Palantir’s kill chain meets the multipolar child
Anis Raiss, The Cradle, May 4, 2026 —
Alex Karp’s AI manifesto exposes an empire trying to turn algorithmic warfare into doctrine just as the multipolar world learns to answer in its own code.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the emperor parades naked through the city until a child says what everyone else is too afraid to admit. On 18 April 2026, Palantir CEO Alex Karp staged his own parade. Palantir posted his 22-point manifesto on X, and within days it had drawn 32 million views. Scholars called it technofascism.
Outside the Atlanticist seminar room, the verdict was simpler. The empire’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) doctrine had exposed itself.
The manifesto arrived as a system error from a collapsing order, selling algorithmic domination just as the multipolar world was proving it could no longer be commanded from Washington, Tel Aviv, or Silicon Valley.
Beneath the swagger sat a simpler fear. Empire’s machines are no longer the only ones running. The panic sits in the document’s polished certainty, in its belief that code can restore the discipline that fleets, sanctions, and bombing campaigns no longer impose.
What follows is what the manifesto already admits.
Fascism in product language
The 22 points were no accident. They condensed Karp’s 2025 book ‘The Technological Republic’ – co-authored with Palantir’s head of corporate affairs, Nicholas Zamiska, and published by Crown Currency. Palantir’s communications team pushed the summary through the corporate X account, where it gathered tens of millions of views.
Cas Mudde, among the most cited scholars on the global far right, called it “Technofascism pure!” Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis answered with a single line: “If Evil could tweet, this is what it would!” From Vienna, the philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh reached the same diagnosis.
Celine Castets-Renard, Canada Research Chair in International AI Law at Ottawa, went further: a “dystopian, techno-fascist vision of the world.” Tim Squirrell of Foxglove told The Guardian the document read as “the ramblings of a supervillain.”
The historian Tarik Cyril Amar went furthest. He named the manifesto for what its structural ancestor was: Alex Karp’s Mein AI – Hitler’s Mein Kampf updated for the algorithmic age.
The irony is almost too neat. Karp earned his PhD in social theory at Frankfurt’s Goethe University in 2002, in the intellectual home of Adorno and Habermas, the school that produced some of the deepest analyses of how fascism takes hold, from The Authoritarian Personality to Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The manifesto Karp’s company has now published is what scholars from that same school would recognize as fascism in its newest form.
The first AI war
To read the manifesto properly, you have to know what Palantir was doing in the weeks before Karp posted it. On 28 February 2026, the US and the occupation state launched ‘Operation Epic Fury,’ the first large-scale military campaign substantially run by AI.
By 9 April, US Central Command (CENTCOM) had reported more than 13,000 strikes against Iranian targets, with 1,000 hit on the opening day alone. The platform doing the work was Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which fused satellite imagery, drone footage, and signals intelligence to “identify, prioritize and recommend strike packages against Iranian military sites, nuclear facilities and leadership targets.”
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar told Bloomberg TV in March that the war would be remembered as “the first major conflict where artificial intelligence played a central role.”
CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper confirmed it on the record: “Our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools. These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds.”
Maven generated more than 3,000 targeting options against Iran in 24 hours during the opening phase. Kill-chain expert Craig Jones told Vision of Humanity that the system had compressed targeting decisions to a tempo “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.”
Philosopher Elke Schwarz, speaking with France 24, calculated that during the first 24 hours, US forces launched approximately 41 missiles per hour, making “meaningful human oversight practically impossible.”
Maven’s target classification accuracy hovered around 60 percent, against 84 percent for trained human analysts. The Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab was struck during the same campaign. It killed at least 175 people, most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and 12.
Was this one of Maven’s misclassifications? The Pentagon has not said. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responded on 31 March by publishing a list of 18 American technology companies – Palantir, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia among them – and declaring their facilities in West Asia “legitimate targets.”
That is the war into which the manifesto was released. Karp wrote his 22 points with the blood still on the interface.
Where the doctrine exposes itself
Point 12 of the manifesto reads, “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”
The 56-day war Karp’s stack had just helped fight was a war over Iranian atomic facilities. Read the two facts together, and the contradiction is total. If the atomic age has ended, why did Washington and Tel Aviv wage 56 days of war over Iranian atoms? If those facilities mattered enough to bomb, then point 12 collapses under its own claim. Karp cannot square the two claims without indicting one of them.
Points 21 and 22 give the answer. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” the manifesto declares. “We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.”
The war was never about uranium. Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the occupation state is not. Iran was bombed for its program; the occupation state holds 90-plus warheads undisturbed.
Point 21 supplies the philosophical rationale for that asymmetry.
Iran’s nuclear sites were treated as targets because they marked sovereignty. The manifesto attacks the right of civilizations that point 21 calls “dysfunctional and regressive” to claim equal standing. That doctrine speaks clearly enough. That is the doctrine. The contradiction in point 12 is not a flaw in the document. It is the document’s confession.