MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security
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[1] https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Your thinking is too black-and-white. The emergence of a new technology (drones) does not necessarily make previous technologies (ballistic missiles) obsolete or a non-threat.
What it means is the effective defensive system will need to be bigger and more capable.
And, IIRC, the ballistic missiles are still the more effective weapon in Ukraine and Iran. Long-range drones are easier to intercept cheaper interception technologies are catching up with them: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain....
Nuclear war is the justification given for violating all fiscal responsibility with this multi-million dollar taxpayer program.
No they don't, because you can still deliver a warhead with an ICBM. It just means you need the ABM system and and anti-drone system for it to be complete.
Absolute security is an illusion. Even Trump understands this, and why he later pivoted to calling Golden Dome an offensive global strike system. Because yes, that's what it is.
Yes, it sounds like you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good: don't build a defense unless it can defeat all threats, all of the time. Go tell that to Ukraine and see what they say.
But even granting what you say for a moment: a defensive system that defeats drones and ICBMs but doesn't defeat nuclear torpedoes is a massive improvement. Sure, it sucks if you live in a coastal city, but inland cities are protected (and the US has a lot of those).
Suitcase nukes and bio weapons are dumb: the former are weak and seem more like a plot device for a action/suspense show than a real threat (beyond random acts of terrorism), the latter seems like a nonstarter because it'd either not be very effective or guarantee blow-back (e.g. your bio-weapon becoming a pandemic that hits everyone).
But boost intercept doesn't even meaningfully reduce ICBM threats.. adversaries simply build the bypasses that render the "shield" useless. Offense is always easier and cheaper than defense for this sort of system. ASATs, decoys, cyber, jamming are all low hanging fruit. Sending large synchronized volleys is an easy way to exploit GD's interceptor absentee problem (which is approx 1000x worse than a regional system like Iron Dome).
This all amplifies the false premise that the "shield" will work flawlessly, because if you're going to destabilize MAD you better get it right. The fact is interceptors are not even single 9's in the real world with countermeasures, and a Tesla FSD attempt v420.69 doesn't cut it for nuclear war. (Oh don't worry we'll push a patch and next time we won't lose Chicago!)
And like I said, everyone knows this isn't a defense system for those reasons and more. Golden Dome's satellite architecture is effectively an orbital weapons platform capable of offensive global strikes, which fundamentally destabilizes geopolitics. If you're an engineer working on that you better have your eyes wide open and be able to explain why you think this is a good thing.
For some history, the very first contract SpaceX ever got was for https://wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project a global strike weapons system.
(Note 1: For all I know it may well be true that the reporting is 100% accurate and Palantir's claim to deserve a reply is 100% bullshit. I'm not saying they're in the right here! But I think the actual story is a bit less horrible than "Palantir is taking these guys to court because they didn't like their reporting" sounds without the relevant context. They're not, e.g., trying to get damages from the newspaper, or trying to get what they wrote retracted, or anything like that.)
(Note 2: I am not an expert on Swiss law or on this case, and I am accordingly not 100% confident of any of the above. In the unlikely event that whether I'm right about this matters to anyone reading, they should check it for themselves :-).)
Also important to note that a Palantir exec sits on the board of Ringier (aka Blick) one of the two large media conglomerates in Switzerland.
Oh.
And that they’re outrageously expensive as well but somehow still land a lot of these deals.
I'm not talking terrorism, far more basic than that.
Food, Energy, Transport Communications, Manufacturing.
Are you either able to be the provider of any of these if it really came down to it, or are you dependent on a single outside source?
Most countries will be unable to fulfill all of these, but they can mitigate by not being dependent on a single source, maybe working together in a union.
Russia has been an unreliable partner for energy for decades (if ever?), yet the UK yoked itself with them relying on their gas for energy instead of diversifying. We are doing it now but it has been far too late to mitigate the damage.
For domestic energy, it has never relied on Russia. Natural gas supplies are a roughly equal mix of domestic production, Norwegian pipeline imports, and LNG imports (primarily from the USA, but with no restriction on switching to other providers if needed). Yes, there was a spike in global LNG prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but that was driven by other countries seeking to replace Russian imports.
The same goes for the other areas you mentioned - food, transport, communications, and manufacturing. All have vast diversity of supply, with robust supply chains. None of them are remotely close to being dependent on a single external source.
Is a threat to everyone on earth. Palantir is the real Skynet. They are developing everything they can to control and surveil the population at all levels. And the founder is evil, and he knows it.
US-Israeli cybersecurity-AI-related infrastructure is crazy but not good for the world.
Thiel has made no secret of his intent to use technology to dispense with that pesky democracy problem that billionaires have, and Palantir is pretty obviously his attempt to do just that. It's a reductio-ad-absurdum argument against listening to your citizens:
You put it in the hands of a populist demagogue, the power to apply hyper-targeted pain to their enemies amplifies their darker tendencies, and when evil happens you say: "look, the people can't be trusted." Meanwhile, you use it to direct the pointy end of the state's stick towards people you don't like (because the demagogue is too lazy to actually use those hyper-targeting features themself) so you can interfere with democratic attempts to limit your power without bothering to pay for the pepper spray.
Nobody in their right mind would want their government anywhere near it.
Then it will start to make sense.
Prove me wrong by contributing more than I did.
You're the one making an assertion about Palantir. Apparently whatever you're referring to is well reported, but not quite well reported enough for you to actually point out the statements you're referring to.
If I was to say "Musk is an asshole just look at what he did at the presidential inauguration in 2025" and you said "you'd make a better point by giving a source for that ominous reference", I would think you were acting in bad faith because of how widely reported Musk's nazi salutes were at the time, and I would feel completely fair in saying "go and find out for yourself, you have all of the necessary information to do so."
I would actually think that you were in a position to defend that person but weren't ready to express that yet. So here we are with Thiel and Karp where 5 minutes of using Google or something would bring up various reports of Karp's recent conference statements. And I could have done that myself originally but "source?" is quite an irksome reply to deal with.
> 5 minutes of using Google or something would bring up various reports of Karp's recent conference statements
And for the third time, you couldn't even be bothered to actually share those statements.
This is the first result from googling "Alex Karp Conference":
> “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
What does this demonstrate about Karp's beliefs, besides the fact that he thinks AI is going to disrupt large parts of society? That's a pretty normal belief, is it not?
Perhaps you can't actually find quotes to match your rhetoric, and that's why you repeatedly fail to actually share any statements from Karp and Thiel.
This is how it works. I can double down on bullshit and you can spin your wheels arguing against it.
That wasn't my original intention, I just wanted to say Thiel and Karp are assholes but you should see for yourself.
1) It holds deeply sensitive data and does so in the US. In times of increased mistrust of the US, many (including myself) see that as a risky choice.
2) Speaking of mistrust in America and American corporations, have you heard their execs talk? It's absolute cuckoo-town:
> If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.
Well, you've convinced me. I'm scared of America, I'm scared of American companies and I'm scared of your company in particular.
Good job, I guess?
Of course I agree that quote is insane and you can dislike them for political reasons, but I want to understand the technological fears and see if any are unfounded.
What are they actually doing for the MoD? Are they reading MoD data out and processing it elsewhere?
https://www.palantir.com/palantir-is-still-not-a-data-compan...
But the parent comment points out that software companies often don't see all the data that their software is used to analyze. Microsoft does not see your tax return just because the IRS uses Excel.
That is the reality that the world is having to adapt to. Even when Trump is gone, it will take a long time to rebuild that trust.
Genuinely a bit shocked at the naivety on HN on this topic but maybe thats a misunderstanding on my part. Happy to be shown otherwise. Alex Karp, if you're reading this, please don't send your fent laced urine spraying drones after me!
In the post WW2 era most western countries grew lazy about sovereignty due to America's open-handed approach - this has been a wake up call and has severely lowered America's soft-power globally.
Has China ever threatened to invade Canada?
Canada isn't a first rate power - if the US or China decided to unilaterally target us it'd be deeply damaging. The hope is that working in concert with other middle powers we can form a cushion to soften a blow - not fully turn it.
They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup.
The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value.
And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).
It’s just the latest implementation of a winning formula.
It's not sufficient but the first thing you can filter by is anyone who comments on the name first (literally one of the most effective marketing strategies in government contracting history basically).
I'm guessing that people are scared that the state will install one big palantir instance on all its systems. So that anything any part of the state learns about you, in any context or interaction, can be effortlessly used against you in every other context (perhaps via parallel construction in a lawsuit).
Basically, the fear would be that palantir makes mass surveillance data actionable, fuses surveillance programs, and incorporates most IT into mass surveillance programs.
The government would become less like a series of seperate agencies, more like a big consciousness that knows things (knows centrally, everything it was told anywhere).
Note this is just my interpretation of the fear.
Its fuzzy. Others may know more about palantir than me and thus have a more precise and grounded concern.
[1] https://archive.ph/6ljwy#selection-2539.194-2539.400
See also: https://redlib.privadency.com/r/Futurology/comments/4o02p3/o...
Christine Maxwell and Alan Wade found Chiliad, a database surveillance application that was used in the FBI. Then Alan Wade became CIO at the CIA. Then In-Q-Tel (CIA) co-founded Palantir with Thiel.
Karp, who was at Haverford college with Epstein's neighbor Lutnick, became the philosophical ideologue for Palantir.
With these overt and easily verifiable connections it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir. The governments do not even work any better with all that surveillance software, they work worse than 20 years ago. So even the "we need it" argument is a fallacy.
Germany's PM was formerly at BlackRock. What exactly do you find so hard to believe?
"Everything in the name of man, everything for the good of man!" — The 3rd Program of the CPSU, 1961. As the joke went, "and if you get to visit the Party Congress in Moscow, you will even get to see that very man!"
(Play on words of Palantir of Orthanc)
Year Military Spending (billions of RM) % of GDP
1933 0.7 1.0%
1934 4.0 5.1%
1935 5.5 7.0%
1936 10.3 12.2%
1937 11.5 12.7%
1938 17.2 17.2%
1939 38.0 23.0%
Did they build their military to go to war? Or were they force to go to war as the nature of their economy forced them?
So did the German Nazis back then now I think about it.
Maybe there is something with cult-like thinking, fascist or not, where the aesthetics seduces more people into wanting to be a part of it all?
It's neurological. They feel emotional disgust if the regimentation isn't there.
It's not just fascists, either; totalitarian regimes _in general_ tend to be very keen on this sort of thing.
Offhand, the only totalitarian I can think of who seemed to put in a particular effort on hair is Stalin. But in general, stylish clothes, mad hair seems to be the rule.
They're never able to live it down. It always comes up. And it makes them seem, in a way, careless.
In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.
If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.
People barely understand what the company does, but boy do they want to tell you all about the name.
It's marketing gold. Because rather then "who was that? Some firm named something corp" instead you're spending 5 minutes reinforcing how bad the name is..just building a ton of word association games for a name derived from a well known fiction work and really building up the message that the company is named Palantir and they sell products to the government.
Farage's "Reform" colleague Robert Jenrick took a £12k bribe to make his donor £30m.
If you're going to be bribed, at least make it worthwhile.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-1bn-development-and-the-tory-...
Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)
Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."
Like if their product was so good why isn't Amazon using it? Like their case studies all seem to be pre-internet companies that probably never developed a computer competency.
If I bring a themostat back into the past all the peasants are going to think it's black magic. If I show it off as a college project I'm not getting a passing grade.
In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.
Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.
At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.
I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.
To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.
And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.
It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.
Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.
The companies who capitalised on this (Kainos/Equal Experts/ScrumConnect) are now their own oligopoly.
It's just big guys charging arms/legs for average work again.
Look for yourself, GDS is hiring a "Lead Technical Architect" for £67,126–£91,453 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/jobs/ . FAANG (and Palantir) pays up to triple that. How can GDS compete for talent?
I hope you can see why that's a nonsensical statement. Palantir is a private intelligence company.
Edit: I found the following on Glassdoor and, while I don't know the poster personally, it pretty much sums it up:
"If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors."
But specifically in terms of what?
If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.
It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.
A good design is valuable, and this applies to business processes as well.
How would you design the user experience of constructing a submarine?
Good design IS technological superiority.
But I'm unsure why you feel that my response pointing out that a product's user interface is typically a more important factor in success than the product's underlying technologies was discounting the value of user experience?
> Good design IS technological superiority.
Hmm, I was attempting to respond to someone who wrote "It feels like a big pile of nothing... Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines" which seemed to dramatically undervalue good schemas, CRUD implementations, or sparklines as "nothing". So to contrast those I used "technical superiority" as a catchall for the sort of challenging technical implementations that some developers lionize. Does that make sense? Is there a different term you'd suggest for that? For now I've changed to "(non-UX) technological superiority".
The people making purchasing decisions at this level aren't the ones using it and don't care one whit about UX.
That isn't to say that it isn't valuable, but it's basically a non-factor. The technology itself is a non-factor. Everything is about connections, buzz words and pretty slide decks.
Randos don't become general managers.
Have you ever used jira? They are very much not selling that thing on the basis of UX.
In my view expert systems typically failed because the organizations would degrade bureaucratically faster than any expert system could accommodate. With AI there isn’t a pre-requisite need for organizational expertise so the tooling will still work in largely dysfunctional orgs which is a property that did not previously exist. With the help of AI people who don’t understand ontologies can still successfully build one.
Separately it is my opinion that Palantir is a CIA cut-out for the Peter Thiel faction. So paying Palantir is like paying tribute to that particular faction. Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.
I have a feeling this is no longer a viable model. If "subscribers" get threatened every other day, they will be looking for alternatives.
Who do "they" as in Europe go to?
China also views the EU as a junior partner [0], is running an ongoing disinfo campaign against the industrial exports of an EU member state [1], and has doubled down on it's support for Russia [2] in Ukraine in return for Russia backing China's claim on Taiwan [3].
And the EU is uninterested in building domestic capacity for most critical technologies.
Heck, last week [4] the EU excluded AI, Quantum, Semiconductors, and other technologies from the Industrial Accelerator Act (aka the "Made in EU" act) in order to concentrate on automotive and "net-zero" technologies.
Given that Chinese technology imports are already under the radar in the EU due to the Ukraine war, this is basically the EU creating a carveout for the US.
Even the major European Telecom and Space companies like Eutelsat, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica bluntly stated that they view the EU's digital sovereignity strategy as dead in the water [5] in it's current form.
Edit: can't reply
> They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you
But as I clearly showed, the EU is doing otherwise.
And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.
All the rhetoric about digital sovereignity and domestic capacity has been just that - rhetoric.
[0] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
[1] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
[2] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russias-shoigu-chinas-wa...
[4] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/eu-axes-ai-chips-and-quantum...
[5] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/europes-digital-sovereignty-...
I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)).
I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.
It is for the EU.
The EU dislikes the current deprioritization of the Ukraine Conflict by the US, but also recognizes that the PRC is directly providing material support and subsidizing Russia's military industrial complex [0]. That is the red line for much of the EU.
Similarly, for the PRC it's continued support of Russia in their war in Ukraine is also a non-negotiatable [1], and the CCP's foreign mouthpieces continue to reiterate that "the mainstay of EU foreign policy — supporting Ukraine in a conflict to defeat Russia — has turned into a quagmire of sunk costs with little hope of success" [2].
> I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone
We know. And we don't care.
As long as the EU views Ukraine's territorial integrity as non-negotiable and a large portion of EU states view Russia as the primary national security threat, the US will remain the less bad option than the PRC or Russia.
Both the US and China are aligned in that we view the EU as a junior party that can be pressured [3].
If the EU views Russia as a threat, it will have to accept American vassalage becuase the PRC will continue to back Russia [1].
If the EU views America as a threat, it will have to accept Chinese vassalage, give up Ukraine, and accept Russia as the primary European military power.
Based on the carveouts within the Industrial Acceleration Act, the EU has chosen American vassalage.
[0] - https://ecfr.eu/article/funding-war-courting-crisis-why-chin...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
[2] - https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202603/16/WS69b7f2e2a310d...
[3] - https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/17/europe-sees-china...
The answer in Poland, the Baltics, Czechia, and Finland is NO and that Russia is worse and that Ukraine must be supported, and will back the US no matter how transactional we become.
The answer in Hungary, Slovakia, and Belgium [1] is YES and that sacrificing Ukraine for Russia is acceptable.
[0] - https://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/china-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/4ce01938-a671-4433-83a7-dada2b3ba...
But anyway, over short or long the EU needs to build its own military to a strength it can at least work as a strong deterrence for aggressors.
China is not interested in breaking with Russia.
Russia helps China put pressure on Japan [0], helps China put pressure on South Korea [1], allows China to expand it's influence in Central Asia [2], acts as a backchannel for China-India diplomatic normalization [3], gives China the ability to access ONG without dealing with Hormuz or Malaccas [4], and allows China to run the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe railway [5] which continues to supply Europe with no sanctions despite the ongoing war in Ukraine.
On the other hand, the EU is tariffing Chinese goods [6]; signing FTAs with Chinese rivals like India [7], Japan [8], and South Korea [9]; and signing defense pacts with Japan [10], South Korea [11], and India [12] while allowing them to participate in ReArm Europe 2030.
Additionally, China-EU trade only represents a little over 10% of all Chinese trade [13], and is easily replaceable with expanded trade with ASEAN, Japan, South Korea, and India.
China views Russia the same way America views the EU - a weak junior partner who can be bullied. The US is somewhat trying to pull Russia to our side, and China is somewhat trying to pull the EU to their side, but the reality is both the US and China view the EU and Russia as junior partners.
> the Chinese support for Russia can be broken, by ... threat
What threat can the EU give to China? Chinese foreign policy already views the EU as sanctimonious [14], weak [15], and declining [16].
> over short or long the EU needs to build its own military to a strength it can at least work as a strong deterrence for aggressors
Yep.
But that will takes decades, which is why the US and China can both bully the EU with complete impunity today.
Heck, both China [17] and the US under Trump [18] are supporting Viktor Orban because he is a great Trojan horse.
Whenever either the US or China feels the EU is leaning towards one at the expense of the other, they then start breaking EU institutions as a result.
THIS is the world the EU exists in today.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russian-b...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxq38028djo
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china-looks-strengthen-ties-ru...
[3] - https://eastasiaforum.org/2020/10/23/how-russia-emerged-as-k...
[4] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3345920/m...
[5] - https://carnegie.ru/commentary/?fa=64555
[6] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
[7] - https://commission.europa.eu/topics/trade/eu-india-trade-agr...
[8] - https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-j...
[9] - https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-s...
[10] - https://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/pressite_000001_00703.h...
[11] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-partner...
[12] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...
[13] - http://www.customs.gov.cn/customs/2025-12/14/article_2026011...
[14] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202603/1356666.shtml
[15] - https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202603/16/WS69b7f2e2a310d686...
[16] - https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202512/22/WS69488270a310d686...
[17] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202405/10/content_WS663d3b83...
[18] - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
So, if the EU is so much inferior, why did they not buckle in the Greenland issue, but Trump was called back by his puppeteers? Why can they say "no" to supporting the US and Israel against Iran? And if they wanted the EU leaders could go further and match tariffs one by one and nothing serious would happen. The picture you are painting does not account for the facts. The relationship is not between equals but lord and vassal is also not a good fit.
I am not sure about the trade figures in your link [13]. It does not open for me. I seem to recall a significantly higher export volume going to Europe. But anyway, China is going to have their own internal issues with an aging populace, an end to strong economical growth and ever-growing social inequality. They are also too rational (compared to the US) to disrupt good business by mutual bullying (at least overtly and systematically).
15 is an opinion piece written by a failed politician from Kyrgyzstan for China Daily and 16 is another opinion piece written by a right-wing politician from Slovakia. Neither represent Chinese opinions. 14 doesn't open for me.
The fact that the mouthpieces of two of the CCP's most important committees are constantly publishing content that is dismissive of the EU highlights how China's leadership actually views Europe.
Europeans really need to get it in their head that both the US and China look at the EU dismissively and as a junior partner. Neither the US nor China is interested in a relationship of equals with the EU.
It’s interesting to read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had, though I think that speaks more to the relative cost effectiveness of tributes versus blackmail. These states don’t have the security apparatus to both blackmail US politicians and prevent others from blackmailing those same politicians. This second part is essential as it is what maintains the relative advantage.
I do think they will be less enthusiastic subscribers in the future, and perhaps even shop around for more cost effective approaches. Modi in India is intentionally creating an Indian diaspora as one example and I believe he is bribing politicians to help make this happen.
The primary players in the Gulf - Saudi and the UAE - have been aligned with the ongoing Iran strikes.
KSA's Mohammad Bin Salman has been lobbying Trump to strike Iran [0], just like his predecessor King Abdullah was doing [1]. Similarly, the UAE has an ongoing land dispute with Iran [2].
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-ira...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/cut-off-he...
[2] - https://www.uae-embassy.org/foreign-policy/occupied-uae-isla...
The larger Gulf States are aligned with the US in striking Iran. And we have an incentive also to prevent another nuclear breakout from happening.
Edit: can't reply
> I do note that a similar reason was given for North Korea which did end up rather peacefully acquiring nuclear weapons
Because we were in Iraq and Afghanistan when North Korea's nuclear breakout happened in the early 2000s.
> the primary reason?
There is no primary reason (there never is), but there are clearly a multiple interests that aligned with striking Iran
1. Iran's eventual nuclear breakout (already mentioned)
2. The operationalization of the Iran-Central Asia-China railway in 2025 [0], which allows China to bypass Malacca
3. Iran's relative weakness following the collapse of the Assad regime, the death of much od Hezbollah's leadership, and the Houthis comparative weakness
4. Continued anger amongst policymakers in the Gulf, Israel, and the US that Iran-backed Hamas launched the 10/7 attack barely 3 weeks after the US+EU launched the IMEC project and were about to loop Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords [1]
[0] - https://caspianpost.com/iran/china-kyrgyz-iran-rail-link-cut...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/09/g20-eu-and-us-...
I do note that a similar reason was given for North Korea which did end up rather peacefully acquiring nuclear weapons.
Edit: so to confirm that is your stated primary reason? Any other reasons you can think of?
(It actually has quite a few expert staff who are not delighted with the tools they have been given but they don't have the lobbying power of Palantir and the cluster of consulting firms around it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrtDgoqWmgM
The commercial product, Foundry, is very well documented and an extensive Data Platform that allows to build data pipelines (similar to Databricks) and build low code / no code applications on top. If you master it, its incredibly powerful but complex
It's not rocket science. Those particular database schemas, together with those particular CRUD layers, do something useful, and neither building nor maintaining those applications is part of the core business for most companies, so buying prebuilt from somebody else, and letting them maintain it for you, makes perfect business sense.
The software exists because it's now convenient and easier to build their own than depend on a contractor.
Reproducing it verbatim;
“Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”
Why don't we ban data brokers in the first place?
> Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company. We do not sell personal data of any kind. We don’t provide data-mining as a service.
The first half is true. They bring in their FDEs to clean and organize your data.
But the difference in what they leave behind is what separates them from classic consultancies and pure tech companies.
They don't leave behind "insights." They leave behind a suite of operational (ie have write capabilities not just dashboards) applications that are "custom" built to actually solve those insights. I put custom in quotes because while the applications are usually bespoke to your company, they are built in Palantir's app-building product Workshop, which significantly lowers the cost of building these custom apps.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview
So in the end, your company's processes are improved because your employees are using the apps that the FDE's built.
This is distinct from traditional consultancies because those will only leave behind the insights. Also distinct from most SaaS because those have a one-size-fits all approach, so you wind up having to change your company to fit the design of the application, where as Palantir builds its applications to fit your company.
Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.
The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.
However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.
Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.
[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.
This is glossed over and not really mentioned as an issue...
Quite aside from that fact that Palantir is basically an arm of the US government -- which has proven to be an enemy to the West and a thoroughly busted idiocracy -- just look at the sociopaths that lead that company. Alex Karp's public appearances are dystopian, and the guy comes across as a vile, self-involved crackhead that has no comprehension how reprehensible he is to 99% of the planet. Thiel is utterly deranged, and that goblin shouldn't come within a parsec of any influence or power.
> US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff.
This sort of stuff might go down well with fundamentalists in america, but it has no place in the advanced world.
"Yesterday, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale agreed with an X post suggesting communists in the Western hemisphere should be blown up. “Exactly,” he wrote. “What did you think founding Palantir was supposed to be about?”" - https://responsiblestatecraft.org/defense-companies-maduro/
"“We support warfare and we are proud of it,” Karp stated bluntly during the conversation with German media outlet Heise.de." - https://zetbit.tech/news/209/pentagon-backing-palantir-ceo-k...
"In a CNBC interview Thursday, Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp opined that AI will undermine the influence of “highly educated, often female voters” and empower working class men instead. And anyone who doesn’t realize this political reality, he added, belongs in an “insane asylum.”" - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ceo-palantir-ai...
It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off fully.
Seems like a crucial miscalculation on their part, as they lose all international revenue and will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
Because he's speaking to his investors aiming to keep the stock price up. He's not selling his products or himself to the world. His investors are rewarding him for the way he talks and acts.
Because shedding the sheepskin is the point. It's performative. A display of power.
It doesn't matter that Karp has destroyed his brain with cocaine, nor that he's a massive bigot. It's a signal. "We have won. You can't stop us".
> will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
The gamble and taunt being that they're stating that this will not happen. Thiel has won. US democracy is dead. The moment Trump croaks they try to seize the fed entirely.
The actual miscalculation is deeper. They may seize the US government. It won't save them, they'll only drag it down with them.
Globalism is not some evil ploy by which [we all know exactly who they're accusing] try to subvert the US. It is the foundational mechanism of the US' imperialism. And in trying to unmake globalism, they're unmaking the American Empire.
Similarly with democracy. Democracy is not some weakness forced upon the west. It is the winning system of government after all others have collapsed. Even the smartest god-king is useless if all his advisors are coked out nutjobs. Thiel's idea of disposing of democracy will doom not only the US, but himself personally as well.
Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?
The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure, but nobody does because they would quite rightly be called out as conspiracy theorists.
Is there any reason to think they would not do something illegal? Or that they would be above exporting secret data?
This is supposed to count towards their integrity? There is no way your posts aren't satire, actually great job you almost convinced me lmao
They're hosted by the US. It would be illegal for them not to comply with orders to hand data over to US security services. This has been a concern since the Microsoft "safe harbour" GDPR case. It's now the same thing with much higher stakes.
Since this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr... , no US tech company can give a meaningful guarantee that they won't just turn off critical UK defence systems if ordered to by Trump. Such as if we tried to carry out actions against the invasion of Greenland. I admit that was a couple of months ago, so it now seems like ancient history, but the US picks a new invasion target every month.
"Corporation says they aren't doing a bad thing so any assertion to the contrary is crazy."
Corporations actually tend to lie when they are engaged in illegal or repugnant behavior.
> The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure,
The leadership of those corporations aren't publicly supporting the dissolution of democracy to impose neo-feudalism, so that's a big difference.
To quote:
> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
- Peter Thiel
Given his ancestry wearing a black shirt for a TV interview was pretty bad judgement.
Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
MI6 head is Blaise Metreweli whose grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, the Nazis' chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.
If this was a political drama, that would be written out on the basis that it wasn't believable.
I mean if it wasn't obvious from the get go they're, well, dubious, given the grandson of Owsald Mosley is the UK CEO.
edit: just looked at your comment history too, explains a lot.