At Palantir’s Developer Conference, AI Is Built to Win Wars

It’s a chilly March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir’s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they’d assumed the previous day’s mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between open-air pavilions, it looks like they were pulled from shipwrecks. Nonetheless, spirits are high. To this self-selecting crowd, Palantir is delivering on its promises. The company’s stock price is soaring. The gathering is infused with the giddy groupthink of a multilevel marketing event.

After securing an invite to the conference—a task made challenging by Palantir’s disapproval of WIRED’s recent coverage—I was eager to get an inside glimpse of the mysterious company. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and his then obscure former Stanford classmate Alex Karp, the company has become part of the Pentagon’s AI-based combat transformation. In the past few years, though, its biggest growth has been in the commercial sector. “The commercial business is growing at 120 percent year over year. We’re very proud of the 60 percent growth in government, but they’re not even on the same glide slope,” says Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, who is also part of a four-person contingent of tech execs serving as lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.

Generative AI has helped fuel Palantir’s rise, supercharging the hands-on support the company provides to its customers. Early in its evolution, Palantir would embed “forward deployed engineers” into companies, helping them weave Palantir’s software into their operations. Large language models allowed Palantir to build products with more power, and now the engineers concentrate on helping customers build their own tools with Palantir’s technology. “Every time those models got better it seemed like they were tailor-made exactly for us,” says Ted Mabrey, an early employee who now heads the commercial business. Sankar elaborates: “Our whole thesis has been that we’re building Iron Man suits for cognition,” he says. “We were rate-limited by the number of people, the creativity of the questions, all those sorts of things. And then [with Gen AI] that rate limiter was eliminated, and that changed the rate of growth.”

The morning’s keynotes include a US Navy vice admiral, the officer in charge of the Maven AI battlefield project, and executives from Accenture, GE Aerospace, SAP, and the Freedom Mortgage Corporation. The range reflects the company’s trajectory from defense work to the commercial sector. During the breakfast hour I watch a demo from a family-run fashion business with 450 employees. CEO Jordan Edwards of Mixology Clothing says that he found Palantir through an Instagram ad, and that the AI-powered system has transformed his business. He uses Palantir’s software to help make buying decisions and then has it send emails to negotiate prices. For one line he sells, “it drove a 17-point margin swing—from losing $9 a unit to gaining $9 a unit,” he claims. Edwards now describes himself as a “forward deployed CEO.”

Even though Palantir’s major growth is in the commercial sector, its soul remains in defense contracting. During its long struggle to become part of the defense establishment (at one point, it sued the Army to be considered for a contract), it adopted a focus on outcomes. Palantir likes to think that this experience forced it to adopt a level of rigor that has allowed it to eclipse its rivals in the commercial arena. One chapter of Sankar’s just-published book, Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, is called “The Factory Is the Weapon.” Both Sankar and CEO Alex Karp believe that American industry, especially in Silicon Valley, has shown insufficient patriotism. Their hope is that Palantir’s example will inspire other corporations to produce national defense products in addition to their consumer work.

Karp’s introductory remarks at the conference emphasized how defense work defines the company, especially now that America is at war. Atypically garbed in a blazer (“This is to convince my family I have a job,” he jokes), he says that normally, he would be talking to commercial customers about how to make them wealthier and happier and help them destroy their competitors. (He refers to rivals as “noncompetition” because in his mind, they don’t rank in Palantir’s class.) But with an active battlefield in Iran, the company’s sole priority is now supporting the troops. “At Palantir we were built to give our warfighters … an unfair advantage,” he says. “It was, ‘Yeah, we’re going to really F- our enemies.’ And I take great pride in that.”