Palantir Comes to Campus |
On a Thursday in April, I headed to the north end of Yale’s campus and persuaded a passing fellow student to swipe me into a building. Fourteen floors up, the Palantir Foundation — a think tank run by several of the software company’s senior executive team — was about to convene its third annual Atlantic and Pacific Forum, co-hosted with Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. The event hadn’t been publicized online, and I saw no signage for it in the building’s lobby. Only select Yale students had been invited. (I RSVP’d using a plain-text digital poster that had been floating around but not posted in public.)
It was sensible enough to keep the conference somewhat hidden. Palantir has become a byword for America’s growing surveillance state. The company sells something seemingly mundane: software that helps clients analyze and sort data. But in the hands of the firm’s highest-profile clients, you can see the consequences of good organization. Palantir’s Maven Smart System helps armies decide who to kill; the firm’s technologies aid ICE in combing through diverse sources — from Medicaid data to seized smartphones — to select deportation targets.
And then there is Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, who has leaned into Palantir’s notoriety. “The only way” to save the West and stop war, he told Fast Company, is to “scare the daylights out of our adversaries.” During a talk last year, Karp fantasized about deploying a drone to spray “fentanyl-laced urine” on analysts who had criticized the firm’s valuation; the company recently sold T-shirts reading “There Are No Secrets.”
Palantir’s reputation is, accordingly, poor on campuses like Yale’s. The university’s student government voted this month to demand that the university divest from the company. But the Atlantic and Pacific Forum — part intellectual salon, part job fair — offered a gathering of converts to Karp’s cause and a call for new adherents. When the elevator doors opened, I saw the room was rapidly filling.
The crowd was a mix of State Department staffers, Yale professors, Palantir employees (including Bill Rivers, a deputy on the Corporate Affairs team), and think-tankers. I spotted two people affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations among them: Gordon M. Goldstein, who arrived carrying a CFR tote bag, and Alan Raul, who wore an American-flag lapel pin.
A small clutch of undergraduates stood near the windows. They were students, they told me, of Ted Wittenstein, a Yale lecturer who had organized the event. One said he thought they’d been invited because the organizers knew they were “not going to protest.” Some were angling for jobs at Palantir. Others were simply interested in the conference’s topic, “National Power and Purpose in the Age of AI.” I found my seat next to an employee of a large New York bank. Her boss, she said, had sent her.
Wittenstein called the room to order. “In this age of hyperpartisan politics,” he said, “we need more gatherings on campus and elsewhere that foster intellectual diversity.” It was a curious note to strike. The speakers that day were almost entirely Palantir executives, conservative intellectuals,........