The viral manifesto of 'anti-woke' tech boss with NHS and defence contracts

Getty ImagesPrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (centre) and then-US ambassador Peter Mandelson met Alex Karp (right) of Palantir in February 2025Palantir insiders compare what they do to "plumbing" - joining together scattered stores of information.They say their products allow large, often incompatible sets of data to be analysed and searched easily, including through the use of commercial AI systems.To this end, the firm won a £300m contract to create a data platform for the NHS - a role that has been opposed by the British Medical Association (BMA) and provokes continuing intense debate.In the last few days, Palantir's UK boss Louis Mosley turned to X to attack a critical cover story in the BMA's British Medical Journal.But consultant Tom Bartlett, who previously led the NHS team responsible for delivering the Federated Data Platform - built on Palantir software - told the BBC Palantir was "uniquely suited to the messy NHS data problems that have been accumulating over the last 25 years".The $400bn (£297bn) firm is also a major military contractor. Its AI-enabled "war-fighting" technology is used by Nato, Ukraine and by the US, including in its conflict with Iran. In the UK, the MoD has signed a similarly controversial three-year contract worth £240m for tech that it said would support the so-called "kill-chain", fusing together data provide to produce faster options for attacking an enemy target.Palantir says it employs around 950 people in the UK, making up 17% of its global workforce.But some critics argue its work with US immigration enforcement and with Israel's military should disqualify it.Others cite the opinions of Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel, a libertarian backer of Donald Trump, and Karp, as reasons to exclude it.What has Karp said?The 22-point post is a summary from a 2025 book by Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, a Palantir lawyer, titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.In its review the New Yorker wrote the book's central claim was that "the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex".Karp's politics are complex: he reportedly donated to the presidential campaigns of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but he is also proudly calls his company "anti-woke" and his views will be unpalatable to many on the left.In the X post, Karp wrote that some cultures have produced "wonders" while others are "regressive and harmful", and said the lack of criticism of other cultures has created a "hollow pluralism".He criticised the West for having "resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity".Protecting democracies required "hard power", he said, while "theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications" would see the US lose ground to its adversaries. The age of nuclear deterrence is ending, he argued, to be replaced with deterrence built on AI. Karp said defending democracy was a shared obligation, and national service should be "a universal duty" - a claim which has already drawn criticism in the US, where Palantir holds billions of dollars of military contracts.He also criticised the post-war "neutering" of Germany and Japan, calling the "defanging" of Germany "an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price" - presumably a reference to Europe's efforts to counter the threat from Russia.Getty ImagesElon Musk (left) and Alex Karp pictured in 2023Karp, who has a doctorate in social theory, is one of a number of wealthy tech leaders - also including Elon Musk - to promote political and ideological theories. In point 16 of the X post, Karp wrote: "The culture almost snickers at Musk's interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves."