At the Palantir Developer Conference, AI is designed to win wars

It is cold March morning at an undisclosed hotel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean hosting the Palantir developer conference. Defense contractors, military officers and corporate executives in attendance were unprepared for the weather. They assumed temperatures in the mid-70s the day before would hold. The cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir distributes heavy blankets. As people move between the open-air pavilions, they appear to have been salvaged from shipwrecks. However, morale is high. For this self-selecting crowd, Palantir delivers on its promises. The company’s stock price is rising. The gathering is filled with the groupthink going on for a multi-level marketing event.

After securing an invitation to the conference — a task made difficult by Palantir’s rejection of WIRED’s recent coverage — I was eager to get an inside glimpse into the mysterious company. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and his enigmatic former Stanford colleague Alex Karp, the company has become part of the Pentagon’s AI-driven warfighting transformation. However, in the past few years, its biggest growth has been in the commercial sector. “The business is growing 120 percent year over year. We’re very proud of the 60 percent growth in government, but they’re not even on the same slope,” says Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, who is also part of a four-person band of technology executives who serve as lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.

Generative AI has helped fuel Palantir’s rise, increasing the hands-on support the company provides to its customers. Early in its development, Palantir embedded “front-end engineers” into companies, helping them integrate Palantir software into their operations. Larger language models have allowed Palantir to build more powerful products, and now engineers are focused on helping customers build their own tools using Palantir technology. “Every time these models get better, it’s as if they were tailor-made for us,” says Ted Mabry, one of the first employees who now heads the business. “Our whole thesis was that we were building Iron Man suits for perception,” Sankar explains. “Our rate was limited by the number of people, the creativity of the questions, all that stuff. And then [with Gen AI] “This rate has been eliminated, which has changed the growth rate.”

Morning keynotes include a Vice Admiral of the U.S. Navy, the commanding officer of the Maven AI battlefield project, and executives from Accenture, GE Aerospace, SAP, and Freedom Mortgage Corporation. The range reflects the company’s trajectory from the defense business to the commercial sector. During my breakfast hour, I watch a demo of a family-run fashion company with 450 employees. CEO Jordan Edwards of Mixology Clothing says he found Palantir through an Instagram ad, and that the AI-powered system has transformed his business. He uses Palantir software to help make purchasing decisions, then asks him to send emails to negotiate prices. He claims that for one line he sells, “it resulted in a margin swing of 17 points — from a loss of $9 per unit to a profit of $9 per unit.” Edwards now describes himself as a “progressive CEO.”

Although Palantir’s main growth is in the commercial sector, its ethos remains one of defense contracting. During her long struggle to become part of the defense establishment (at one point, she sued the Army to consider a contract), she has focused on results. Palantir likes to think that this experience forced it to adopt a level of rigor that allowed it to outperform its competitors in the trading arena. One chapter from Sankar’s book that was just published, Mobilization: How to Restart America’s Industrial Base and Stop World War IIIcalled “The Factory is the Weapon.” Both Sancar and CEO Alex Karp believe that American industry, especially in Silicon Valley, has not shown enough patriotism. They hope Palantir’s model will inspire other companies to produce national defense products in addition to their consumer businesses.

Karp’s opening remarks at the conference emphasized how defense work defines the company, especially now that America is at war. (“This is to convince my family that I have a job,” he says, unusually wearing a jacket.) Usually, he says, he would talk to business clients about how to make them richer and happier and help them destroy their competitors. (He refers to competitors as “non-competitors” because, in his view, they do not fit into Palantir’s category.) But with an active battlefield in Iran, the company’s only priority now is supporting the forces. “We built Palantir to give our warfighters…an unfair advantage,” he says. “It was like, ‘Yes, we’re really going to fight our enemies.’ And I’m very proud of that.”