Most corporate mission statements are real snoozers. Especially in the case of large public defense companies, they’re designed to present boilerplate language to the public: “We develop science and technology to help people, and we produce some other things (weapons) that we won’t directly mention here, but which you can find on page five of our annual report.”

Palantir recently broke from this mode of anodyne corporate communication in a manifesto-style post titled “The Technological Republic, in brief,” which itself is a summary of a book of the same title by Palantir executives Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska.

Here are some paraphrased highlights from the 22-point declaration:

• Silicon Valley has an obligation to participate in national defense.
• Democratic societies must back “soft power” with “hard power.”
• AI weapons will be built by American adversaries (the unsaid implication being that Palantir will build the counterbalancing American AI weapons).
• Japan and Germany should rearm.
• America still stands for progress and peace, a peace guaranteed in the last several decades mostly by American military power.
• Silicon Valley should take a role in addressing violent crime with technology tools.
• There is too much intolerance of religious belief among elites.
• Not all cultures are equal.
• There are limits to pluralism.

Unsurprisingly, this post caused something of an uproar. While many wholeheartedly supported Palantir’s message as an expression of overdue patriotic commitment, and others saw it as largely unobjectionable but metaphysically empty, some including Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin accused Palantir of harboring techno-fascist designs for world domination.

So why the uproar? Why should Palantir’s corporate statement cause controversy when those of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon do not?

Treating this manifesto as Palantir’s official stance, intended to establish a position (and gain advantage) in a market, let’s examine its intent within the broader historical context of American civil/private defense coordination.

A 21st-Century Moral Vision

Since the 1930s, American defense companies have converged with the federal government to the point that, in many respects, it is impossible to distinguish between them. Beginning with FDR-era war contracts—sometimes resisted by industrialists like Henry Ford—defense primes learned to leverage political influence to shape policy.

Now, former Pentagon officials frequently move into senior roles at major defense contractors, whose executives are regularly appointed to government posts. Defense headquarters and lobbying firms have proliferated in the cities and neighborhoods surrounding the Pentagon, transforming the Virginia beltway into a defense-oriented shadow of Washington, D.C. Members of Congress justify support for programs based on jobs and supplier networks to the point where the business of legislating is often subordinated to capturing local defense spending.

On the financial side, cost-plus contracting structures from World War II still survive, baking incentives for slow and costly development into the procurement process, a system that benefits the defense primes handsomely. Worrisome for conservatives, this alignment extends even to cultural and ethical expressions. Images of rainbow flag-bedecked Predator drones bombing Middle Eastern nations for gay rights became something of a rallying meme for critiquing Obama-era State Department foreign policy failures.

RAND Corporation, for example, was a joint venture founded by the Air Force and Douglas Aircraft Company. It’s an example of how defense companies use think tanks to advocate for higher spending and expanded weapons programs in a way that seems to originate from panels of disinterested experts rather than the defense companies themselves. The result is that defense primes are now so aligned with the federal government that strong statements of their beliefs and priorities are completely unnecessary.

Palantir, a uniquely autonomous company producing uniquely autonomous weapons, seems to represent a partial breach of this classical public-private divide. It accounts for a minuscule percentage of defense spending compared to the primes, which is why Alex Karp evidently feels the need to make his case to government officials, the tech community, and the public at large. It’s certainly more efficient to use his own platforms for this purpose, especially when addressing all three constituencies at once.

In this, Karp represents a long tradition of American industrial titans who cultivated grand personas to publicize their new and sometimes disruptive technologies. Henry Ford preached the benefits of a machine age that would save man from drudgery. Thomas Edison fused entrepreneurship with myth-making to present himself as an electrical wizard. Andrew Carnegie argued that wealthy industrialists had a moral duty to guide society through philanthropy. Public engagement of this kind is ultimately a negotiated process of transforming technical capability into legitimacy, particularly where a large gap in understanding exists, as between the culture of Silicon Valley and that of the public.

Karp goes one step further, however, when he articulates a strategic, and indeed a moral, vision for an AI-powered United States military of the 21st century. This is the heart of the outrage inspired by his manifesto.

If Palantir’s technology is as effective as it is claimed to be—indeed, there seems to be preliminary evidence that it is—then it’s incumbent on Karp to make his case to the public. We’d expect him to discuss its potential impact on society, lay out a framework for its use, and explain how it will serve and be subordinated to the public good—all of which he does in The Technological Republic. There, he argues that it is vastly preferable that military AI be wielded by democratic nations and subject to oversight than that its use be dictated by our adversaries. It’s hard to argue with this conclusion.

If AI is something like the arrival of gunpowder in the 16th century, as Nate Fisher is fond of saying, then it doesn’t matter whether you like the changes gunpowder will inaugurate. If you want to continue to be a force in the world, you had better start learning how to get good at producing and using gunpowder.

Retrenchment and Adaptation

Why is it incumbent on Palantir to take up this mantle? As the manifesto’s preface argues, “[T]he state has retreated from the pursuit of large-scale breakthroughs.” With the end of the Cold War, including the post-Reagan push for privatization, Silicon Valley was cut loose from the Department of Defense. In the following decades, it was able to put its considerable human and technological capital to use to fuel its astonishing growth. In Karp’s view, this separation eventually left the DOD without global competition-grade software capability and a Silicon Valley that pursued expansion without a sense of mission, its rarefied culture increasingly cut off from the mores and needs of the average American citizen.

So according to The Technological Republic, Palantir now steps into the gap to restore that lost relationship by delivering a strategic capability beyond what the government can currently provide. In the absence of clear guidance from the state, it falls to companies like Palantir to define both their role and the terms on which they seek to participate.

There’s a deep historical precedent to this kind of relationship, one that gets to the meaning behind the title of Karp’s book. America, in essence, was founded by private companies chartered by the British Crown. The Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company were both for-profit joint-stock companies entrusted to develop and administer the newly settled American colonies. In a frontier where state capacity was limited, the British government relied on private actors to fulfill national geopolitical aspirations.

These companies operated under royal charters and, though subject to regulation and oversight, were empowered to fulfill crucial state-like functions including governance and defense. This public-private cooperation gave the American colonies a distinct advantage: the latitude it afforded for private initiative contributed significantly to the extraordinary economic and social dynamism in America compared to French or Spanish colonies that relied on centralized imperial bureaucracies.

This pattern of public-private cooperation only intensified during and after the War for Independence. Many Americans understood the Revolution as a fight to restore their corporate charter rights that had been suspended before the fighting began. After the Declaration of Independence, each American state was re-founded using constitutional forms that closely echoed its previous corporate charters. After the war, a series of laws and Supreme Court decisions strengthened protections for corporations and dramatically expanded the role of private enterprise in economic and technological development. As Adam Winkler writes in We the Corporations:

In the years after the Constitution was ratified, the founding generation, liberated from English control, enthusiastically embraced the corporate form. Joseph Stancliffe Davis, the Stanford historian who discovered there were only a handful of corporations formed in the decade prior to the Constitutional Convention, found over three hundred business corporations chartered in the United States in the decade following ratification of the Constitution. It was a spurt of corporate growth without precedent. Americans formed corporations to produce silk, cotton, iron, and maps; to construct aqueducts, dig mines, and run waterworks; and to operate ferries, banks, and insurance companies. Most of all, corporations were created to build the scores of turnpikes, bridges, and canals that began to stitch together the independent colonies into one nation with a single, national economy.

In essence, early Americans thought that private action, not government fiat, would be the dominant social force, an understanding that did not come without responsibilities, however. Early America was a nation of companies that, rather than pursuing unfettered economic interest, were self-subordinated to the public interest, an alignment that was possible only through common culture and shared ideals of national service.

From the Revolution through the early 20th century, the relationship between American companies and technological development remained deeply intertwined and focused on national purpose. The same corporate form that had been used to settle the frontier was repurposed to build the young republic’s economic and industrial base.

Private firms not only constructed canals, railroads, and telegraph networks, but also provisioned the instruments of war—financing privateers, producing gunpowder, and manufacturing weapons in support of national defense, often under state charter or with public subsidy. Companies like DuPont and Remington Arms, and later, General Electric, Boeing, Ford, General Motors, and Lockheed, did not merely respond to market demand—they helped define the technological trajectory of the nation itself, advancing visions of industrial growth, technological capability, and modernity that carried clear implications for national power. By the early 20th century, this pattern culminated in a system where private enterprise drove innovation at scale, but increasingly in coordination with federal priorities, particularly during moments of crisis such as the First and Second World Wars.

The result was not a clean separation between public strategy and private execution, but an evolving partnership in which companies both supplied and, at times, shaped the material foundations of American state power. By 1944, the United States was producing roughly 40% of the world’s military output, vastly outproducing Germany and Japan combined in ships and vehicles and generating 60% of all steel produced in the world. It was these pillars of technological power that undergirded America’s postwar moral order, a fact that the American establishment, which hollowed out the nation’s private industrial base in the ensuing decades, seemed to have forgotten.

This, then, seems to be Karp’s vision of the technological republic: a polity in which freedoms are safeguarded not only by its formal institutions, but also by a robust commonwealth of private companies capable of mobilizing technological and industrial power in alignment with public purpose; a freer sphere of enterprise adapted for the novel digital domain and a world of evolving geopolitical realignment, but which nonetheless hearkens back to the nation’s founding.

Viewed in this light, Palantir’s ambitions should be understood not as overreach but as a necessary retrenchment of fundamental American traditions and an adaptation of American enterprise to a new strategic frontier.