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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Caroline Haskins

‘I’m the new Oppenheimer!’: my soul-destroying day at Palantir’s first-ever AI warfare conference

Palantir Alex Karp Eric Schmidt Mark Milley David Cohen Oppenheimer United States Gaza America CIA
karp gestures widely as radakin looks up and smiles
The co-founder and CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, and Adm Tony Radakin at the event last week. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Palantir

On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city’s biggest convention hall welcomed America’s military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that’s not how they would describe it.

It was the inaugural “AI Expo for National Competitiveness”, hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the “techno-economic” thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference’s lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that’s best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump’s family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.

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