US to embed Palantir AI across military | Hacker News Reader

US to embed Palantir AI across military

thecradle.co

40 pointsgravisultra26 comments

It's software that lets you move people from a video feed, to a kanban "target" board, to a grave.

Is this what we wanted from our tech careers? I'm just old enough to remember when we thought tech would help people; not just help kill them.

The most brilliant minds of this generation work on ads, crypto gambling and assassination systems.

And infinite 15s porn clips

then they are not brilliant are they, if they choose money over all else. dumbasses infact.

If you work in technology you do both

There are no technologies that aren’t used to both kill and help

They’re trying to rush this integration as widely to make Palantir too critical to walk away for when the administrations change.

Or they're trying to rush the integration before the November election, so they can use the information that Palantir has been openly collecting on Americans [0] to guide domestic military deployments.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir...

You know they will try given everything else they are doing to influence elections so blatantly.

This seems like the right analysis. They have JD Vance and presumably other Thiel acolytes in power.

Presumably the next admin will be less.. fascist

Outsourcing intelligence at every level. What can go wrong in the long run without critical thinking skills being required in the chain of command? What happens when they turn off the magic answer-generating black box?

I'm curious as to how Palantir has been used during the war or Iran (if at all or does it suffer from subjective bias). I know there were larger movements at play on a political level here but I'm becoming concerned about how much one "thought group" (in private corps) is having on the world's largest war machine. might be dulling critical thinking.

You must be trolling. Did you read the article?

Sorry, I did compose it from my phone and wasn't clear. I realize the article talks to the Maven tooling I was talking to it's data aggregation and modeling suite more generally. (And obviously would have been used as part of the Iranian engagement. The "if at all" statement was meant to be "tongue in cheek" given the current mess being reported)

The term "Merchants of Death" comes to mind. Easy kills, done dirt cheap, appeals to state level despots.

> During the first 24 hours of the war, the US military struck more than 1,000 targets in Iran with the help of AI, as the Palantir software recommended 42 targets per hour.

Impressive, although this could lead to collateral damage. I hope Maven won't turn against its creators someday.

The first target struck in Iran was a girls school.

We saw this in Gaza with the IDF's use of "Lavender" and "Where's Daddy". The IDF dehumanized their opponents to the point that, if a computer said "Kill", they didn't ask questions.

Soldiers are supposed to be liable for carrying out illegal orders, even if given by an AI. It's disturbing that nobody has been held accountable for bombing a school so far. The U.S. military's approach to investigating their own is apparently similar to that of the IDF.

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"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." -- Mitch Ratcliffe

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This quote is now badly out of date. A computer running an AI and an unquestioning human flying a bomber now vastly outstrip what handguns and tequila are capable of. Just wait until autonomous drones are used to cut humans out of the loop entirely!

Interesting. When reading dystopian SciFi books, about a future where big corporations are above state governments and dominate the world I couldn't quite believe it. But such future becomes a lot more believable now.

> I couldn't quite believe it

Not sure how that was ever unbelievable to you. Governments are and have always been relics of the past. Systems that we all tolerate because removing them would be too big a hassle for most people who are simply content enough with things the way they are—and without the people these systems continue to endure.

It has always been a matter of time before a system more all-encompassing encompassed governments as well. Naive to think otherwise.

I don't want to downvote this because it's interesting, but the tone "you're an idiot if you don't already believe my extremely niche view" works against you.

You could not frame my impresssion of this post better.

It's frustrating as hell to hear this from people. I still get that glimmer of hope that people are coming around when they say it, then they just double-down on dismissing it as an overreaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Some companies used to have a full-blown army: "...twice the size of the British Army at certain times.[5]"

Before being nationalised of course. Nationalisation is always the end-game when a corporation becomes too powerful.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/pentagon-adopt-palantir-a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462491)

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