Data intelligence software firm Palantir has made no secret of its staunch advocacy for Western exceptionalism – for a company that built its initial strongest base on services for the defense and intelligence sectors in the US, regular strong expressions of patriotism are par for the course.
But Palantir executives’ rhetoric gets more strikingly strident with each earnings call. CTO Shyam Sankar said flatly “we are at war with China” – as Palantir reported record revenues (including 32 new deals in Q4 worth over $10 million) and posted 2025 revenue expectations of $3.7 billion.
The world according to Karp?
And CEO Alex Karp signed off his annual letter to Palantir’s investors with a passage from historian Samuel Huntingdon. The rise of the West, he quoted, was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence…
"Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
(On a Q1 2023 call Karp, meanwhile, had said that Palantir’s AI platform for defense would make the West’s adversaries “quiver and scurry away…” and warned that “undemocratic regimes will not allow their development of artificial intelligence to be restrained by… moral considerations.”)
“We are at war with China. We are in an AI arms race… But this war started long ago. It was an economic war with the ascension of China to the World Trade Organization: the greatest IP theft in history; the greatest wealth transfer in history. It is an opium war: the number one cause of deaths of 18 to 45-year-olds in this country is fentanyl that is coming from China. It is a diplomatic war: the Belt and Road Initiative is basically indentured servitude for other countries to the CCP… and the unprecedented phase zero gray zone operations of the CCP? China knows they're at war… We kind of equivocate on it as a peace loving nation" – Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar, 2024 Q4.
Palantir’s CTO added: “One of the things I want to make sure we all do realize is that the engineering in r1 is exquisite. The optimizations that they've done are really impressive. And I don't think you can get away with the facile explanation that the Chinese just copy, and we're the only innovators. We have to wake up with the respect for our adversary…”
War... and Warp
The company also spent time on “Warp Speed”, previously referred to by the company as just “Warp” and as an ERP for manufacturing and on the Q4 call as a “modern American manufacturing operating system…”
Palantir in December 2024 announced that Anduril Industries, L3Harris, Panasonic Energy of North America (PENA), and Shield AI would be its inaugural “Warp Speed” cohort; the platform “integrates engineering, test production, quality and operations so that manufacturers can build better and build faster” (featuring things like automated visual quality inspections and dynamic production scheduling) it told investors.
CTO Sankar added that “our nation is in the beginning of a great re-industrialization as we compete with China to secure a free world and individual liberties. This is a competition we cannot afford to lose.”
