On Palantir’s X account, the publication circulated Saturday like a sharp-edged manifesto, with its twenty-two points, presented as a synthesis of The Technological Republicthe best seller by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. A concise, almost programmatic form, which contrasts with the ambient consensualism of Silicon Valley.
And the content matches the form. We read that “Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its growth possible” and an “affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” That “the hard power of this century will be built on software.” Let the “atomic age end” and a new era of AI-based deterrence begin. That national service should once again become a universal duty. That the military neutralization imposed on Germany and Japan after 1945, long celebrated as a success of Western diplomacy, was only an excessive correction of which Europe is only beginning to measure the cost, and of which Asia could soon pay the price in turn. That some cultures “produced wonders” while others “proved regressive and harmful.” That Western pluralism, as it has been constructed over the past half-century, is nothing more than an empty horizon.
This catechism in twenty-two points, dry as a marching order, is not another provocation, but the public formalization of a trajectory built for more than twenty years in rupture with the dominant model, and which leads us to delve back into the work published just a year ago, to enter the world according to Karp.
Against consensus, a company based on conviction
In The Technological RepublicAlex Karp formalizes a trajectory built on the fringes of the dominant tech model. That of Palantir, a company created with its partner Peter Thiel, the day after September 11 to respond to a problem that Silicon Valley did not want to deal with, namely how to equip the State, its agencies and its armies with software tools capable of exploiting data on a large scale.
At the time, the bet went against the grain. While venture capital pours its billions into consumer, platform, and the attention economy, Palantir chooses national security and intelligence. A choice that will earn him years of exclusion.
“It was forbidden to work with us,” summarizes Karp, laconic, facing Andrew Ross Sorkin during a conference in New York in April 2025. The marginalization will last until confrontation becomes, paradoxically, a proven method.
Palantir will go so far as to sue the American state twice, both cases which the startup will win. The objective was not to obtain contracts, but to open procedures, force access, and introduce competition into a closed system. A decision that Karp himself described as “stupid” in the short term, but which he retrospectively considers to be structuring.
And it is this type of decision that Alex Karp repeats out of conviction. Where investors expect an analytical product, Palantir is developing a secure data integration engine capable of processing unstructured feeds. Three years of development without visibility. Same logic in the organization, with engineers deployed directly to customers, at the heart of operations.
Refusing the Valley venture capital playbook now becomes its guiding principle.
Because for Karp, the problem is first and foremost cultural. A generation of leaders learned to manage rather than think, to adjust to situations rather than decide. He describes “an entire generation of leaders and entrepreneurs (…) deprived of the possibility of forming true convictions about the world”. The result is a managerial class whose primary function is to ensure its own reproduction, at the cost of intellectual and strategic impoverishment.
In this context, the notion of “belief structure” becomes central. Karp is not talking about values in the widely overused marketing sense, but about convictions capable of structuring an organization over the long term. According to him, no successful institution functions without an explicit foundation of beliefs. “I have never seen an organization operate at a high level without a strong belief structure. Not a single one,” he says to Andrew Ross Sorkin. This requirement also applies to the company, so an organization which refuses to take a position and is content to optimize its indicators ends up losing its internal coherence.
Palantir’s experience serves as an empirical demonstration here. “The decisions that seemed the worst from an economic point of view turned out to be the best five or ten years later,” he explains. Better: “The closer the decision was to a value decision, the more value it proved to create over time. » This articulation between conviction and performance constitutes the heart of its doctrine, and radically breaks with a strictly financial reading of the company. For Karp, sustainable value creation requires an ability to make non-consensual decisions, sometimes costly in the short term, but aligned with a vision. The company is not a simple economic agent, but an institution with an implicit political orientation.
Hard power is built on software
This conviction extends well beyond the confines of the company. For Karp, technology leaders bear a direct responsibility for national defense. “Every technology company in this country should be ashamed for not providing their technology to American soldiers,” he says. Refusing to work with the army while marketing its products abroad amounts, according to him, to abandoning an essential strategic lever.
The position marks a clear break with the Silicon Valley culture of the 2010s, marked by internal protests against defense contracts. It is part of a deeper reconfiguration, where the boundary between civil and military innovation is permanently blurred. Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, autonomous systems: all areas where software is becoming decisive in the conduct of operations. Karp’s conclusion is straightforward: “Hard power in the 21st century will be built on software. »
This rereading of power is accompanied by a critique of soft power. The cultural and moral influence of democracies would no longer be enough to guarantee their position: it must be supported by concrete technological and industrial capabilities. Geopolitical competition is no longer played out only on diplomatic grounds, but in the control of digital infrastructures and AI systems.
Europe, blind spot of technological modernity
Europe appears to him as a point of fragility. Alex Karp describes a structural disconnect between the United States and the European continent. “Many think the pendulum will swing back. But this time he might never come back,” he warns. His argument is not just about innovation, but about the ability to act. Where the United States would combine institutional flexibility, industrial power and risk culture, Europe would remain constrained by its regulatory frameworks and political balances.
This diagnosis is part of a broader vision of the international order. Alex Karp assumes a hierarchy of powers and rejects the idea of a world based on a consensual balance. “I don’t think in terms of win-lose. I think in terms of domination,” he says. A formulation which reflects a conflicting conception of international relations, where the capacity to impose technological standards becomes decisive.
The confrontation also runs through Western societies. Alex Karp criticizes a political culture that he considers inhibiting, marked by the fear of error and the difficulty of expressing clear positions. “Those who never say anything false often end up saying nothing at all,” he observes. This excessive caution would, according to him, be incompatible with the requirements of an unstable strategic environment.
In this context, technology becomes a literal battlefield. It structures military capabilities, but also economic and cultural balance of power. It requires rethinking institutions, business models and forms of leadership. Finally, above all, it requires a choice, because according to him, neutrality, long claimed by tech players, appears less and less tenable.
The Technological Republic ultimately proposes a radical redefinition of the republic itself. No longer a legal framework or a set of procedures, but a power architecture articulating State, technology and conviction. A republic which is no longer content with regulating the market, but takes advantage of it to project itself into a conflictual environment. A republic, above all, which assumes confrontation as a condition of its survival, and which no longer waits for permission to choose its side.
The challenge to Europe
A vision certainly in tune with the times across the Atlantic, but which is not without profoundly shaking up European biases.
Because what Alex C. Karp describes is not just a corporate doctrine or a philosophy of American power. It is, in essence, an indictment against the European model as it has been constructed over the past thirty years: regulation as a substitute for strategy, consensus as an unsurpassable horizon, technological neutrality as a comfortable posture. A model that has long been able to afford to delegate its security, to supervise rather than produce, to standardize rather than innovate.
Karp believes that this comfort now belongs to the past. And it is clear that events prove him, at least partially, right. The return of war to European soil, the rise in power of autonomous arsenals, the battle for AI standards: so many signals that force Europe to reconsider the very foundations of its sovereignty. No longer as a legal construction to defend, but as a technological, industrial, military capacity to exercise.
The paradox is cruel: it is precisely at the moment when Europe seeks to assert its strategic autonomy that it measures the extent of its dependence. Dependence on American platforms, Asian semiconductors, AI models trained elsewhere. And behind this dependence, a question that Karp asks bluntly: can we still allow ourselves to think of technology as a neutral space, governed by law and ethics alone, when others immediately think of it as an instrument of power?
The European response exists, in fragments. It is called ASML, Mistral, KNDS, Pasqal or the space ambitions of the ESA. But it still struggles to articulate itself into a coherent doctrine, to produce these belief structures which Karp makes the sine qua non condition of any successful institution. Europe knows how to regulate what others build; it is learning, more laboriously, to build what it would like to regulate.
This is ultimately the real message that The Technological Republic address to the Old Continent, in a world where power is built on the intelligence of machines, not choosing is already, in itself, a response. Unfortunately rarely the right one.
