BERLIN — Palantir CEO Alex Karp criticized Germany after a top Berlin official said the country doesn’t plan to award military contracts to the U.S. data analytics giant.
Last month, a top military officer told the Handelsblatt newspaper that Germany’s armed forces do not plan to award contracts to Palantir. Germany’s Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger told POLITICO in an interview that he wants a European alternative to the American data analytics giant in the long term.
In an interview with Bild, Karp expressed surprise at the Bundeswehr’s stance and made the case for widespread use of his company’s defense technologies. “Every serious battlefield in the world uses parts of Palantir. There’s a reason for that,” said Karp.
While he expressed understanding that Germany and other major countries want their own autonomous systems, he said he was puzzled by German skepticism — especially given that his co-founder, U.S. entrepreneur Peter Thiel, was born in Germany. Karp, an American entrepreneur, studied in Germany and speaks fluent German.
“Peter and I are the most prominent Germanic and/or German-speaking business people in the world by far and every other country would have found a way to adopt us,” said Karp. “If we were French, the French would wholesale force us to have French passports and only speak French and change our name to Falantir … I don’t understand how Germany believes it can afford this.”
Karp said that “at a general societal level, a lot of the discussions sound like they’re talking about witchcraft.”
The use of Palantir software has proven controversial in Germany, with critics warning of risks to data protection and fundamental rights, as well as dependencies on a U.S. provider.
Palantir provides a technological backbone to some of the world’s most powerful militaries, supplying software to the United States, Israel and Ukraine, among others.
The interview with Karp came off the back of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in Kyiv. “They deserve a lot of credit for building one of the most important military defense systems in the world,” Karp said.
He described Palantir products “as an operating system for war. So, the same way you’d have an operating system for a company or anything, or even a car, they have it for the modern battlefield.” Ukraine, he says, manages the battlefield “the way a tech company would manage its clientele.” Only the key questions are different: “How many Russian people die per square kilometer? And why and how and what are the payloads and what worked and what didn’t?”
Karp said he is proud that his company is contributing to Ukraine’s defense and that other European countries should leverage this expertise by purchasing proven Ukrainian technologies.
“What products is Europe gonna buy to defend itself? Is it going to buy PowerPoint-tested products? … Or are they gonna buy the products that are single-handedly stopping a great military power?” he said.
Karp said Palantir has no access to Ukrainian data through the military’s use of its software. “When they’re doing air defense or targeting, almost all the code is written by them, controlled by them. We have no access. In that sense, in my view, there’s no sovereignty issue. I couldn’t tell you what they’re doing, how they’re going, and I can’t stop them from doing it. They control that.”
He was also critical of the way Europe is spending its massive defense budget.
“When I look at spending in Europe, I get really worried that there’s too much being distributed by people who have no idea how to spend it. And that’s going to create entrenched interests of people producing suboptimal, non-workable tech that are politically strong. And then it’s really hard to take it out.”
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