While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.
This was the startling admission made by Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, a company that’s come under increasingly heavy scrutiny for its growing role as a provider of AI-powered surveillance technology to the military and government.
In an interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea published this week, Karp, who has Jewish heritage, was discussing German culture and his time in the country before going on a tangent about how outrageous it is that people online “laud the Nazis.” Then he fessed up to something even more eyebrow-raising.
“I spend a lot of time talking to Nazis,” Karp said, implying that this is an ongoing pastime of his. “Like, real Nazis,” he emphasized.
Karp explained that it was his way of “understanding what made them tick,” before making an ironic observation.
“Part of the crazy thing about people who laud the Nazis nowadays is there’s not a single Nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps!” he chuckled.
He then pulled off the smoothest segue of all time.
“Uh, but, um, and uh, and it’s like, it’s uh but” — the interview mercifully jumps cuts — “the thing that’s crazy unique about America,” Karp began to muse.
Beyond his role as Palantir’s head honcho, Karp is known for his philosophical ramblings, his “eccentric” personality, and his affinity for German culture. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt, and draws on his background to defend Western values — in particular American ones — as especially good for the world.
This year, for instance, he published a book about how the US needed to embrace having the most technologically advanced weapons possible to preserve its dominance. An excerpt of that book was published online as an essay under the headline “We Need a New Manhattan Project.”
Karp once identified as a progressive, putting him at odds with Palantir’s cofounder Peter Thiel, who openly espouses his own brand of techno-feudalism defined by his espousing of race science, a peculiar obsession with the “Antichrist,” and his view that allowing women to vote was a mistake.
Karp, however, has in recent years has shifted rightward, bashing progressives instead of claiming to be one. He has recently defended Palantir’s role in providing ICE with an Orwellian surveillance network to help locate people for deportation, and for providing the IDF, which has been internationally condemned for committing genocide in Gaza, with an AI platform designed for making decisions on the battlefield, including analyzing enemy targets. Karp’s extensive and enlightening conversations with Nazis, in other words, seemingly haven’t endowed him with any self-awareness about all the evil he’s entangled in.
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