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Decoding Palantir, the Most Mysterious Company in Silicon Valley
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 15, 2025. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir has worked with ICE, the US Department of Defense, the Israeli military and sparked numerous protests in multiple countries. WIRED staff writer Caroline Haskins joins Uncanny Valley to decode the company for us. Articles mentioned in this episode: Join us live in San Francisco on September 9th: Get your tickets here You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Caroline Haskins on Bluesky at @carolinehaskins. Write to us at uncannyvalley@ How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Michael Calore: Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with the local station KQED. Lauren and I will sit down with our editor in chief, Katie Drummond, and we'll have a special guest joining us for a conversation that you will not want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We cannot wait to see you there. Hey, Lauren. How are you doing? Lauren Goode: I'm pretty good, Mike. I'm a little tired because we just published a big story I've been working on for a long time. Michael Calore: Oh. Do tell us. Lauren Goode: Well, now that you've asked, we have a series here at WIRED called The Big Interview. Every so often we get to interview the most interesting people in tech and beyond. And we do this very long Q&A, a lot of research goes into it, original photography. It's a really cool series. And the most recent one I interviewed Lisa Su, the Chair and CEO of AMD. Michael Calore: Lisa Su from AMD? Lauren Goode: That's correct. Michael Calore: Nice. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Michael Calore: Did you fly to Texas? Lauren Goode: Austin, Texas. I was there to spend some time with Lisa Su and tour the labs, their chip testing labs down there. And it was a fascinating conversation. She's a super smart lady, and she has managed a pretty remarkable turnaround of AMD over the past dozen years. Michael Calore: Nice. Lauren Goode: So, we talked a lot about that, we talked about export controls. We talked about competing with Nvidia, run by her cousin. Did you know that Jensen Huang and Lisa Su are distant cousins? Michael Calore: No. Lauren Goode: You really didn't know that? Michael Calore: No. Lauren Goode: Yes, distant. First cousins, once removed. But she prefers not to be. Always asked about him, constantly pitted against him. The cousin thing irritates her. Michael Calore: Right, right. Lauren Goode: Of course, we talked about Nvidia. Anyway, I spent some time in the labs with her, because she's an engineer by trade. She was asking some highly technical questions of her engineers. It was really fascinating to witness. Michael Calore: Nice. Lauren Goode: We took a car ride together, we talked about personal stuff. It was one of my favorite interviews I've ever done at WIRED. So, that's out today. Michael Calore: Everybody should read it. Lauren Goode: Thank you. Michael Calore: And I'm assuming that you conducted this interview before the deal with the US government. Lauren Goode: The 15 percent fee that Nvidia and AMD are now going to be paying to the US government? Michael Calore: That would be the one. Lauren Goode: Yes. I did that interview beforehand. News has constantly been breaking in the semiconductor space since then. So we keep going back to Sandra, one of our editors and saying, "Should we update this? Do we need to update this? You can't keep up." Michael Calore: Yeah, that's the news business. Lauren Goode: Yep. Michael Calore: Sometimes you just got to say, "Ship it." Lauren Goode: That's right. Ship it. I'm sure all the techies listening to this will appreciate that. Let's ship this show. Michael Calore: Let's ship this show. This is WIRED's Uncanny Valley , a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we are talking about Palantir, a controversial software company with an ever-growing list of government contracts. The company has received a lot of attention this year because of its close ties with the Trump administration. Palantir's US government revenue has grown by more than $370 million compared to this time last year. But alongside its rising revenue and its rising profile, the company has also received widespread backlash because of its roster of clients, which includes ICE, the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli government. One question that has become hard to answer is what exactly the company does. We know Palantir works with vast amounts of data, but it's not clear what they do with it. WIRED's Caroline Haskins went looking for answers, and she found that even former Palantir employees had trouble closely defining the company's services. So we're going to dive into what Palantir does, what it does not do, and how its cofounders dreams of a techno state, continue to shape the company's goals, and potentially, our future. I'm Michael Calore, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior correspondent. Michael Calore: To break down what Palantir is all about, we had to invite Caroline Haskins onto the show. Caroline is a staff writer at WIRED's Business Desk who has been closely covering the company for years. Welcome to Uncanny Valley . Caroline. Caroline Haskins: Hi. Thanks for having me on. Lauren Goode: Caroline, we're so excited to have you on. And can we give Caroline just a little bit of cred? Which we're going to get to later in the show, but everyone should know to start that Caroline I think is the only one among us who's been kicked out of a Palantir event before. So we're going to have to ask you about that, just in FYI. Michael Calore: Yeah, we'll get to that later. Caroline Haskins: Yeah, happy to share it. Michael Calore: So, I want to start with defining what Palantir isn't. Caroline, what are some of the common misconceptions that you've encountered around the company services? Caroline Haskins: Yeah. It's funny, because it seems like Palantir is kind of having a growing reputation among the public. People know the company Palantir, but they still, just among the general public, have a hard time saying what it actually is. It's often used as kind of a shorthand for just talking about surveillance generally. There are people who think that it's more akin to something like a data broker that's buying and selling data from place to place. Or a data miner that's actively taking information offline and packaging it and selling it in some way. I mean, it actually isn't any of these things, but the misconceptions have been pretty widespread. Palantir has actually had to put out a couple of blogs. I think the titles are literally Palantir Is Not a Data Company, Palantir Is Still Not a Data Company. I think it's a seven-part series on its website. But there's a reason that these misconceptions exist, it's because it's hard to define what Palantir actually is. Lauren Goode: OK. So, Palantir is not buying or selling data, or I guess harboring data in giant databases, but they still work with a lot of data. They sell their services to help other companies gather up a lot of data and structure it. Is that correct? Caroline Haskins: Correct. Palantir does not actually sell any data, but it is providing just the infrastructure and tools that its customers can use to actually work with data. Over the 2010s, I'm sure everybody remembers there was all of this marketing around big data, leveraging your data. And all of these companies were trying to just say how they were really smart. Lauren Goode: Yeah, it was all very nebulous. Caroline Haskins: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Palantir was founded in the early 2000s, in the couple of years after 9/11, but it's business really didn't start taking off until that decade, and I think that in part that's because it was able to meet the moment, because it sells essentially like a one-size tool that can be customized for different customers, that can replace, say, a dozen or more other tools that a company might buy to try and get better insights, manage its factory lines better, manage orders better, make smarter decisions. Michael Calore: Yeah. In your story, you got all kinds of descriptions from your sources who used to work at Palantir about what the company does. One of them called it a really extravagant plumbing with data. Another called it a collection of different applications that customers can use to operationalize data, which is a fantastic word to have in a quote. Lauren Goode: I mean, that literally sounds like the AI from LinkedIn was let loose. Michael Calore: My favorite is the source who called it a supercharged filing cabinet. But there are specific things that Palantir sells, right? And I think if we can go through some of those, we might be able to get a better idea of what they do. Caroline Haskins: So, Palantir has a couple of different products, but its two main flagship products are these things called Foundry on one hand, and then Gotham on the other. So Foundry is more oriented toward private enterprise corporations, that type of customer. So think like Walmart or something. And then the other one is Gotham, that's more oriented toward law enforcement, government agencies, places that are actually dealing with case information, things about actual people, trying to figure out relationships between people, that kind of work. On the other hand, Foundry is more being used to just make regular everyday business practices more efficient. So, whereas a customer might use Foundry to, say, instead of having to completely redo their IT systems because their company is like 60 years old and they have a combination of really old code and then really new software, and they can't figure out how to just make it all flow together, they don't actually have to go in and fix it. Foundry just sits on top of everything and allows them to get the insights that they need to without actually fixing any of the stuff that's going on underneath. It's like a technical bandaid in that sense. And then Gotham, similarly, it is sitting on top of systems that law enforcement and a government agency might already have. The difference is that it's working with case information, it might work through information from a social media company. So, if a police department asks for everything associated with someone's Facebook profile, it would ingest all of that. And the whole idea is that you can map the relationships between people. So, police departments have used this to try and map out alleged gang affiliations. They can also extract things like whether someone has a tattoo, which is information that police might have if they have a booking record on somebody, whether they have to note things like whether somebody has a tattoo. Gotham is not actually providing any of this information, it's just helping police work through the information that they already have. Lauren Goode: So, it's easy to see where some of the concerns come in around data collection then, because even if Palantir isn't selling new data, or aggregate data to another enterprise or something like that, it's still aggregating and transforming all of this data, and putting it into this powerful tool. And then, there's the specific government contracts. Caroline, you reported earlier this year for WIRED that ICE is paying Palantir $30 million to help the agency select who to deport and to track who was self-deporting. Around the same time, our colleague McKenna Kelly reported that Palantir was working with the IRS to build what sources called a Mega API, which would essentially unify all data across the agency. And then of course, there are military contracts. A lot of the contracts that Palantir works with, there is an expectation of confidentiality going in, which is I think where some of this vibe of mystery and secrecy comes from. And I think it's because a lot of these products are then deployed at a large scale, people start to grow concerned when they just think about there's this entity out there that is just sort of helping to gather all of this data into one space. And it seems like Palantir hasn't always wanted to engage with some of these criticisms, or answer questions about this. Caroline, you had firsthand experience with this. Caroline Haskins: Yeah. There was a conference that was being held in D.C. by the Special Competitive Studies Project, the SCSP, it's the think tank that was founded by Eric Schmidt who, obviously, used to be at Google. They have a ton of booths from all these different companies. And the whole idea is that you walk around and then you sit at one booth and you watch someone do a demo of some kind of software, and then you move on to the next one, and you talk to employees, that kind of thing. And I was watching a couple demos at the Palantir booth, and I wasn't even asking any questions, I was just taking some notes. And then I think at one point I walked to a different booth and then I turned around and went to come back, and then they said that I was not allowed back in the booth, and that if I did come back they would call the police. And I was like, "Wait, why?" And they didn't give me a reason. They also didn't give me one when I asked for comments. Lauren Goode: OK. Did you go back? Caroline Haskins: No. I think I walked out of the booth and I immediately called one of my editors, and yeah, she was just like, "Let's just not do that for now. It's OK." Lauren Goode: Wow. They really took it to 11. Caroline Haskins: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I talked to event security and I was like, "Was there a rule I wasn't aware of? I mean, I don't see how I could have been breaking any rules." "Or did they flag something about certain participants?" And event security, I mean, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yeah, I'm not really sure. Lauren Goode: I'm sorry that happened to you. I mean, it sounds like Palantir was not putting on the event, it was another entity and Palantir was a part of it? Caroline Haskins: Right, Palantir is one of the main sponsors of the event. So, if you're paying enough money, then you get one of the giant booths at the front of the conference hall. So they had this really fancy setup. Michael Calore: Wow. Lauren Goode: Well, Caroline, if they didn't have data on you before, they do now. Caroline Haskins: Yeah, I think on their radar to some degree, I guess. Michael Calore: One of the great things about your story is that it helps us really understand the types of services that Palantir actually offers, and what those services look like when they interact with real world. But you had to talk with several former staffers and really dig in to put all these pieces together. So for a company that is so intertwined with all kinds of organizations and public government services, Palantir has to be secretive, and they're notoriously secretive, as we just talked about. What are some of the other reasons why they just don't want people poking around in what they're doing? Caroline Haskins: It's interesting. I think probably one of the most insightful conversations I had, a former content strategist at Palantir was talking about how at a traditional tech company that might be marketing products to consumers, or maybe like a social media company, they have to make things legible for just the average member of the public, because those are the people that are buying their products. But Palantir, their products are extremely expensive. They're targeting essentially gigantic corporations and bureaucracies that really need help sorting things out and getting the insights that they need. They don't really need to be talking to consumers in that way. The reason why it's putting out those blogs is that I think it's become a PR problem at this point, that people are making assumptions about the company that are trying to make a criticism, but aren't really putting their finger on what the company is actually doing. So in that sense, it's become a PR problem for them. But to a degree, they don't have to market to the average person. And it does kind of benefit them to cultivate this aura of mystique and power. Like, what we are doing is so important that the public can't know, maybe, exactly the extent of our products. And this is something that appeals to, I mean, if you are a high up person at the company and you know that you need to get some sort of product, let's say you're not super technical, this is exactly the kind of rhetoric, visuals, et cetera, that might appeal to someone. Lauren Goode: It seems like secrecy is also embedded in the origins of the company. One of its early investors was in QTEL, which is the CIA's venture capital arm. And two of Palantir's cofounders are pretty well-known. Peter Thiel, we've talked about a few times on this show, and Alex Karp, seem like they have intentionally wanted to position the company as a government and military partner, which, like we said earlier, inevitably comes with some secrecy. Michael Calore: We need to take a break now, but when we come back, we're going to dive further into those founders that you just talked about, Lauren, and we're going to break down how their vision of a techno state has shaped the company, and what it can mean for our collective future. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . Before the break, WIRED's Caroline Haskins was telling us all about Palantir services, and how the company actually works with data and the software that it sells to organizations. But it's through looking at two of Palantir's cofounders, particularly Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, that the company's identity starts to come into sharper focus. Peter Thiel almost needs no introduction. We've talked about him on the show before. And besides being one of the cofounders of Palantir, he used to be part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, and has gathered widespread attention for his support of the current administration and other GOP candidates. Alex Karp is the current CEO of Palantir, and he co-founded the company alongside Thiel and a few other people in 2003. So from the start, what vision did they set up for the company? Caroline Haskins: I feel like maybe a useful way into that is to talk about some of the internal jargon that Palantir uses. I mean, even just externally, the name Palantir actually comes from Lord of the Rings. It's this idea of an all-seeing stone that can look across vast expanses of land in the present, or go into the past. So the whole idea of that is to provide a product to that is seemingly extremely powerful and can go wherever you would need it to go. But then I guess internally, I think employees have really adopted this attitude that they are solving the world's most difficult problems and making the world a better place. So, they've kept with the Lord of the Rings language, even just talking amongst each other. Employees call themselves internally, since really the early days of the company, they've called each other hobbits. To the best of my knowledge. I'm not sure how popular this phrase is these days, but a motto that was circulated internally was Save the Shire. So it does get back to this idea of, we're trying to save the world, we're trying to make the world a better place, we're trying to catch terrorists. We're trying to do these really difficult things that make the world a better place- Lauren Goode: And the Shire in this case is what? It's these Western ideals and all-powerful government. Is it our country? What's the Shire? Caroline Haskins: I mean, in one sense, you could understand the Shire as the United States and all of its allies. The term that Alex Karp uses most frequently is the West, or western values. A big thing that the company has tried to stand on is, "We're only going to be doing business with companies that are in the United States or allied with the United States in some sense, militarily." It does get to this idea of security and being aligned with the US military interests. A military mindset has also been something that's pervaded the internal culture at Palantir since the very beginning. Instead of calling people just like software engineers, they call them forward deployed engineers. So, by forward deployed, they're essentially referencing the term for forward deployed troops, which is when in the military use station troops that are somewhere near an adversarial region with the idea being that's going to deter them from making a move against you. They've also used NATO military radio terms as code names for different job titles, like Delta was the one that was associated with fraud deployed engineers. And then they also have a version of a product manager, which instead they call Echo. Those are the words for D and E on the NATO military radio code name list. Another example, something that someone else brought up to me was when they're writing emails to each other, instead of saying FYI, they go FYSA, which means, for your situational awareness. And that's another thing that originated in the military. Lauren Goode: So intense in these San Francisco or Palo Alto offices. They're like, "FYSA, the bevy machine is out of the mint cucumber flavor today." Caroline Haskins: No, exactly, exactly. There's so many examples of this. What was another one? Yeah, "Bottom line up front," that was another one that someone mentioned, it just means you write a two-sentence summary at the start of an email. So instead of saying TLDR, you go BLUF and then give a two-sentence summary. Lauren Goode: Bottom line up front. Michael Calore: I'm going to start doing all of these. Lauren Goode: I could see your eyes light up when Caroline was going through. This is really interesting. Michael Calore: "For your situational awareness, I will be at the dentist today." Lauren Goode: Caroline, when you spoke to these former employees about working there, how did they feel about this culture? Caroline Haskins: They didn't really seem critical of the use of these terms from the most part, but there were people that I spoke with that just felt uncomfortable with military work that was happening in other parts of the company. There was one woman I spoke with who specifically brought this up, and how she essentially had to actively choose to suppress the knowledge of the fact that there were probably products that were being built at other parts of the company that she would be extremely morally opposed to. But on the other hand, I think there were other people I spoke to who just had a functional appreciation for these little habits, like the bottom line up front thing or the FYSA. This didn't make it into the article, but one person said, "I've gone on to other workplaces and I've actively introduced some of these things into my other workplaces." So, some people just have a functional appreciation for, I don't know, I guess that kind of communication style. It's funny. Lauren Goode: That's interesting. And some of this rhetoric has actually made its way into executive communications too. Our producer pulled up a clip from Alex Karp speaking during Palantir's earnings call this past February. And there were a couple lines that really jumped out at me, so we're going to take a quick listen. Alex Karp: We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we're super proud of the role we play, especially in places we can't talk about. And we love our success in the US, and globally also, we are doing, in the United Kingdom and many other places, Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. And when it's necessary to scare enemies, and on occasion kill them. Lauren Goode: Oh, just killed it. So, is he referring to killing business competitors? Are the enemies business competitors? Or is he talking about actual adversaries to the United States? Caroline Haskins: That's the funny thing with that clip, because he used the word disrupt, which obviously disruption is a common thing that people just mentioned in a Silicon Valley business context. Lauren Goode: Right. Very Silicon Valley coded. Caroline Haskins: Right. But then when he talks about killing. I mean, everybody knows that some of Palantir's first clients were members of the US intelligence community, in that it does work across branches of the US military. And these are products that are designed to be lethal. So these are things that are literally talking about killing people, but there's plausible deniability in terms of talking about killing your business competitors or something, or killing the competition. It's just the interesting use of boards. Michael Calore: So, it's obvious that Palantir is eager to embrace this close tie with government work and military work, but this is also part of a larger belief that not only should this be Palantir's mission, but also Silicon Valley's larger mission. To that point, Karp wrote a book recently called The Technological Republic. And in this book he laid out the philosophy of technology being created in service of a state, so a techno state. He kind of reminisces about the times when technology and science and governments all came together to defeat a common enemy instead of, "Building things because they can," which is serious shade at, I don't know, a company that makes food delivery apps. He calls for a renewed unity around this mindset of the techno state. What are your thoughts on Karp's philosophy here? Lauren Goode: I haven't read Alex Karp's book yet. I would like to. I did read the excerpt in The Atlantic. I think what's kind of interesting about both Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, even though sometimes their politics aren't entirely aligned, they both coalesce around this shared vision of the techno state and powering the West to what they call its obvious innate superiority. And they're not alone. There is a group of really influential people in Silicon Valley, this cohort who I sometimes call the War Bois, B-O-I, bois. Michael Calore: I love the name. Lauren Goode: Yeah. And I think that they are shifting the culture a little bit, and having people focus less on the attention economy software and the social media that got a lot of the attention in 2010s, and saying to people like, "You need to build more serious tech here." And some of that happens to be tech for the military. We've also written about Palmer Luckey at WIRED who is a cofounder of Anduril. Anduril is a defense tech company that makes autonomous weapons. He's a part of this cohort as well. Earlier this summer, a bunch of tech CTOs and other executives joined this detachment that's supposed to help make the US armed forces leaner, smarter, more lethal, basically provide tech advice to the military. So for example, Meta CTO, Andrew Bosworth, is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth, or Bos. Michael Calore: Oh, boy. Caroline Haskins: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, some people have pointed out that in some ways it's kind of a return to roots for Silicon Valley, because I mean, in the 20th century it was kind of a place where defense infrastructure was built out. And then it sort of pivoted away from that. I mean, I guess one thing that's maybe worth pointing out about someone like Alex Karp is that for the entirety of the time that Palantir has been around, he's been extremely ideologically consistent. I mean, even through the 2010s when, I mean, no companies were openly embracing working with the military, or doing work in defense tech, which is partially why Anduril, Palantir, they just sort of stood in contrast with a lot of these other companies. But now I think with Trump in office and there just being all of this rhetoric that's centered around patriotism, that's centered around these ideas of strength, especially in the context of war, it's suddenly become, I guess, business-friendly to be embracing these kinds of ideas. Michael Calore: It seems like the time is now for this vision of the techno state that Karp and Thiel have been laying out. So, are we seeing it play out in real time? Lauren Goode: Well, judging by Palantir's current valuation, we might've entered the techno state. It has been pushing into record territory just over the past week since Palantir went public in 2020, their stock has gone up nearly 2500 percent. Michael Calore: Excuse me? Lauren Goode: Yeah. That's just in terms of the numbers though. I'm curious to hear from a cultural perspective, Caroline, what do you think? Caroline Haskins: Yeah. One thing when I think about Peter Thiel and the companies that he's been involved with and the ventures that he's funded, there often isn't a completely consistent through line. I mean, one thing I've been following on the side is the amount of so-called network state projects that he's funded, or essentially trying to make these almost city state like areas that people who work in tech that feel frustrated with working on software that doesn't have visible effects on the real world can just go to and escape the United States, or escape the political friction of a place like Silicon Valley. But then in contrast, I mean, someone like Alex Karp, he's really never doubted the concept of the network state, and having that as a grounding force for your political philosophy and your business philosophy. And I guess the one thing uniting them in the end is this desire for strength for monopoly, I guess, in the business context, and for hegemony in the context of politics and wars between countries. Michael Calore: OK. We're going to take one more break, and then we'll come right back. Lauren, Caroline, thank you for a great conversation about the techno state. Before we go, we want to shift gears a little bit and we're going to share our personal recommendations with the listeners. So, should we have Caroline go first? Lauren Goode: Absolutely. As our guest of honor. Michael Calore: OK. What do you got? Caroline Haskins: I stumbled upon this show recently called The Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds. It's this UK reality TV show where they essentially put mics and cameras on a playground around, again, these four, five, and six-year-olds who, I mean, the four-year-olds, they've never even interacted with other peers their age essentially unsupervised before. And you're seeing literal stages of brain development happening in real time. Like a kid realizing that, "Oh, if I'm fighting over this toy, that means that this other person wants it too, and we might have to work out a compromise." I landed there because I went on a TikTok rabbit hole that started with a New York City public school teacher showing how they set up their classroom, and then a kindergarten teacher setting up their classroom. And then I was like, "Wait, I forget what happens in kindergarten." So then I was looking up, "What do you do in kindergarten?" And then this show came up. And it was so interesting. And obviously, really funny and cute. Even if you're not a huge kid's person, I don't know, I just thought it was really interesting. Michael Calore: Talk about a techno state. Let's put cameras on all the kids. Lauren Goode: Seriously. Michael Calore: When broadcast their brain development. Lauren Goode: Has Palantir sold their software to nursery schools yet? Michael Calore: Sorry, where is this show streaming? Caroline Haskins: It was on Amazon Prime, and then I also think someone uploaded the whole thing onto YouTube. So, either way you can find it. Lauren Goode: OK. Michael Calore: Fantastic. Lauren Goode: I like how Caroline's like, "Even if you're not a kid's person, you might still enjoy this." Michael Calore: She's speaking to her audience, which is- Lauren Goode: No, I like this. Caroline Haskins: I want to capture all ends of the spectrum. Lauren Goode: That's right. That's right. It also sounds like a nice little palate cleanser after reporting on some of the stuff you've been reporting on, Caroline. Caroline Haskins: Honestly, it was. Yeah, yeah. The kids are really funny. Michael Calore: Lauren, what's your recommendation? Lauren Goode: My recommendation is TV series on HBO Max, The Young Pope, which I started watching because I want to watch The New Pope with John Malkovich, but I figured I should watch The Young Pope with Jude Law first. Michael Calore: Yeah, yeah. Lauren Goode: So it's not new. I think it came out in 2019. Michael Calore: Yeah. Lauren Goode: Jude Law is absolutely diabolical as a Pope. I've recommended a lot of Pope stuff on this show before. My longtime listeners will know. Michael Calore: It's those Catholic roots coming out. Lauren Goode: Yeah, I guess so. You can take a girl out of church, but can't take church out of the girl. Is that even a phrase? Michael Calore: Yes. Lauren Goode: Did I just make that up? Michael Calore: No, but you translated into English from the original Italian, I think is what it is. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Mike, what's your recommendation? Michael Calore: I am going to recommend a newsletter. It is from one of our competitors, New York Magazine. It's a subscriber- Lauren Goode: Never heard of them. Michael Calore: They're great. They do good work. It's a subscriber only newsletter from New York. It's called Night School. And it is people who work at New York Magazine and some of the people who are contracted to work with them explaining how they do their jobs, and how you can apply this knowledge into your hobbies or your own jobs. So for example, they have a newsletter about how to take a photo. And it comes out every week, and it's written by the photo editors and the photographers at New York Magazine. They have one about how to write, which is written by the writers and the editors. Again, that one comes out every week. And then there was one that Jerry Saltz, the art critic, just did, how to look at art. And he basically tells you how to go to a gallery, how to experience a museum, what do you do when you go to an artist talk, what are good questions to ask, what sorts of things you look forward to determine whether something is actually good. The photo one really blew my mind though, like how to take a photo. I take a lot of photos, I think I take a pretty good photo, but I read a few of these newsletters and immediately was able to up my game. And I take better portraits now, for sure. Lauren Goode: That's very cool. Michael Calore: Yeah. So, if you are a subscriber to New York Magazine, you can go into their newsletter page, and you can click subscribe to these, and you get these courses, and they come once a week, and they're very digestible and fun. And you will learn something. Lauren Goode: I actually am a subscriber, and I have not subscribed to that. Michael Calore: Well, here you go. Lauren Goode: I'll do that right now. Michael Calore: This is a benefit that you are not yet earning. Lauren Goode: Amazing. Michael Calore: I hope you love it. Lauren Goode: Thanks for that recommendation, Mike. Michael Calore: And Caroline, thank you for being here, and thank you for your recommendation about the Watching Kids Grow Up Show. Caroline Haskins: No, thank you. And I really need to learn how to take a better picture. I feel like people stop me on the street and they're like, "Can you take a picture of me and my friend?" I have to apologize to them at the end. I'm like, "I did the best I could. I'm sorry." Michael Calore: Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley . If you'd liked what you heard today, please make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or shows, suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@ Today's show was produced by Adriana Tapia and Mark Lida. Amar Lal at Macro Sound Mixed this episode. Mark Lida is our SF studio engineer; Pran Bandi is our New York Studio engineer; Sam Spangler fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborne is our executive producer; Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director; and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio.
WIRED
02-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
A DOGE Recruiter Is Staffing a Project to Deploy AI Agents Across the US Government
Caroline Haskins Vittoria Elliott May 2, 2025 12:19 PM A startup founder told a Palantir alumni Slack group that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees. He was met with emojis of clowns and a man licking a boot. An aide sets up a poster depicting the logo for the DOGE Caucus before a news conference. Photograph:A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig—and he's hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers. Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he's hiring for a 'DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,' according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously. 'We've identified over 300 roles with almost full process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,' he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn't clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment. The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator , and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word 'Fascist.' Three responded with a heart emoji. 'DOGE does not seem interested in finding 'higher impact work' for federal employees,' one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. 'You're complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect.' 'Tbf we're all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt),' another person commented, which received one '+1' reaction. 'How 'DOGE orthogonal' is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?' another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. 'Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?' AccelerateX was originally called AccelerateSF, which VentureBeat reported in 2023 had received support from OpenAI and Anthropic. In its earliest incarnation, AccelerateSF hosted a hackathon for AI developers aimed at using the technology to solve San Francisco's social problems. According to a 2023 Mission Local story, for instance, Jancso proposed that using large language models to help businesses fill out permit forms to streamline the construction paperwork process might help drive down housing prices. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri tells WIRED that the company "never invested in AccelerateX/SF,' but did sponsor a hackathon AccelerateSF hosted in 2023 by providing free access to its API usage at a time when its Claude API 'was still in beta.') In 2024, the mission pivoted, with the venture becoming known as AccelerateX. In a post on X announcing the change, the company posted, 'Outdated tech is dragging down the US Government. Legacy vendors sell broken systems at increasingly steep prices. This hurts every American citizen.' AccelerateX did not respond to a request for comment. According to sources with direct knowledge, Jancso disclosed that AccelerateX had signed a partnership agreement with Palantir in 2024. According to the LinkedIn of someone described as one of AccelerateX's co-founders, Rachel Yee, the company looks to have received funding from OpenAI's Converge 2 Accelerator. Another of AccelerateSF's cofounders, Kay Sorin, now works for OpenAI, having joined the company several months after that hackathon. Sorin and Yee did not respond to requests for comment. Jancso's cofounder, Jordan Wick, a former Waymo engineer, has been an active member of DOGE, appearing at several agencies over the past few months, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education. In 2023, Jancso attended a hackathon hosted by ScaleAI; WIRED found that another DOGE member, Ethan Shaotran, also attended the same hackathon. Since its creation in the first days of the second Trump administration, DOGE has pushed the use of AI across agencies, even as it has sought to cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a DOGE associate suggested using AI to write code for the agency's website; at the General Services Administration, DOGE has rolled out the GSAi chatbot; the group has sought to automate the process of firing government employees with a tool called AutoRIF; and a DOGE operative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is using AI tools to examine and propose changes to regulations. But experts say that deploying AI agents to do the work of 70,000 people would be tricky if not impossible. A federal employee with knowledge of government contracting, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says, 'A lot of agencies have procedures that can differ widely based on their own rules and regulations, and so deploying AI agents across agencies at scale would likely be very difficult.' Oren Etzioni, cofounder of the AI startup Vercept, says that while AI agents can be good at doing some things—like using an internet browser to conduct research—their outputs can still vary widely and be highly unreliable. For instance, customer service AI agents have invented nonexistent policies when trying to address user concerns. Even research, he says, requires a human to actually make sure what the AI is spitting out is correct. 'We want our government to be something that we can rely on, as opposed to something that is on the absolute bleeding edge,' says Etzioni. 'We don't need it to be bureaucratic and slow, but if corporations haven't adopted this yet, is the government really where we want to be experimenting with the cutting edge AI?' Etzioni says that AI agents are also not great 1-1 fits for job replacements. Rather, AI is able to do certain tasks or make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible. 'Unless you're using funny math,' he says, 'no way.' Jancso, first identified by WIRED in February, was one of the earliest recruiters for DOGE in the months before Donald Trump was inaugurated. In December, Jancso, who sources told WIRED said he had been recruited by Steve Davis, president of the Musk-founded Boring Company and a current member of DOGE, used the Palantir alumni group to recruit DOGE members. On December 2nd, 2024, he wrote, 'I'm helping Elon's team find tech talent for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the new admin. This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3. If you're interested in playing a role in this mission, please reach out in the next few days.' According to one source at SpaceX, who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak to the press, Jancso appeared to be one of the DOGE members who worked out of the company's DC office in the days before inauguration along with several other people who would constitute some of DOGE's earliest members. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Palantir was cofounded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and long-time Trump supporter with close ties to Musk. Palantir, which provides data analytics tools to several government agencies including the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security , has received billions of dollars in government contracts. During the second Trump administration, the company has been involved in helping to build a 'mega API' to connect data from the Internal Revenue Service to other government agencies, and is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create a massive surveillance platform to identify immigrants to target for deportation.
WIRED
02-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins
Caroline Haskins Leah Feiger Apr 2, 2025 7:39 PM The Heard and McDonald Islands are among the dozens of targets of President Donald Trump's latest round of tariffs. But they have no exports, because no one lives there. King Penguins contemplating the snow on Heard Island, Antarctica. Photograph:On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the US was imposing reciprocal tariffs on a small collection of Antarctic islands that are not inhabited by humans, as part of a global trade war aimed at asserting US dominance. The Heard and McDonald Islands, known for their populations of penguins and seabirds, can only be reached by sea. Trump announced the countries now subject to tariffs in a Wednesday press conference, using a poster as a prop. Additional countries—including the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are, incidentally, not countries—were listed on sheets of paper distributed to reporters. One of the sheets claims that the Heard and McDonald Islands currently charge a 'Tariff to the U.S.A.' of 10 percent, clarifying in tiny letters that this includes "currency manipulation and trade barriers." In return, the sheet says that the US will charge "discounted reciprocal tariffs" on the islands at a rate of 10 percent. The islands are small. Their reported 37,000 hectares of land makes them a little larger than Philadelphia. According to UNESCO, which designated the islands as a World Heritage Site in 1997, they are covered in rocks and glaciers. Heard Island is the site of an active volcano, and McDonald Island is surrounded by several smaller rocky islands. The islands are home to large populations of penguins and elephant seals. The Australian Antarctic Division manages the islands, preserving the environment and conducting research on the large wildlife population, as well as climate change's impact on Heard and McDonald's permanent glaciers. On Wednesday, Australia and a number of its island territories, including Christmas and Cocos Keeling Islands, were also hit with tariffs of 10 percent. Norfolk Island, which Australia also claims, got a tariff of 29 percent. The White House did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment. When reached for comment, the Australian Antarctic Division referred WIRED to the country's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which did not respond prior to publication. "One could argue this is in breach of the international Antarctic spirit," Elizabeth Buchanan, a polar geopolitics expert and senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells WIRED. Under the Antarctic Treaty, which promotes international scientific cooperation and stipulates that the continent should be used for peaceful purposes, land in Antarctica cannot be owned by any country. However, Australia has claimed since 1953 that the islands are Australian territories. Australia also laid claim to the water surrounding the islands via a 2002 act that established a marine reserve. Last year, it passed a law extending the boundaries of that reserve, approximately quadrupling its size. The Australian Defense Force monitors the waters surrounding the Heard and McDonald Islands as a part of 'Operation Resolute,' which covers the area 200 nautical miles from Australia's mainland and 'approximately 10 per cent of the world's surface.' In addition to Heard and McDonald Islands, it also applies to the water surrounding the Christmas, Cocos Keeling, Macquarie, Norfolk and Lord Howe islands. The Australian Defense Force claims that the goal of Operation Resolute is to address "security threats" like piracy and pollution. The Australian Antarctic Division claims that the area occasionally receives ships involved in scientific research, commercial fishing, and tourism.
WIRED
04-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Google Lifts a Ban on Using Its AI for Weapons and Surveillance
Paresh Dave Caroline Haskins Feb 4, 2025 3:47 PM Google published principals in 2018 barring its AI technology from being used for sensitive purposes. Weeks into President Donald Trump's second term, those guidelines are being overhauled. The Google Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, US. Photograph: MikeGoogle announced Tuesday that it is overhauling the principles governing how it uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technology. The company removed language promising not to pursue 'technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,' 'weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,' 'technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,' and 'technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.' The changes were disclosed in a note appended to the top of a 2018 blog post unveiling the guidelines. 'We've made updates to our AI Principles. Visit for the latest,' the note reads. In a blog post on Tuesday, a pair of Google executives cited the increasingly widespread use of AI, evolving standards, and geopolitical battles over AI as the 'backdrop' to why Google's principals needed to be overhauled. Google first published the principles in 2018 as it moved to quell internal protests over the company's decision to work on a US military drone program. In response, it declined to renew the government contract and also announced a set of principles to guide future uses of its advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Among other measures, the principles stated Google would not develop weapons, certain surveillance systems, or technologies that undermine human rights. But in an announcement on Tuesday, Google did away with those commitments. The new webpage no longer lists a set of banned uses for Google's AI initiatives. Instead, the revised document offers Google more room to pursue potentially sensitive use cases. It states Google will implement 'appropriate human oversight, due diligence, and feedback mechanisms to align with user goals, social responsibility, and widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.' Google also now says it will work to 'mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes.' 'We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights,' wrote James Manyika, Google senior vice president for research, technology and society and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company's esteemed AI research lab. 'And we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.' They added that Google will continue to focus on AI projects 'that align with our mission, our scientific focus, and our areas of expertise, and stay consistent with widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.' US President Donald Trump's return to office last month has galvanized many companies to revise policies promoting equity and other liberal ideals. Google spokesperson Alex Krasov says the changes have been in the works much longer. Google lists its new goals as pursuing bold, responsible, and collaborative AI initiatives. Gone are phrases such as 'be socially beneficial' and maintain 'scientific excellence.' Added is a mention of 'respecting intellectual property rights.' After the initial release of its AI principles roughly seven years ago, Google created two teams tasked with reviewing whether projects across the company were living up to the commitments. One focused on Google's core operations, such as search, ads, Assistant, and Maps. Another focused on Google Cloud offerings and deals with customers. The unit focused on Google's consumer business was split up early last year as the company raced to develop chatbots and other generative AI tools to compete with OpenAI. Timnit Gebru, a former co-lead of Google's ethical AI research team who was later fired from that position, claims the company's commitment to the principles had always been in question. 'I would say that it's better to not pretend that you have any of these principles than write them out and do the opposite,' she says. Three former Google employees who had been involved in reviewing projects to ensure they aligned with the company's principles say the work was challenging at times because of the varying interpretations of the principles and pressure from higher-ups to prioritize business imperatives. Google still has language about preventing harm in its official Cloud Platform Acceptable Use Policy, which includes various AI-driven products. The policy forbids violating 'the legal rights of others' and engaging in or promoting illegal activity, such as 'terrorism or violence that can cause death, serious harm, or injury to individuals or groups of individuals.' However, when pressed about how this policy squares with Project Nimbus—a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, which has benefited the country's military — Google has said that the agreement 'is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.' 'The Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,' Google spokesperson Anna Kowalczyk told WIRED in July. Google Cloud's Terms of Service similarly forbid any applications that violate the law or 'lead to death or serious physical harm to an individual.' Rules for some of Google's consumer-focused AI services also ban illegal uses and some potentially harmful or offensive uses. Page 2
