Weapons of Mass Prediction
Inside the Militarization of AI: How Palantir's 22-Point Manifesto Reveals the Ideology Behind the Digital Kill Chain
On April 18, 2026, Palantir Technologies published a 22-point manifesto on social media. The document declared that "Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible." It called for a closer merger of technology companies and the national security state. It questioned pluralism, dismissed certain cultures as "regressive and harmful," and argued that leaders are judged too harshly — that public life has become too punitive for the powerful. Within days, the post had been viewed 33 million times. Cas Mudde, one of the world's leading scholars of authoritarianism, responded with a single word: "Technofascism."
The Company [C1]
Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003, funded in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. Its co-founders include Peter Thiel — the billionaire political operative who donated over $1.25 million to Donald Trump and $15 million to J.D. Vance, and who lectures that AI regulation is literally the work of the Antichrist — and Alex Karp, a philosophy Ph.D. who describes himself as a "socialist" while running one of the world's most profitable defense contractors. Early seed funding reportedly included $40 million from Jeffrey Epstein channeled through Thiel. Karp has been remarkably candid: he has acknowledged that "our product is used on occasion to kill people." He has described Palantir's infrastructure as a "digital kill chain." [C1 — SEC filings; In-Q-Tel disclosures; C2 — Epstein/Thiel funding allegation]
The Gaza Kill Chain [C1/C2]
In January 2024, Palantir held its first board meeting of the year in Tel Aviv, "in solidarity" with Israel. Immediately afterward, Karp signed an upgraded agreement with Israel's Ministry of Defense. The most detailed reporting on what those missions involved comes from +972 Magazine and Local Call: Lavender sorts through massive volumes of surveillance data to generate kill lists containing tens of thousands of names — human officers spent roughly 20 seconds verifying each target before approving a strike. Gospel accelerated strike planning so dramatically that the IDF could identify as many targets in a single month as had previously taken a year. Where's Daddy tracks individual targets and alerts the military when they enter their family homes — designed to facilitate strikes on residential buildings. [C1 — +972 Magazine, April 2024; The Guardian, April 2024]
U.S. government contracts: NSA · CIA · FBI · DHS · DOD (Maven Smart System) · ICE · Treasury · State Dept.
International: IDF · NHS (UK healthcare data) · multiple EU agencies
The dependency trap: As Steve Caplan wrote: once a government agency has operated on Palantir systems for two or three years, "nobody remembers how to do the work without them. The data lives in their architecture. The workflows run on their tools." The banks were too big to fail. Palantir is too embedded to remove.
UN Special Rapporteur finding: Francesca Albanese submitted a report to the Human Rights Council concluding there are "reasonable grounds to believe" Palantir supplied predictive policing systems that facilitated crimes against humanity in Gaza. [C1 — UN Human Rights Council, June 2025]
"Our product is used on occasion to kill people."— Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies SEC Form 10-K (2024–2025); In-Q-Tel founding disclosures; Palantir 22-point manifesto (April 18, 2026); Cas Mudde — on-record response; Bellingcat / Eliot Higgins — on-record response; +972 Magazine, "Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza" (April 3, 2024); The Guardian (April 2024); UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese report (June 2025); British MP statements on Palantir/NHS; German cybersecurity expert statements; Palantir IDF contract documentation; Alex Karp — on-record statements (multiple).