Palantir CEO says it's pioneering an antiwar movement – while happily accepting defense dollars

Alex Karp casts military software as a force for peace while declaring a moral imperative to dominate the market

Alex Karp, CEO of US spy-tech company Palantir, used this week's historic US midterm election results to claim an unlikely mantle for a military software supplier: pioneer of an antiwar movement.

Palantir's Q3 revenue rose 96 percent year-on-year to $2.31 billion, although its shares fell 8 percent following the results, which it reported on Tuesday as US voters were delivering a resounding defeat for Republicans in the voting booth. For Karp, the figures represented "the reality that this moment has become a real focal point of understanding" and might help explain "what is happening in our society."

From the CEO's perspective, they not only reflected the company's financial performance, but also its overall "mission."

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"That mission reason is we support your alpha [above average performance], we support your sovereignty. We support the war fighter. We are delighted that we can support the war fighter even more because we're making so much money. But we believe we have a moral imperative to be the dominant player in our industry," he told investors.

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For Karp-watchers, this is familiar self-serving shtick: turn Palantir's work for military and intelligence customers into a moral crusade, and goad its critics along the way.

"There's this larger question of what does it mean to have a business that was built around what we believed and believe now is the most important mission in the world, supporting our war fighters, [and] bringing them home," he said.

None of this stops him presenting Palantir as a force for peace. "We see ourselves as the pioneers of a genuine and viable antiwar movement," he wrote in his shareholder letter.

He expanded on the point during the Q3 earnings call. "Our products are built to avoid war, meaning the adversary knows that they will have such pain inflicted upon them that, in fact, it's not worth going to war and also to create social cohesion because we're going to bring back our troops healthier, safer, undamaged and that makes our society much more effective," he said.

That antiwar pitch sits awkwardly alongside Karp's $1 million donation in December 2024 to MAGA Inc., the super PAC supporting Donald Trump. Trump subsequently launched a US military operation in Venezuela and went to war with Iran, repeatedly promising the latter conflict would be short-lived as it dragged on. Karp did not address either topic on the call.

Elsewhere, Karp claimed that Palantir "built products that would protect civil liberties and stop terrorism. If you don't stop terrorism, you're going to get a radical fringe on the right. If you stop terrorism without rights, none of us wants that."

That civil liberties pitch also invites scrutiny of Palantir's longstanding relationship with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose treatment of people it targets and detains has drawn criticism from US judges.

Karp seems to enjoy the circus of controversy he and his colleagues have created. He also offered investors this insight: "The future is becoming the present and the present is now." Whatever that future holds, he seems confident Palantir has a moral imperative to invoice it. ®