Transcription
[Music] It's been designed to look like a trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster. A sophisticated AI powered mission carried out across international borders. Standby.
When you watch the ads of data analytics firm Palunteer, it's difficult to figure out exactly what the company does. Juan Sebastian Pinto used to produce adverts for Palanteer. After he left, he criticized the company's work with the Israeli military.
"We've seen over the last few years, automated warfare leads to immense amounts of civilian casualties, destruction, inaccuracy. So what you see here is Palunteer kind of attempting to mask over that reality and that is why they try to make these tools seem like Michael Bay productions."
After leaving Palunteer, after watching automated warfare in the real world and its effects, how it kills not only warfighters but entire families, journalists, people who work at hospitals, emergency workers. I look at this and it looks completely ridiculous because it is a completely fabricated image of what automated warfare really looks like.
These promotional videos deal very much in conjuring up a mood or producing a mood or to use a term that is um popular in that arena to produce a vibe. And that vibe is dark. It elicits a sense of danger. So it isn't appealing to necessarily rational ways of thinking about Palanteer's products, but it produces a way of of tapping into a very very effective emotion and that is fear. And so it really oludes the fact that war is always horrific. This idea that wars are clean or they they can be done in a way that no lives will be harmed, that is an illusion.
From the mass monitoring and surveillance of non-US citizens in America to the tools it is providing the Israeli military, Palanteer's automated solutions are under scrutiny around the world. The company's co-founders, Peter Teal and Alex Kb have repeatedly expressed their unwavering support for Israel.
"I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel because my my bias is to defer to Israel."
Following the October 7 attacks, they met with Israel's president, Isaac Herdzog, and agreed to what both parties called a strategic partnership. Palunteer was contracted to supply technology that would help the Israeli military's war related missions, though it has been vague about exactly what that means.
Palunteer fundamentally does what a lot of data companies do. They collect data. They make that data readable. They derive analytics from that data and then they help automate actions. A lot of companies do this, but what makes Palunteer different is where they apply these systems and how they use them. And what you see in Gaza is Palunteer's tools being used to support a state that is at war with managing its information, deriving insights from that information, everything that is involved in the execution of a target in modern warfare.
It is hard to definitively establish exactly how much the Israeli authorities depend on Palunteer products for their military objectives in Gaza, but it is clear that Palunteer is providing some pretty critical infrastructure, including AI targeting systems that they are using to draw up kill lists and to impart violence and destruction and the complete decimation of civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
"AIP leverages large language models to allow operators to quickly ask questions. We have an entire suite of AI tools, including an LLM based interface that allows for soldiers to make better targeting decisions." And knowing even in Palunteer's own words that their relationship with Israel is long-standing and goes back to before the war makes us believe that Palunteer is quite critical to the operations of the Israeli military.
Palunteer got its start with an investment from Inutel, the CIA's venture capital firm. From the beginning, the company's founders tried to cultivate a mythology around their ability to use data and predictive models to find, identify, and eliminate America's enemies.
"And what we do is we use what legal scholars call predicate based research. So, we would look at you and then we would go out and say, 'Oh, there's lots of different things in your life that may be indicative of someone being someone involved in bad behavior.'"
After it went public in 2020, Palunteer went on a PR blitz, broadcasting ads at sports events, placing them in airports, and on college campuses. Both Peter Thiel and Alex Karp have deeply entrenched themselves in Donald Trump's White House. As Palunteer's CEO, Karp has styled himself as a deviant philosopher. He has a doctorate in neocclassical social theory and recently published the technological republic, a book marketed as a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency.
One of the first things to realize about Peter Theel and Alex Karp is that they are do not come from a technical engineering background but are both you know deeply sociological thinkers. They understand philosophy of language uh information and how those tools can be weaponized.
Found here as a workplace is a place where you're continually surrounded by narratives that indicate that you're exceptional, that you're working on the hardest problems, that you're helping the biggest institutions support democracy. Palunteer is here to disrupt and make our the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.
One of the things that Palunteer's leadership has been particularly good at doing is to set up a sort of a clash of civilizations narrative in which the west is in peril. It is in the service of our nation and with great thought and uh applying the ethics of war which America does sometimes you have to kill the other side. Alex Karp has been quite clear about his willingness to kill people in an effort to sustain Western civilization. That in fact he didn't really bat an eyelet at the fact that uh his tools were being used to kill Palestinians even if they were terrorists in his words.
"AI and your technology from Palunteer kills Palestinians mostly terrorists. That's true."
So these are really bellose overtly bellose statements that he deals in and the fact that he's very much in the public eye suggests that this is not accidental but that this is a part of Palunteer's marketing campaign and branding that both Peter Teal, Alex Karp, and others in that environment functioning as what I like to call hypemen kind of defense influencers. We're doing it. And I'm sure you're enjoying this as much as I am. That makes such outrageous claims that the narrative slowly shifts. The narrative shifts towards, oh well, yes, maybe the world is broken. Well, maybe yes, we are in perpetual crisis. Maybe we need this urgency.
Both Alex Karp and Peter Teal have become the poster boys for a wave of technomilitarism sweeping the US. Their embrace of the technology of war is part of a vibe shift in Silicon Valley, which has tech CEOs clamoring for Pentagon contracts and even enlisting in the military. Yet, mainstream media coverage of figures like Karp and Teal has too often fixated on their maverick personalities and business success rather than interrogating them on the technologies they build.
"You are absolutely phenomenal. Let's just start with today's event. and you get a chance to strut your stuff. You're showing new tools, new capabilities, and a string of deals. Talk to us about that."
Palunteer has in many ways perfected the ability of covering up what is a complex, bloody, violent reality, that is to say, war. And in the case at hand, genocide with a sleek startup type one-click solution aesthetic. from the battlefield to the boardroom.
More scrutiny within the media, I think, could shift the narrative and the dial on how we see the palentes of the world, not just as benign startup, but that they are actually playing an active political role even in things like genocide.
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