How AI Is Changing Warfare | Palantir CTO

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar argues the US has lost deterrence and must re-industrialize by empowering military heretics over bureaucratic process.

• Sankar’s ‘18 thesis’: the US has lost deterrence and lacks the industrial base it had in WWII — process worship is the cause of decline.
• Europe has produced zero companies worth over €100B from scratch in 50 years; the US has created all its trillion-dollar companies in that same window.
• Defense primes have ~9% operating margins and trade below 2x revenue — Sankar argues they need to be more valuable, not vilified.
• Palantir’s time-to-value for enterprise AI has compressed from eight weeks to roughly one week over the past two years.
• Sankar believes AI value will accrue at the chip layer and the ontology/AI-infrastructure layer — model providers are being commoditized and must run up the stack.
• Palantir holds twice-yearly ‘weeks of revolt’ where employees build whatever they want, explicitly to prove current approaches are wrong.
• Rickover built the first nuclear submarine in seven years despite opposition from Oppenheimer; the US nuclear sub force remains a key asymmetric advantage over China today.

2026-03-10 · Watch on YouTube