🔴 The Tech Bros' West

This week everyone seemed focused on the Palantir manifesto published on X, a kind of digest of the most contentious points of Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic, released in February 2025.

We had already talked about Palantir here at the time of the standoff between Anthropic and the Department of War, but this time it is an opportunity to push the analysis a little further.

🔴 The Painful Transition to the Digital War Economy

When reality comes knocking, that is the moment you hope you prepared well

Tariq KrimTariq KRIM

I have found myself several times at dinners or conferences with Peter Thiel and Musk since my first stints in the Valley. And I have become friends with several people in their circle, sometimes called the PayPal Mafia.

What I was able to see in the Web 2.0 era, with Netvibes and then Jolicloud, is how these networks found a way to build something resilient enough to stay at the heart of power despite changes in technology and gatekeepers. A few technological building blocks, a lot of nerve, but also good intuitions made it possible.

I had a front-row seat for some of these changes, which is also why this newsletter looks at things from a slightly different angle than what you may have read elsewhere.

But as I said in the newsletter on the war, my reading of the situation is different today. Palantir's products, like the rest of SaaS software, can potentially be disrupted by Claude, and that changes everything.

Tomorrow, any CIA analyst will be able to decide, from the classified sources available to them, to generate their own dashboard to support their own analysis, rather than Palantir's.

Because today the only option is to rely on the pre-analysis of Palantir's Maven to draw your conclusions.

As I told an audience of military officers at my last conference, if after the war in Ukraine everyone wanted drones, with the war in Iran every army in the world wants its own Maven.

The question for Palantir is above all how to secure a monopoly on this type of service. In countries whose elites are computer-illiterate, such as England and France, it has often managed to bring down the national-security barrier. In the United States its dominance is being challenged by technology, and that is what interests me most.

The question you are surely asking is: why release their manifesto now?

This newsletter will tackle the subject in two parts.