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The Palantir Yale Jeremiad (Not Quite a Polemic But Not a Colloquy)

May 8, 2026

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumbAnother dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

I think this is a click bait title for those who have some exposure to the Jesuits. For others, the reaction will be, “Jeremiad? Is that an NBA superstar?” I thought the use of the word “jeremiad” was clever, but others may find the reference puzzling. Sigh.

image

Thanks, Venice.ai. You only protested that my image was violating your guardrails a couple of times. Well, good enough.

After reading the New York Magazine essay, “Palantir Comes to Campus: At a Quiet Conference at Yale, the Company and Its Allies Sketched a Vision for AI, State Power, and How to Mix the Two.” From my point of view, the magazine’s write up did not provide enough cross references, glosses, annotations, and endnotes to the relevant antichrist lectures of Peter Thiel, Dr. Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the Lord of the Rings, and the philosophical writings of René Girard, among others. (Love me some Girard.)

The essay is a snapshot of a chit chat organized by the Palantir Foundation, a commercially-funded Ivory Tower for big AI tech or BAIT ideas. The topic for the event was ““National Power and Purpose in the Age of AI.” Full disclosure: I converted the title of the event to Napp-ai. You can make of this shorthand what you will. I did not spell the acronym “nappy” which shows some measure of judgment I suppose.

The main “points” struck me from the New York Magazine piece were:

  1. Humans cannot do government. AI is the answer. It is definitely good to be the human controlling the AI I assume.
  2. The government should become software. Obviously the old and weird deliberative approach is not working. It is good to be in a senior government position responsible for software or be working for the big software outfit supporting the new government.
  3. The Great Chain of Being is back. AI mavens and AI are at the top. Ergo, a digital god or Mt. Olympus of zeros and ones.
  4. The wimp approach to treating humans is over. The approach is expensive and doesn’t work. AI software works… mostly.

The cited New York Magazine article quotes one luminary as pointing out:

Princeton Classics graduates… couldn’t even read Latin.

Keep in mind the conference was held at Yale, where I presume classics grads can indeed read Latin. As Plautus observed:

Si decem habeas linguas, mutum esse addecet.

Translation: I you had 10 tongues, you ought to hold them all.

The meta-view of the conference seems to be encapsulated in this statement from the New York Magazine essay:

In their book, The Technological Republic, they contend that Silicon Valley lost its way after the Cold War as the technology sector retreated from the public interest and into “luxury beliefs” — opposition to using software to help law enforcement among them. The rot, in their telling, began in higher ed: Stanford dropped its History of Western Civilization requirement in 1968, and the generation that built the internet grew up constructing its identity “in opposition to the state.” It became squeamish about helping governments do government things, like deporting people. Karp [founder of Palantir and philosopher] and Zamiska [Palantir’s PR person] take particular offense at Google’s former motto, “Don’t be evil.” That old maxim reflects, they write, a mind-set that prizes moral clarity over “the more difficult and often messy task of navigating the world in all of its imperfection.” Palantir would not make the same mistake.

Let’s step back. The Jeremiad at Yale is part of Palantir’s and its adherents efforts to implement BAIT’s vision for the way the US and probably most of the world to operate. Forget government and the people. Just compress the idea into government and AI plus some fellow travelers to the new world order.

Let me offer several observations:

  • The New York Magazine essay does not ruffle too many Palantirian plumes. Unfortunately the result is a collection of generalizations about how Palantir and Mr. Thiel’s ideas will be implemented. (Yep, these folks think that their AI way in the new Information Highway.,)
  • The objective of the Karpy dieum is power and control. With those two fundamental elements, money will accrue to the superior beings; for example those who recognize the genius of Mr. Girard and his ilk.
  • The academic trappings of this Lord of the Rings reality show are intended to bestow the halo of big thinking on the ideas of Dr. Karp. I like to think of the approach as Thielism, but, like it or not, Dr. Karp is the mouthpiece for the movement in my opinion.

Net net: As a dinobaby, I marvel at this mash up of search and retrieval technology, power, money, surveillance, and a new world order assembled from bits and pieces of some quite interesting ideas. Personally I am delighted to be able to observe first hand how BAIT catches carp and other fish.

Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2026

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, Ethics, News 

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