Palantir CEO Alex Karp Receives Hudson Institute’s 2025 Herman Kahn Award

Shyam Sankar:

Well, I’d like to introduce you to Alex Karp. And I know all of you are thinking, well, this man needs no introduction, and you’re right about that. But you know Alex Karp, the tech mogul, the defender of the West, the man who dreams of spraying fentanyl-laced urine on short sellers, the author of The Technological Republic, the subject of The Philosopher in the Valley, the only person who has an optimistic view of AI and American greatness.

But in other words, you know Alex Karp, my boss. And I want you to know Alex Karp, my friend. Next to my late father, no person has a greater impact on my life than Alex. And that’s true in obvious ways, the success of Palantir, the faith that he’s placed in me. But it’s also true in other ways. He’s been my rabbi, he’s been my confidant, my guru. And at times when I’ve given him cause—and I’ve given him cause—he’s been my parole officer. One of the first things Alex told me 20 years ago when we started working together is that he thought I had the constitution of a goat—and he did not mean the Gen Z expression of greatest of all time. He meant the animal—that it seemed like I could survive eating trash and plastic in a barren wasteland, and such a skill would come in handy in Washington DC.

That’s not a standard rubric for getting a job. But there’s nothing conventional about Alex. Some months later he asked me if I knew why French restaurants were so good. I in fact did not. At the age of 24, the closest I’d gotten to a French restaurant is a French fry. He educated me that it’s in part because the wait staff are actually part of the kitchen staff. They understand the technique, they understand how the food is made, they understand the methodology.

In other words, they understand the food from first principles. They were a part of a complex system of delivering the experience. And this was his inspiration for creating the conception of forward deployed engineering. Now, I didn’t have the heart to tell my father that my Cornell and Stanford education was about to qualify me to be a waiter at Chez Karp, but that’s what happened.

My father and Alex did agree on one thing for certain, which is that the Bhagavad Gita is amongst the most important books ever written. Now, my father believed this despite never having read it. To Alex it was the most important business book ever written. Well, maybe coequal with Menachem Begin’s biography. And frequently and as my literal guru in this case, he’d remind me of how Krishna selectively revealed the truth to Arjun as he was driving his chariot into battle, purposefully matching what Arjun was ready to hear and how he was ready to hear it.

And that begs the question of course that I’m sure you have, which is, What movie does Alex hold as the most important business movie ever made? Well, that would be the Kung Fu classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. If you know the plot, then maybe you can see why. But for everyone else, you’re just going to have to ask Alex.

Talking to Alex has always been like talking to an oracle: even when you understand what he’s saying, the revelations are inscrutable. When I do understand him, the predictions beggar belief. But then somehow, he’s almost always right. Al, as his friends at Haverford knew him, is a mensch. He wants to see you succeed—you. He has a wildly positive thumb view of the world, rooted in a deep belief in the individual, especially the individual as an artist. And he modeled Palantir as an artist colony, not a factory. In place of conformity to process he created a place that celebrated creative rebellion, a place of risk-taking, a place that seeks to tease out, develop, and back the artist. And, he says, that makes us feel like a cult. I agree—we’re a cult, not a company. But he’s quipped now and again, he was the leader of a cult but had none of the benefits.

I will leave you with one final story. I remember in 2008, our first Department of War deployment, I was leading a team of 10 people. We were working for literally 14 days straight, 19-hour days. We consumed a heroic amount of Red Bull. At the end of this, I called him incredibly grumpy. Humorless from sleep deprivation and I told him, “This is not going to work. It’s unsustainable. We’re going to fail here.”

Without skipping a beat, he broke out in deep and self-satisfied laughter, what was probably 30 seconds, but in my humorless mood felt like 10 minutes. And I was shocked. And of course he understood that this was the only way that it was going to work, even if no one else did. Not our customers, not our investors, and least of all, not me.

The Hudson Institute is presenting Alex with the Herman Kahn Award, which is fitting because both men share many similar qualities: brilliant, unconventional, and people who make others nervous at dinner parties. Herman thought about the unthinkable, and Alex built a company to make sense of it all. And beneath that philosopher’s hair and the ski gear is someone who believes that serious technology should serve serious purposes, that the West needs to defend itself with both wisdom and strength, and that you can’t protect democracy without occasionally making everyone a little uncomfortable.

So please join me in welcoming a man who proves daily that you can run a half-trillion-dollar tech company while looking like you got lost on the way to Burning Man: Alex Karp.

Dr. Alex Karp:

Thank you. Thank you so much. This award means a lot to me. And I’ve obviously, the alignment, the way in which the founder and participants here have shaped the world on the back of technology is super impressive. I have a lot of remarks that I wanted to make, but I would say for all of you who are younger and on your way to build important things, there is no greater award than getting a speech like that from Shyam, especially since Shyam can barely write. He must have spent a lot of time on that one. And we all know that the ups and downs we went through. Shyam’s father, he mentioned, was one of the great figures in building Palantir and told Shyam, you may never leave Palantir. That’s probably why he didn’t leave. Also with a great deal of love towards me, which I really appreciate.

And I’ll tell you a story where—maybe I’ve saved Shyam and others many, many times—but Shyam saved me after COVID. I’m basically an introvert, and every day I enjoyed being alone more than the day before. Every day it was like the silence and it was just the best thing that—I mean, obviously once we realized we were going to survive—I was like, this is . . . I have this place in New Hampshire. I have no neighbors. I have bears and deer, and actually all the neighbors I do have vote the same way everyone in this room does.

And then Shyam showed up one day and he’s like, This isn’t cutting it. You got to get back. You got to come back. This isn’t going to work. And honestly, if anyone else had showed up, I’d have been like, that’s so nice you said that, I’m really enjoying myself. You can’t spend a lot of money in New Hampshire where I live. And thank you and thank you all the Palantirians who burned the midnight oil and still do for sticking up for the West and listening to my crazy ideas.

And I have a bunch of remarks that to me, honestly, are less important than that introduction, which really means a lot to me. But just slightly remarks on what have we learned about AI in business that’s relevant and what I’m pretty certain is going to affect our culture in philosophy, which was once going to my metier and I realized should not be for lots of reasons, but including most importantly, I thought it was more important to actually do things.

But one of the things people forget about philosophy is the core concepts are actually downstream from things that were built in the world. Modern architecture led to modern philosophy, postmodern architecture led to postmodern philosophy. And there’s a weird way in which I think a lot of the trends that look inscrutable to us are actually downstream of tech and culture and are particularly pronounced in this culture, which is the only culture that really, really matters in AI.

It’s from chips and what we call ontology to large language models, to the talent, to the venture backing, to the understanding of how to organize the talent. They’re in one country. Our country. And this does not make sense because—it could have made sense in other trends. But actually the mathematical basis of large language models started in Germany, it was Leibniz’s idea of how to do probability, and then moved through France.

And the best mathematicians in the world are mostly in France and in Russia. And so, What was it and what is it about what’s happening that is affecting things that look very odd? Like why do Ivy League trained humanities, highly privileged people, vote against their interest, seemingly, to elect political figures with no experience and who clearly . . . Why are they misaligned with their own interests, would be a question. And then, Why is it in America?

And I want to just start with the most obvious point, that is so obvious. We forget that the rights we have in this country are inalienable and they’re given to us by God. If you compare this to, say, the German Constitution, which I wrote down, the same as where we talk about, “Endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” The German version, which translates roughly as, “A conscience of his responsibility before God.” So not from God and mankind. “Inspired by the will of an equal member to be part of,” this is a rough translation, “united Europe and to contribute to world peace.”

So we have these rights that are incorporated in our First and Second, in our Fourth Amendment, that aren’t given to us by humans, they’re given to us by a higher power. That’s very, very important in understanding—when you look at businesses as an example, some businesses that are five years old appeal to be 20 years old. Some businesses—we have Rupert Murdoch here who seems to be getting younger every year, every year, I’ve known you for a long time. Why is that? 

And the principle . . . And then so you have this revolution, it’s happening in a country which at least constitutionally, obviously not historically, is much, much older than Europe. United Europe, it’s under 30 years old and it’s still not clear what it is really. You have a country which should not have been the leader of what matters in the world, but is the leader in the world.

And then we have a very big moral problem. The basis of most human rights, historically, philosophically, legally—except for in America—have been based on our basically superior cognitive capacities. And as Huntington once famously said, “We believe in the West that our values are superior. The non-West understands it’s our ability to organize violence, which is an intellectual and technological endeavor.” And that’s the thing that has made us, at the end of the day, be able to be superior over nonhuman life forms.

But with large language models and AI, you actually have, the first time where we . . . How do we justify our obvious superiority? Not just as a culture but as a species vis-à-vis something that may be able to do cognitive things that we can’t do. And we are the lone country that has the basis for this. Our rights are not given to us by our intellectual superiority. They’re not given to us by consensus built in Germany or in the United Kingdom. They’re not built to dedicate to world peace, although that would be nice. They’re given to us by our right that we were born here as Americans and those rights are indelible.

And this is a very big distinction. And it’s one that we neglect and do not talk about. And for lots of reasons many in the valley may not be interested in talking about. And then, Why are these so important? Well, first of all, so obviously we have our rights vis-à-vis the machine. And then you also have . . . What does it mean to be in a world where you have very high-end labor being exceedingly valuable—formerly high-end labor, meaning you studied humanities and you would be working in a 501(c)(3) dedicated to the United Nations—not being objectively valuable? I don’t mean morally. Most of us here would look askance at that as being misaligned with what they’re saying.

But even if you don’t view it that way, the reality is large language models can do all that work. And if it’s an ontology, we can do it much, much better. So it’s objectively not valuable. What is valuable is working-class, vocationally trained people with specific knowledge. And here I see a tethering between the specificity of America, that we have a Constitution given to us by God; that we believe in higher principles; that we defend them, if we need to, with our own guns, with our own free speech, and with our own rights of privacy and the specific things that create value in the world now. Meaning specific knowledge of how to build something, how to target something, how to protect data, how to be a nurse or a doctor.

These skills can be very levered and are excruciatingly important. So you have a constitutional and moral tethering of exactly what you would need in one specific culture. And that’s this culture. But you’re going to have a lot of turbulence, because we’re now moving from people who believe they deserved empathy—and this is one I think the biggest tensions, one of the very radical things about Palantir that our enemies do not believe, we at Palantir have maximal empathy for Americans—for the right of Americans to be free and for men and women that actually do work.

And our society . . . if you look at any professions, what you’ll see, we read the law so somehow the law will not allow us to protect Americans who are being murdered by fentanyl. But more Americans have died of fentanyl than have died in any war since World War II. If those were Stanford grads or Cornell grads, you can bet your last dollar the erudite jurisdictions would read the law so that you could stop that. But they’re not. They’re working class, they’re mostly male, they’re mostly white, and mostly people don’t care.

And we have to change that. When things go wrong because those people know that no one cares about them, that’s also our fault. Not anyone in this room. But we don’t show empathy. If you look at, for example, the way analysts more neutrally do models, they love the people they like, it shows up downstream in the model. That’s why Palantir was undervalued. We were undervalued and misunderstood because we were doing radical, crazy stuff they didn’t like.

If you look all across the world and what you’re seeing go on in America now is an enormous shift towards . . . We have to actually look at where the value’s created and have empathy with people who really deserve it. And those people have not gotten enough empathy, and technology is about to change that. And it’s going to change everything politically because it is actually real. The worker, the person on the front, the people that write the scripts that protect us, all those projects you saw are being done by people with vocational training in the military. They’re creating enormous value and they deserve the respect that they’re going to ask for and they’re going to get. And Palantir and all of us that are Palantir are behind that.

And then conversely, how do you get a situation in this city where you just vote for someone who has no experience in doing what they’re going to do? None. I view myself as classically progressive. I care. You know what classically progressive is? The government has to work. You know what that means? You need the very best people. Who are the people? They have experience running complicated organizations. They have ideas on how to run software. They understand the complexity of the law. They enforce it. If you’re really serious about making the things work for the worker, those are the people you vote for. Those are the people that need to be in charge. And that’s why a lot of these crazy things are actually very much explicable based on what is going on in AI and who’s creating the value and how they create it.

Then last, maybe not least, on the AI front, one of the reasons we are in a kind of a doom or AI cycle is because you can only explain the promise of AI if you understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture. Because there are dangers in AI. But the reality is there’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China. Europe—I spent half my life in Europe. At this point, when we talk about Europe, we do exactly the same thing as when we hear about educational programs led by mayors or safety programs in the inner city. We just say, I really hope it works out.

And I want Europe to win, but we’re on our own. And of course there are dangers in AI. And AI is also—and will never be anything other than—a dual-use technology. But we must, must embrace our ability to build it, our ability to own the chips, to own the software, build the large language models, and run very, very quickly. Because again, to quote Huntington again, “If we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be dictating the rule of law.” The things we hold precious in this culture, I would say embodied by our Constitution and especially in our first four amendments, those things will not be the same if we are not the dominant technological culture in the world.

And while we may have tons of disagreements on these things, those are really the alternatives. And most of what we can do, in my view, to counter adversaries is also to build the technology. And then one of the lessons of Palantir is no one’s coming to defend you, you have to defend yourself. And we used to live in a world where you could rely on experts to articulate our vision. But who showed up to articulate our vision in this last election, in my hometown, formerly hometown? If we’re waiting for people to articulate and fight for us, we are cooked.

And you know the people who disagree with us are often better organized and more motivated. And that’s a huge problem we have to solve. Palantirians, half of the reason we succeeded is we are just motivated and very organized and very meritocratic. Meritocracy is the most underestimated, powerful, revolutionary tool that exists in any enterprise ever. And that means . . . you know Shyam is a great example. Shyam was not everyone’s cup of tea. And he advanced because he—for really two reasons—he advanced because I thought he was going to be an incredible human being. And second, and I’ll leave you with this, because I saw him interacting with his brother. And I was like, “If he could love Palantir half as much as he loves his brother, we are going to have the most important enterprise in the world.”

And the capacity to identify and advance people on a meritocratic base that have capacity to care is the single most revolutionary tool. And my kind of thinker has been infected—meaning the progressive party of the Democrats—by people who do not believe in this. And by the way, to my democratic friends here and whoever sees this, we must stand up. One of the most important lessons in the West is, if you do not fight—and as importantly, if you accept the logic that you can never vote for somebody because they have some belief structure you disagree with—you are empowering the radicals in your own party, and they will control everything.

Whether it’s immigration in Germany, which is functionally controlled by people that still believe in chain migration because you could never do a coalition with the Right; or whether it’s the Democratic Party that is functionally being torn apart by people who believe in anti-progressive anti-meritocratic values, as embodied by not having a border. No progressive ever has believed in an open border. None. Never. It has never existed because that undermines the value of workers and their labor.

And if you want to see what happens to a culture when you don’t fight, look at who’s standing up in my former party to say this is ridiculous. Who stood up in Germany to talk about migration? We cannot allow ourselves to become Europe. We really have to fight. And I’m sure many in here are going to be involved in that. And Palantir, I think, has been at the forefront of this. And I’m most proud of the fact that we’ve been able to shift the culture to being, in Silicon Valley, away from being skeptical of America to being pro-America. The idea that you would give tools to give Americans an unfair advantage on the battlefield was viewed as heretical until recently.

Now it’s viewed as common sense: the idea that we enforced meritocracy when we were getting sued by the DOJ for basically just hiring the most qualified people. And if you do that and you succeed, you can actually change the way people think. Thank you.