code, or actually stick with it this time, head to boot.dev and use my codefusion to get 25% off your first year on an annual plan. Thanks to boot.dev for sponsoring this episode. Now let's dig much deeper into the nature of Palanteeria. Some people might say from a strictly technological standpoint, plenty of companies work in data processing to gather trends and insights. So that function by itself isn't inherently evil. It can be used for good. For example, finding lost children, detecting fraud, and stopping terrorism. Logistics teams use data processing to keep grocery shelves
stocked during disasters. Another example, researchers using data in the UK's NHS spread across a network of hospitals have used these data sets to spot disease patterns that would be invisible in any single hospital's records. Palanteer said to the BBC that it was quote deeply proud to be helping the UK government to deliver more NHS operations, speed up cancer diagnosis, keep the Royal Navy ships at sea for longer, and tackle domestic violence. End quote. Most of that is all one side of the company. the Foundry platform, the Gotham platform is something else. To add to this, there's also Project Maven, which we've covered in our AI and war episode. That's a really good one.
You should check it out if you haven't already. But if you did miss it, Maven is basically a more rapid version of Gotham specifically for war. It selects military targets for destruction automatically and rapidly, often with little human involvement. With the help of Anthropic, the Maven system was used in the Orion Wars initial stages. Okay, so with a track record like that, it's no wonder that Palanteer is seen by many as a deliberate attempt to create an AIdriven surveillance state. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let's take a step back. Where did this all come from?
Palanteer was founded in 2003 by Peter Till. His claim to fame is PayPal, but more recently has been like this. I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right? Uh you're hesitating. Well, I Yes, I don't know. I would um This is a long hesitation. So many long There's so many questions and questions. Should the human race survive? Uh yes. Okay. Alongside him was his Stanford law roommate, Alex Karp, and a few others. Their first investor was the CIA venture arm, Incel. They put in about $2 million. From the start, Palanteer
positioned themselves specifically for intelligence workflows, which many companies at the time weren't doing, and for good reason, as working with the government directly was unpopular at the time. The initial pitch was idealistic on paper. Basically, take the fraud detection software PayPal had used to catch credit card scammers and utilize data to catch criminals. Later on, the goal somewhat shifted to fighting terrorism using intelligence data. So, a quick side note, why choose the name Palanteer? Well, it comes from Lord of the Rings. A palanteer is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. So, yeah, that's a nice start. Alex Kob,
co-founder and CEO, was an unusual pick. A guy with a PhD in social theory from Frankfurt, no business background, and a habit of wearing tracksuits to investor meetings. As you'll later see, he's a real character. But to give you a taste first, just listen to these anecdotes. At home, his phone is stored in a Faraday cage to block radio signals because, quote, "The Chinese would be crazy not to try and listen to my calls." End quote. In September 2023, at a summit on AI regulation, he was seated next to Elon Musk. Alex Karp asked Musk if he knew why they were seated together. Musk said he had no idea. Out of nowhere, Karp laughs. It's because the shotgun blast radius will only take
out the two of us. End quote. We'll come back to Karp in chapter 2. From day one, Palanteer was not a normal tech company. It was trying to sell intelligence agencies a way to actually process and understand the fire hose of data that they were already collecting. In other words, making mass data useful. It wasn't until the mid to late 2000s that they started landing government and defense contractors. And by the 2010s, they were involved actively in battlefield analysis. By the 2020s, they were giving data to US ICE and law enforcement as well as the UK police.
Palanteer systems work so well because employees went the extra mile to create them. Palanteer employees would go to active battle zones working on laptops with troops. Troops who were exchanging gunfire nearby. The main aim was to truly understand how things worked on the ground. If the client was a bank looking for fraud, employees would go to the bank's customer operations office for 3 months solely to observe and learn. The idea was don't just listen to the client, be the client. do the client's work for a long time. This information came from a former employee of seven years, Adam Judson, back in 2023 when the company was a bit more sane. But since then, they've expanded
greatly. That includes a major role in creating targeting data for the Ukraine war, and honestly, it's terrifying. That word does get thrown around flippantly these days, but I really mean it here. The everpresent Simon Whistler explains, quoting a New York Times article on the drones, they carry out quote, "pilotless takeoff or hovering, geoloccation, navigation to areas of attack, as well as target recognition, tracking, and pursuit up to and including terminal strike, the lethal endpoint of the journey. Perhaps most frightening, however, Ukraine's recent advancements in unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs. In midappril, Ukrainian President Vladimir
Zalinski revealed that for the first time, Ukraine captured a Russian position exclusively using unmanned ground and aerial drones. Quote, "Without infantry and without losses on our side." How did Ukraine win a battle using only robots? There is this unbelievable video I saw recently from the front lines of the war in Ukraine. And in it, you see these three Russian soldiers crawl out of a hiding place, arms up, fear on their faces. And they walk towards a camera and surrender on the snowy ground. But they're not surrendering to a Ukrainian soldier, or frankly, a soldier of any sort. They're surrendering to a robot. It was, according to the Ukrainians, the first
time that an enemy position was captured solely by a battlefield robot. In 2024, Karp personally flew to Tel Aviv to sign a deal with the Israeli Defense Force. He would supply automated decision-making targets in the Gaza conflict. In fact, we have this problem at Palanteer. We have people who join. They're like, they think they're joining a normal company. We're not a normal company. We are fighting for what we believe and we're putting in a product to give the people that agree with us a superior position. So, let's dig in a little bit more about
why companies and governments still use Palanteer. So for a client, if Palanteer proves their value, more use cases get layered up over time. Gradually the cost to switch builds up. Researcher Luke Mann warned that this can lead to quote vendor lockin end quote where clients become increasingly dependent on Palanteer to even make sense of their own data. Competitors like Snowflake and data bricks exist and there's even solutions from Microsoft and AWS, but Palanteer mostly shines in complex environments cases where multiple fragmented data sets are involved. And once you're in the system, leaving the system is painful. And that's the same in a hospital, a tax office, a supermarket, or a battlefield. And that is how a company with 4,400 employees
becomes worth more than a third of a trillion dollars. You know, a lot of those people are sus suspicious of us now try to take the product out of their hands. Almost all of our clients, meaning people who bought our product, started off as Palanteer skeptics. And I have gone into tens of thousands of meetings. Now, currently, when I meet the Palanteer skeptic, I'm like, that's the person who's going to buy because they have legitimate questions like, is this product being used to take away my right to go have a hot dog with a coworker I'm flirting with while being married? Which honestly, you know, I think is the god-given right of people in this country. Can the government
surveil your patterns of behavior? Like, it's called pattern of life surveillance, which is a very, very, very important way of finding terrorists. And there's these things require very precise tools. Yes, we are monetizing the fact that these decisions are difficult. We're monetizing the fact that they're hard. We're monetizing the fact that they're important. But like any tool, these capabilities can be misused. When in the wrong hands, it can be abused as an enabling force to grant power and authority over private citizens, and they don't have a say in it. Now, you'd expect the CEO of such a controversial and covert company to be incognito for the most part, but as you'll see in chapter 2, Alex Karp is anything but.
I don't think in win lose. I think in domination, almost nothing makes a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine away from these short sellers. Alex Karp is genuinely one of the strangest and most interesting CEOs in tech. He was born in 1967 to an African-American mother who was an artist focused on civil rights and the suffering of black children and to a Jewish father who worked as a pediatrician. As a child, young Alex was taken to civil rights marches. He studied philosophy at Harvard, then law at Stanford, then went to Frankfurt to get a PhD in neocclassical social theory. He speaks fluent German and has
dyslexia. He never learned to drive, but often goes skiing alone for 10 m a day. He departs on his skiing trips from one of his estimated 20 homes around the world, which are apparently sparsely furnished ski huts. He practices martial arts and has no spouse and no children. For years, Alex was framed as the progressive counterweight to Peter Theel, who himself is an absolute madhatter. And just to give you an idea, Peter Theal, the co-founder of Palanteer, believes democracy and freedom are incompatible. the idea of government will fade away and should be replaced with corporate run states and sovereign CEOs who control the masses.
He thinks that tech regulation is the work of the antichrist. Market competition is destructive and is for losers. He wants to live forever and doesn't believe in conflict of interest, but that's all another story for another day. Let's bring our focus back to the forever bouncing in his chair, Alex Karp. Alex Karp being a political counterweight to Peter Phil is no longer the case. Karp now talks almost exclusively in the language of hard power, western dominance, and civilizational struggle. In his 2025 book, The Technological Republic, he argues that Silicon Valley has lost its way by focusing on consumer apps. He believes that engineers have a moral duty to build weapons for the state. So
far, it sounds like a slightly eccentric personality, but that's nothing compared to some of the other stuff he said in public. quotes like almost nothing makes a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine away from those short sellers end quote and joking about light fentinyl laced urine end quote being sprayed on critics by drones. It is genuinely unhinged and these aren't taken out of context. He literally says them on stage and on earnings calls. Karp doesn't believe in democratic institutions. Karp essentially doesn't really believe in institutions. He believes in heroic good people, generally good men. And the general idea is, you know, the good men should be given the power. The
good men should be given the technology and the weapons, and the good men will save the world. It's amazing how these people see themselves as good. Yeah. Strong individuals get the technology and the weapons, and good men save the world. The slow, messy, deliberative parts of liberal democracy are, in his worldview, an obstacle. Karp openly describes Palanteer's products as a quote killchain and says, and this is a direct quote, "If you do not feel comfortable supporting the legitimate efforts of America and its allies in the context of war, don't join Palanteer. For once, a guy like this is being
straight up. But if one is proud of automatic killing pipelines and mass surveillance capabilities that spit on both the Geneva Convention, humanitarian law, and civil rights, I think most people would agree that's a red flag." The thing is, he makes a bunch of money doing this, too. Palanteer disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in 2024. That's not million, billion with a B. And we're not talking about stock options or vague terms here. It's $6.8 billion in compensation actually paid. It was the highest CEO pay package for any publicly traded company in America that year.
Through a structure called class F shares, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel retain 49.99% of voting power, even if they own as little as 6% of the company. There's essentially no way they can be removed. No matter how you look at it, they've cemented a position of pure power and influence. So, his worldview is gagworthy to most regular people, but that's just it. You need a guy this crazy to run such a company and to sleep at night. So, the crux of the issue, what does Palanteer actually want? This section is the hardest part to answer in detail because the full answer is a lot. In April of 2025, Palanteer's official ex account posted what people quickly
renamed the Palanteer Manifesto. It was 22 numbered points drawn largely from Karp's book, and it went absolutely viral. A normal corporate manifesto would say something along the lines of we believe in consumer obsession or that we strive to make your life more convenient. But this one said, "Some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The West must resist quote the shallow temptation of vacant and hollow pluralism. The United States should reconsider reinstating mandatory national service." The question is not whether AI weapons will be built, but who will build them. Silicon Valley must
play a role in addressing violent crime. The manifesto was so unhinged that even the greediest of investors didn't like it and Palanteer stock dropped as a result. Belgian philosopher Mark Kokleberg, a leading scholar on AI ethics, called this quote, technofascism in plain sight. Economist and former Greek finance minister Januz Verofkus said that Palanteer is a key player in what he terms technofudalism and tech lordism. So I guess in a way it's refreshing to see Palanteer lay their refues out there for everyone to see. A private company with multi-billion dollar government contracts pushing an ideological vision where the West must reassert hard power.
There's mandatory service and aggressive technological dominance over its perceived enemies. And don't get me wrong, I know some of you are thinking a country should be able to use technology to defend itself and even use it to cel internal threats. Revamping outdated government systems and modernizing it to become integrated real-time analytics makes logical sense. But who's making that change matters, and that's my main concern. The way that the top ranks of Palanteer behave is a building latent risk. They don't care about civil liberties at all. They see it as a hindrance. In history, just within the United States, government intelligence gathering has resulted in the targeting
of civil rights activists in the 1960s, which Karp himself, as a child, probably took part in, and the monitoring of anti-war protesters during the Vietnam War. Imagine the speed and the precision of silencing domestic disscent with Palanteer and their Gotham system, not just for America, but now the UK, Germany, and any other nation that chooses them. As Nicole Bennett puts it, quote, "In a preg Gotham era, putting someone under suspicion of wrongdoing might have required specific evidence linked to an event or witness account. In a Gotham enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns of data, patterns whose importance is defined by proprietary algorithms." End quote. And
there it is. Palanteer wants to be the default AI and data infrastructure layer for institutional power, primarily for the West. That's the answer to the question and I hope you understand it now. They want to be the operating system that governments, militaries, hospitals, police, immigration agencies, and major corporations can no longer function without. CTO Sham Sanka said it almost word for word in 2021. The goal is to become quote the US government's central operating system end quote. But even within Palanteer, plenty of people think this has gone too far. 13 former Palanteer employees signed an open letter publicly urging the company to stop certain contracts. Linda Shia, a
former engineer, told the New York Times that the issue wasn't the technology itself. It was that combining all of that data, quote, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse. End quote. And there's some important truth there. Even if you like the guys in charge of the government today, the next administration could abuse Palanteer systems without end. It's a huge future moral hazard. Once in place, such unchecked power almost always expands far from its intended original use. When the target switches from that group you don't like over there to simply anyone who opposes the government, it's already too late. And that is the direction that's always gone throughout history.
The good news is that it isn't happening yet. And that's why we talk about these things now because there's still time. Time for change. But despite all of these red flags, the story takes a genuinely bizarre turn. Palanteer, for all of its public bluntness about violence and dominance, is also trying to win over a younger, cooler audience using soft power. They have an online merch store. They sell t-shirts, sweatshirts, and patches with words like ontology, velocity, and dominance printed on them. In 2025, they sold a t-shirt featuring Kar's face with the word dominate. It was quietly pulled off the store. On April 30th, 2026, they released a $200 coat. Their head of Vibes, Eleno Ununas, told GQ explicitly
that he wants Palanteer to be a lifestyle brand, a surveillance and weapons software company that openly admits to killing people now has a sweater line. And if that doesn't do it for you, there's official holiday messages from Alex Karp skiing and wishing you a happy holidays on Palunteer social media. It's genuinely difficult to overstate how new this is. As Andrew Groves, a professor at the University of Westminster, puts it, "Systems that once operated in the background now want to be visible, even desirable. It's like trying to make the Patriot Act after 9/11 seem cool and invoke." Let's discuss what this all means.
Alex Karp genuinely probably believes that is helping democracy survive a dangerous world. But that sincerity might make Palunteer more dangerous and not less. After the manifesto, after the merge, after the kill chain quotes, after the class F shares, after the $6.8 billion paycheck, after the defense deals, after the we kill enemies earnings calls, it becomes pretty hard to make the ethical case for what this company is becoming. The strongest defense of Palunteer is real. Democracies do need capable technology, but that's where it starts and that's where it ends. If we're charitable, we could call Palunteer a data company with military branches tacked on. They just care about defending the West. But if
we're not charitable, we could say they're like the Western version of the CPP government apparatus, but worse. To me, it's almost like Palanteer blows wide open the fraying of the relationship between governments and their people. It's long forgotten now, but there was a time where people knew the purpose of government. It was to serve, work for, and protect its constitutes, not as an oppressive force to be scared of. That's more towards fascism. Few people even care about any of this today. But the fact that you're still watching tells me that you do, and that's great. It's important that we speak up and talk to others so that enough people are aware, talk to representatives, and make some change.
And for any change to happen, people first need to know what's going on. And that's why this episode exists. Fortunately, the UN Secretary General is urging a legally binding international treaty to put a global ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons. So, we'll see what comes of it. And some of the public are on the case. Organizations like Perch Palunteer is a start. We also urgently need oversight, independent audits, regulation, and most importantly, legislators who actually understand what they're approving. Sunset clauses on contracts are a good idea because there's real consequences when things go wrong. Once a company becomes the operating system for a whole country, removing it becomes very, very
hard. Palanteer wants to be that operating system. Whether we let them, well, that's still up to us. So, as always, what do you guys think? Is Palanteer building the immune system that the West actually needs, or are they the surveillance backbone for something much darker? Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm sure it's going to be a fun time. Anyway, that's about it from me. My name is Dogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion. If you did like this episode and want to see something else, maybe probably more light-hearted, there's plenty of other interesting stuff on this channel. All right, so I'll see you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.
