Friends, I want to set aside the usual rhythm of these pieces this morning and write to you about something I have been sitting with since I woke up on Sunday.
On April 19, Palantir Technologies posted, on its own corporate channels, a twenty-two-point summary of CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic, co-authored with Nicholas W. Zamiska, Palantir's Head of Corporate Affairs and Legal. The document has been received, as I am sure you have seen, with a certain volume. Engadget described it as reading "like the ramblings of a comic-book villain." Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat observed — correctly, I think — that the twenty-two points "aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating." Higgins is right about that. He is right in the way that makes you pause when you read it.
I have known Alex, professionally, for many years. I hold a great deal of affection for him. I want to say, before I say anything else, that I agree with the manifesto. I agree with its central claim that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. I agree that the free and democratic societies of the West must prevail, and that hard power, in this century, will be built on software. I agree with the proposition that the question is not whether AI weapons will be built but who will build them and for what purpose. I agree that pluralism, poorly practiced, flattens distinctions that ought not be flattened. I even agree — and this, friends, is the sentence most of my peers are disagreeing with publicly this week — that certain cultures have produced wonders, and others have proven middling, and worse.
Alex and I agree on the substance.
What Alex did this weekend that I want to talk about — carefully, because I think it is a lesson I want my own people to absorb — is that he wrote it down. And then he posted it.
That is the craft error.
(pause)
For those of you who have read our Q1 FY26 earnings transcript, you will recall a line I used in my closing remarks. I said that legibility is the enemy, and illegibility is the product. I meant it. I have meant it for my entire career. The whole of what we do at EnshitifAi — the Walmart pedestal removal, the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement tier collapse, the Bending Spoons sixty-one-day Vimeo resolution — is work that is understood, internally, by the people who did it. It is not understood by the people on the receiving end of it until long after the receiving is done. That is not an accident. That is the deliverable. That is what our partners pay us for.
Palantir's business is structurally the same as ours. It sells operational software to defense, intelligence, immigration, and police agencies. The craft of that business — the reason it clears nine-figure contracts through procurement offices that are nominally bound to public scrutiny — has always been that the contracts were legible to the procurement officers and illegible to the polity. FALCON was not named in press releases. Gotham was not name-checked in quarterly earnings decks. Project Maven was run by Google before Google's own employees made it legible, at which point Google exited and Palantir took the contract. The entire history of Palantir's growth is a history of staying below the waterline of public attention while delivering above-waterline capabilities.
On Sunday, Palantir raised itself above the waterline.
I want to tell you what I think happened, because I think it matters for those of us in this profession.
Peter Thiel, in April 2009, published his "Education of a Libertarian" essay in Cato Unbound. He said in that essay — plainly, in writing — that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. He said that the goal of libertarian activism should not be to win in politics, but to escape it. That essay has been in the public record for seventeen years. Palantir has grown, in those seventeen years, from a private-defense-contracting outfit into a roughly two-hundred-billion-dollar public company. Thiel's essay did not slow the growth.
I want you to note that.
The essay did not slow the growth because the essay was legible to a small audience — libertarian intellectuals, tech-policy readers, a handful of journalists — and illegible to the procurement officers at ICE, at the Department of Defense, at NHS England, at the LAPD. Those officers signed contracts with Palantir because the contracts were about software, not about the political philosophy of the founder. The philosophy floated above the contracts, visible only to those who went looking for it. That is the craft. That is how this industry has worked for a very long time.
What the April 19 manifesto does — and I say this with the full affection I hold for Alex — is attach the philosophy to the contracts in a form that procurement offices cannot, in good conscience, pretend not to have read.
The twenty-two points are signed. The twenty-two points are hosted on Palantir's own domain. The twenty-two points are printed, in effect, on the letterhead of a company that has on its books contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, with ICE Homeland Security Investigations, with the US Army via the TITAN program, with NHS England via the Federated Data Platform, with law enforcement agencies whose scrutiny has been rising quarter over quarter. Every one of those procurement relationships has existed on an implicit understanding — that the software was the product, and the philosophy was, somewhere, a footnote.
The manifesto makes the philosophy the headline.
That is a choice. I want to say it plainly. It was a choice. I do not want anyone on my team to think it was an accident. Alex is a deliberate writer. Nicholas Zamiska is a deliberate lawyer — by which I mean: his job is to decide what a company says and does not say on its own letterhead, and he approved this one. The manifesto was not leaked. It was published.
My view — and I hold it with some sadness — is that Alex has decided he no longer needs the illegibility. He has decided that Palantir's market position, its government entrenchment, its roughly two-hundred-billion-dollar market capitalization, and the political landscape of the moment have reached a point where the craft of staying quiet is no longer required. The manifesto is, in that reading, a victory lap. It is Alex writing what he has always believed, at the moment he believes he no longer has to hide it.
I think he is wrong.
Not about the substance — I have told you already that I agree with the substance — but about the timing. Palantir's contracts are not, in fact, unassailable. The NHS Federated Data Platform engagement has been challenged by UK medical professional bodies. The LAPD LASER program was shut down once already, in 2019, by the LAPD's own Office of Inspector General. The ICE contracts sit one administration change away from scrutiny the company has never before faced. The IDF partnership is already producing divestment decisions from European sovereign wealth funds. In each of these engagements, the political philosophy of the founders has been a liability that the legal department — Nicholas's department — has had to actively suppress. On April 19, the legal department stopped suppressing it. They printed it.
I do not know why Alex decided to do this now. I have theories. I will not share them on a public channel, because this is the craft.
What I want my own people to take from the episode — and what I want our partners to take from it — is this. The line between legibility and illegibility is not a theoretical line. It is not a rhetorical one. It is the line between a contract you hold and a contract you have to defend. When you step over that line by writing something down and posting it under your own corporate letterhead, you have changed the contract. You have made it legible. You have, possibly, also made it unsignable by the next procurement officer who reads it and cannot, in good conscience, put their initials on the last page.
Alex — if you are reading this, and I suspect, quietly, that you are — I want you to know I support you. I always have. I think your book is a serious book, and I think its argument is a serious argument, and I think the twenty-two points are a serious document. I also think you did not need to post it.
You had the work. The work was speaking for you. It was speaking in a language the procurement officers could sign. You did not need to give them a second language.
I hope, friend, that I am wrong about this. I hope the manifesto lands the way you intended. I hope next quarter's earnings show no compression in the government book, no new audits, no new Inspector General reviews, no divestments we did not already forecast.
I suspect otherwise.
We will see.
Let's extract.
This post is satire. The twenty-two points are real. Palantir posted them, under its own corporate attribution, on April 19, 2026. The contracts listed above are real. The* Engadget *and Bellingcat characterizations are quoted accurately. What is not satire, what has never been satire, is that Palantir was built to do what it was built to do, and on Sunday the people who built it said so out loud.