Alex Karp

Alexander Karp (born 1967) is an American businessman with a doctorate in philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt who co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003 with Peter Thiel and has led it ever since — an avowedly unconventional CEO who quotes social theory while selling software to intelligence agencies and armies.

AI as the new arms race

In 2023 Palantir launched its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), wiring large language models into military targeting workflows and enterprise operations, and the company became one of the AI era’s biggest stock stories. Karp frames artificial intelligence as the defining battleground of the twenty-first century, akin to the nuclear race of the twentieth — a contest the United States and its allies cannot afford to lose to China.

His 2025 book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” co-written with Nicholas Zamiska, became a №1 New York Times bestseller. It scolds Silicon Valley for building shopping apps instead of national defense, calls for renewed partnership between tech and government, and warns of the new AI arms race — while acknowledging the technology is genuinely dangerous and demands honest debate about its power. Critics on the left cast Karp as a warmonger profiting from surveillance and battlefield AI; he answers that deterrence, not disarmament, is what keeps liberal democracies safe.