'Palantir is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of him' Alex Karp. 'Palantir is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of him' Alex Karp. 'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO? His company is potentially creating the ultimate state surveillance tool, and Karp has recently been on a striking political and philosophical journey. I n a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was "the most important software company in America and therefore in the world". He may well be right.

Palantir's CEO is good with ICE and says he defends human rights. But will Israel and Trump ever go too far for him? Alex Karp and I would not seem to have much in common. I work for WIRED, which does tough reporting on Trumpworld; Karp is the CEO of Palantir, a $450 billion firm that has contracts with agencies like the CIA and ICE and worked for the Israeli military during its campaign in Gaza. I live in the East Village of New York City, and the home Karp spends the most time in is a 500-acre compound in rural New Hampshire. I was a plain old English major, and he's got a law degree and a PhD in philosophy, studying under the legendary Jürgen Habermas. I consider myself a progressive; Karp regards that stuff as "pagan religion." But we can bond over one shared status: Both of us are alumni of Central High School, a Philadelphia magnet school. I have some years on the 58-year-old executive.)

Defense tech giant Palantir is selling T-shirts and tote bags as part of a bid to encourage fans to publicly endorse it. Palantir Technologies, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags. Last year, Palantir re launched an online merchandise store, and its website was recently redesigned with a swanky interface and new payment system . A mock terminal in the lower left corner displays "code" documenting each item you view.

Waymo will temporarily limit robotaxi service in all of its nationwide markets, the company said Friday, as US cities prepare for a wave of protests of federal immigration policies and law enforcement and military crackdowns on demonstrators. The Alphabet subsidiary will stop service in Los Angeles altogether. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp confirmed the service pause and adjustments but declined to comment further. There is no indication how long the service changes will last. The adjustments will affect service in San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; and Phoenix, Arizona.

Oscar Wilde's quip, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life", needs updating: replace "art" with "AI". The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska's new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a "workbook" containing "key takeaways" from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome "can help you navigate life"; and a third offering another "workbook" comprising a "Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society". It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn't bet on it. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

In the spring of 2014, a trans-anarchist Google engineer petitioned the White House to arrest our national decline. The plan was snappy: "1. Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, was an avatar of technocratic liberalism. Two decades earlier, as the largely unknown C.T.O. of Sun Microsystems, he helped Bill Clinton set up the first White House Web site, and, by the time of the Obama Administration, he served as Silicon Valley's unofficial consul to the Democratic Party. Schmidt was not himself a company "founder," a technologist's most regal credential, but he had performed as an able steward: when Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggled to reconcile their competing visions for Google's first corporate jet--Brin wanted a California king bed, Page did not--Schmidt negotiated a compromise. He was sensible and civic-minded. He was the adult in the room.

On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military industrial complex, its top technology companies, and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness", hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the US military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software.

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports on how technology is revolutionizing modern warfare on'Special Report.' Modern warfare is changing rapidly, and harnessing artificial intelligence is key to staying ahead of America's adversaries. Software companies including Govini and Palantir are behind the production and modernization of today's most high-tech weapon systems. Both companies were at the second annual AI Expo for National Competitiveness in Washington to showcase their work to the nation's top military brass. Fox News saw first-hand this cutting-edge technology and had an exclusive interview with Palantir's CEO and co-founder Alex Karp, whose software is being used in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Early on the morning of June 1, 2022, Alex Karp, the CEO of the data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies, crossed the border between Poland and Ukraine on foot, with five colleagues in tow. A pair of beaten-up Toyota Land Cruisers awaited on the other side. Chauffeured by armed guards, they sped down empty highways toward Kyiv, past bombed-out buildings, bridges damaged by artillery, the remnants of burned trucks. They arrived in the capital before the wartime curfew. The next day, Karp was escorted into the fortified bunker of the presidential palace, becoming the first leader of a major Western company to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia's invasion three months earlier. Over a round of espressos, Karp told Zelensky that he was ready to open an office in Kyiv and deploy Palantir's data and artificial-intelligence software to support Ukraine's defense. Karp believed they could team up "in ways that allow David to beat a modern-day Goliath." In the stratosphere of top tech CEOs, Karp is an unusual figure.

Generative artificial intelligence, tech that can invent virtually any content someone can think up and type into a text box, is garnering not just venture investment in Silicon Valley but interest in Davos at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting this week. Defining the category is ChatGPT, a chatbot that the startup called OpenAI released in November. The tech works by learning from vast amounts of data how to answer any prompt by a user in a human-like way, offering information like a search engine would or prose like an aspiring novelist. Executives have floated wide-ranging applications for the nascent technology, from use as a programming assistant to a step forward in the global race for AI and military supremacy. Conference goers with a major stake in the development of the technology include Microsoft, whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, said the tech's progress has not been linear.