PSP Watch | Focus
A 22-point corporate manifesto offers an unusually clear look at what happens when technology, military power and private strategic influence begin to converge.
Sometimes a story lands almost perfectly inside the framework you have been trying to describe.
This is one of those times.
A recent post by Dean Blundell drew our attention to something unusual: Palantir Technologies had published a 22-point statement describing how its leadership sees technology, national defense, artificial intelligence, government and the future of Western society.
Blundell’s treatment is deliberately provocative. His conclusions are his own, and some go considerably further than we are prepared to go.
But the underlying document is real—and remarkable enough without embellishment.
In April 2026, Palantir published “The Technological Republic, in brief,” a 22-point distillation of ideas developed by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska in their 2025 book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Contemporary reporting quickly began calling it Palantir’s “manifesto.”
One clarification matters at the outset. The document is sometimes described online as Peter Thiel’s manifesto.
It isn’t.
The ideas are principally those presented by Karp and Zamiska. But Thiel is hardly a distant figure. He co-founded Palantir and has chaired its board since 2003.
And that brings us directly to Private Strategic Power.
This isn’t just another tech-company mission statement
The 22 points range widely.
They argue that Silicon Valley owes the United States a moral debt and that its engineers have an obligation to participate in national defense. They say that twenty-first-century hard power will be built on software. They contend that AI weapons will be developed regardless of Western hesitation, making the central question who develops them and for what purpose. The statement also ventures well beyond technology into national service, military preparedness, culture and the responsibilities of elites.
People can—and certainly will—agree or disagree with those propositions.
That isn’t really the PSP question.
The PSP question is:
Who is making them?
If this were simply a political philosopher writing a book, it would belong in the marketplace of ideas.
Palantir, however, is simultaneously a major technology company deeply embedded in government and national-security systems.
Palantir reported $4.48 billion in revenue in 2025. Fifty-four percent came from government customers
. Revenue from U.S. government customers alone reached approximately $1.9 billion.
The company states quite plainly in its SEC filing that it intends to capture an even greater share of U.S. federal government spending on software.
Its involvement in modern military systems isn’t theoretical either. In May 2025, the Department of Defense announced a $795 million modification to Palantir’s Maven Smart System contract for software licenses, with work potentially continuing through May 2029.
That changes the context considerably.
The PSP issue is convergence
Readers of our Private Strategic Power work will recognize the pattern.
None of these things, standing alone, is particularly extraordinary.
A defense contractor is not new.
A billionaire with political ideas is not new.
A technology company selling software to government is not new.
A CEO writing a book about national policy is certainly not new.
Artificial intelligence is new in capability, but private companies developing strategically important technologies are not.
The issue begins when these elements converge.
Palantir combines advanced software and AI, intelligence analysis, military integration, government contracting, enormous private capital and unusually explicit views about the relationship between technology and national power.
That is very close to what we have been calling Private Strategic Power: privately controlled capabilities becoming important enough to affect functions once associated primarily with sovereign states.
And there is another layer.
Peter Thiel has been thinking publicly about the relationship between technology and political power for a long time.
In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel wrote that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible.” His argument was broader than that often-quoted sentence: he had become pessimistic about achieving libertarian objectives through conventional democratic politics and was interested in technologies that might create spaces for freedom outside traditional political structures.
After criticism of the essay, Thiel explicitly said that he did not believe any class of people should be disenfranchised.
Both statements belong in the record.
More interesting for PSP is the underlying idea. Thiel described politics and technology as being in a kind of race and suggested that technology could alter the existing social and political order.
Seventeen years later, he chairs a company whose software is integrated into government and military systems while that company publicly advances a philosophy connecting technological development with national power.
That doesn’t establish some hidden agenda.
It does make the relationship worth watching.
Intent is not the test
This distinction is central to the Private Strategic Power project.
Our concern is not whether Peter Thiel, Alex Karp—or anyone else—intends to become some kind of private sovereign.
That question quickly leads into speculation, partisan warfare and, eventually, conspiracy theories.
There is a much more useful question:
What happens when capabilities essential to the exercise of state power become concentrated inside private organizations whose leadership also possesses substantial economic, technological and political influence?
Good people can control such systems.
Responsible people can control them.
Patriotic people can control them.
The institutional problem remains.
People change. Owners change. Governments change. Incentives change. Technologies become more capable.
A democratic society cannot build safeguards on the assumption that today’s owner will always be wise, today’s government will always be restrained or today’s technology will always be used for its originally stated purpose.
That is the heart of PSP.
And, to Palantir’s credit, they’re not exactly hiding the debate
There is an odd virtue in Palantir publishing these ideas so openly.
The company is effectively inviting a public discussion about the relationship between technology and state power.
We should take them up on it.
Some of Karp and Zamiska’s arguments deserve serious consideration. Democratic nations plainly need technological competence. Soldiers should not be deliberately deprived of superior tools. Potential adversaries will pursue AI-enabled military capabilities regardless of whether democratic societies are comfortable with the technology.
Those realities cannot simply be wished away.
But another question follows:
If software becomes part of the hard power of the state, who ultimately governs the people who build and control that software?
That question is considerably bigger than Palantir.
It applies to artificial-intelligence companies, satellite networks, launch providers, communications platforms, autonomous-systems developers, robotics companies, financial networks—and whatever comes next.
Which is exactly why Strategic Power Watch exists.
What we’ll be watching
Palantir now goes onto the PSP Watch board—not as proof of a conspiracy, and not as a villain in search of a plot.
As a case study.
We will watch the continuing integration of Palantir systems into military and civilian government functions; the relationship between technological capability and public-policy influence; the wider networks connecting strategically important technology companies, founders, investors and government; and whether effective public oversight develops at anything close to the speed of the technology itself.
Because the interesting question is no longer simply whether Private Strategic Power could emerge.
Pieces of it are already here.
The job now is to watch how they connect.
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