Palantir CEO’s rant about the Anthropic-Pentagon feud threatening his company was about a lot more than a dirty word

AI “seems much worse for the math people than the word people,” Peter Thiel tersely said in 2024. He likely wasn’t anticipating that just two years later his Palantir co-founder, CEO Alex Karp, would use some decidedly flowery language to describe people he thought were stupid.

“If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job … and you’re gonna screw the military—if you don’t think that’s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded,”...