Last week, the US Army announced the creation of its Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps, a new unit within the Army Reserve that will enlist tech executives as uniformed officers. Among the first few enlistees was Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir, the trailblazer of Silicon Valley expansion into the military. Sankar was not exaggerating when he wrote in the Free Press:

A decade ago, it would’ve been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the U.S. military. Equally, it would’ve been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation’s business elite — much less to create a special corps so they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government. But a sea change has taken place in both places. . . . Palantir was the forerunner in this effort.

This story is integral to Palantir’s self-conception. The Big Data firm, which was founded after 9/11 by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, has never been squeamish about aiding American efforts to establish global military hegemony. As Karp tells it, Palantir stoically endured nearly two decades of suspicion in Silicon Valley until it helped form a new consensus. In a recent interview, Karp said:

We were very controversial, and that’s changed a lot — partly because people realized it was wrong, and quite frankly, if somebody makes a lot of money on something, then it must be right. So we’ve changed the world by humiliating people and getting rich. It’s the most effective way for social change [to happen]: humiliate your enemy and make them poorer.

The enemies in question were squishy Silicon Valley virtue signalers. In 2017, Google won a contract for the US military’s Project Maven, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into battlefield operations. Public backlash ensued, and Google flinched, not wanting its tech to be associated with automated mass death. Palantir took over Project Maven, with Karp calling Google’s unwillingness to be associated with war a “loser position.”

Now Silicon Valley is coming around. Desperate not to be seen as losers, they’ve replaced virtue signaling with vice signaling. Among the Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps enlistees is the chief technology officer of Meta, a company that, under Mark Zuckerberg’s direction, once aimed to appear cuddly and nonthreatening but has now pivoted to wanting to appear imposing, brash, and, as Zuckerberg himself suggested, aggressively masculine.

This is the Palantir effect, and its implications extend far beyond Zuckerberg’s MAGA makeover. A new common sense is taking hold in Silicon Valley: the companies that once flamboyantly postured as social justice allies are now currying favor with Donald Trump’s administration — and welcoming criticisms along the way, taking them as a badge of honor, proof positive they’re not effete liberal pushovers. To heed public criticism is to bend the knee to the “woke,” which Karp calls “the central risk to Palantir, America and the world.”

Armed with this new anti-moral sensibility, tech is dissolving into the pulsating nexus of MAGA, crypto, combat sports, and the US military. The merger is exemplified by the list of corporate sponsors of Trump’s military parade last weekend, which included Palantir, the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the global data-mining conglomerate Oracle, the crypto platform Coinbase, and Phorm Energy, a new energy drink company created by Dana White, who is both the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a member of the Meta board.

Of these, Palantir is the Trump administration’s darling. The administration has showered it with federal contracts, hefty enough to elicit a letter from Democratic lawmakers asking the company to explain and justify itself. Of particular concern are Palantir’s apparent moves to fulfill Trump’s request that the company create a unified database on American citizens, consolidating information currently scattered across agencies into a single dossier index that critics worry the Trump administration will use for surveillance and political repression.

Palantir is also signed on to create an “ImmigrationOS” system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which will track immigrants’ movements and facilitate their arrest, detention, and deportation. And the Trump administration has increased Palantir’s Project Maven funding. Palantir’s work on Project Maven has accelerated the militarization of AI, enabling autonomous drone surveillance systems and algorithmic targeting. Under Trump, the administration is pushing to expand these capabilities into real-time battlefield AI tools, including giving Palantir an additional $174 million contract “to house a battlefield intelligence system inside a big truck” called the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, or Titan.

For many years, Palantir has received surprisingly little public scrutiny, disproportionate to its status as “the West’s AI arms dealer.” Israel’s war in Gaza brought more negative press than usual; Palantir sold Israel tools that analyze massive surveillance and intelligence data to help the Israeli military rapidly generate lists of targets for airstrikes in Gaza, resulting in countless civilian deaths. When confronted by a Palestinian woman who accused Palantir of developing software used to kill civilians, Karp said flippantly, “She believes I’m evil. I believe she’s an unwitting product of an evil force, Hamas.”

Palantir’s profile has risen further now that Trump is tapping it to carry out its most frightening designs, from domestic mass surveillance to automated war. Much of the American public has reeled in disgust. The stock market, for its part, has responded to Palantir’s shady federal contracts by rewarding the company handsomely. Palantir has the best-performing stock of 2025, increasing 140 percent since Trump took office.