An official at the U.S.-based data-analysis firm Palantir Technologies Inc. pointed to a location on a screen at the company’s headquarters in Denver, Colorado, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border.

“This image was taken of a site just north of Ukraine,” he said on Feb. 10 during a demonstration of software that coordinates satellite imagery. “A planner might want to know how frequently this site needs to be imaged so that they could detect new movements.”

Palantir’s software provides analysis of the crisis unfolding in Ukraine and other regions around the world to assist the U.S. government and military.

“Over just a two-day time period, for example, there have been 1,200 satellite flyovers,” the official continued.

The firm, which has grown much closer to Washington than other IT giants and Silicon Valley darlings, uses its software to schedule image collection from hundreds of satellites orbiting the Earth to deliver critical information to decision makers.

The official then pulled up an image of the South China Sea, where China continues to increase its naval power. The company’s software enables its customers to continuously monitor the movements of Chinese submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers and other vessels, providing vital tactical information for strategic and policy decisions.

“How can our technology enable our customers to make decisions faster than their adversaries? To do that, we need more eyes,” the official said.

Palantir Technologies was established in 2003 by Peter Thiel, a well-known investor and a co-founder of the major U.S. payment service provider PayPal.

The company, known for its sophisticated data analysis using artificial intelligence technology, provides analytical software to the U.S. military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and allied governments.

Its technologies were reportedly used when the U.S. government discovered the hideout of Osama bin Laden, the head of the al-Qaida international terrorist organization.

The company’s software enables its customers to combine massive amounts of disparate pieces of data to allow its clients to track military movements in chronological order and analyze them closely.

Palantir technicians develop new software in cooperation with the U.S. military, at a time when software that processes big data is increasingly seen as more crucial during war than even weapons or other hardware.

Although Google LLC or Facebook Inc., now Meta Platforms Inc., maintain some distance from the U.S. government and military, Palantir is one example of how Big Data is working closely with Washington.

When the firm was listed in 2020, its registration documents said that it would not trade with adversarial countries or the Chinese Communist Party.

Over the past decades since the end of the Cold War, a consensus had been reached that globalization would foster world peace because international businesses--IT giants and multinational companies--deepen mutual dependence among nations.

But the emergence of China as a hegemonic world power, and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are beginning to shake that belief.

AI WILL ‘DICTATE NORMS OF THE FUTURE’

Alex Capri, an expert at the Hinrich Foundation, a nonprofit think tank focused on trade issues, believes the world has entered an era of techno-nationalism, when nations--particularly the United States and China--struggle for hegemony over data and AI.

“Data is a commodity. It’s tradeable. But it’s also a tool and a resource for all kinds of activities, positive and negative,” Capri said.

These activities include state attempts to disseminate fake news or controversial information to undermine political adversaries.

“As globalization becomes more regionalized and localized, we will see more ring-fencing around strategic data industries.”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp also emphasizes the importance of data. Known as a unique businessman who majored in philosophy and earned a doctorate in Germany, Karp said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun that his industry is now the key to the success of nations.

“The country that controls the best software, in this case AI software and its many manifestations, will dictate the norms of the future, the same way the countries that controlled the nuclear bomb in the last half decade de facto defined the rules of the game,” Karp said.

Karp showed dissatisfaction with U.S. IT giants that have expanded their businesses worldwide after the Cold War ended, regardless of the norms embodied by different states.

“Silicon Valley 1.0 believed it should build technology primarily for the military and repurpose that technology so that it would be useful for the rest of humanity,” he said.

Then, “Silicon Valley 2.0” marketed its products as things that help people, while at the same time was transforming their users into the products being consumed, he said.

In other words, Google and Facebook are essentially advertising companies. Consumers use their services because they are free, but the companies vacuum up their personal data and put it up for sale at enormous profits.

More recently, Big Tech companies have come under fire for distorting democracy through monopolistic business models that exacerbate wealth disparities and allow states such as China and Russia to easily propagate disinformation online.

Conversely, Palantir has become a major contractor for the U.S. government, including the military and intelligence agencies, a fact that has drawn its own criticism from observers.

While Palantir works to protect the U.S. and its allies from Islamist terrorism and infringement on freedoms by authoritarian states, there is also concern that Palantir’s software can be perverted by governments to surveil the public or curtail civil liberties.

Responding to these criticisms, Karp noted that while it is true any technology can be abused, Palantir’s software allows for oversight by third parties within organizations who do not have a stake in project outcomes. All operations of the software delivered to the government are recorded, making it harder to misuse, he said.

Palantir’s operations are not limited to the national security realm, however. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm also built a computer system for the U.S. government’s vaccination rollout.

In Japan, Sompo Holdings Inc. has invested in Palantir since 2020. It is working to deploy Palantir’s software in elderly nursing care facilities and medical businesses. 

Palantir likewise cooperated with the Kanagawa prefectural government to analyze the spread of COVID-19 across the local community. More than half of Palantir’s customers are now in the private sector.

Karp said he pays close attention to the relationship between the Japanese government and the Five Eyes countries--the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand--which share confidential intelligence and military information.

Palantir is “very interested in helping Japan play an even bigger role in the Five Eyes community,” he noted.

Matthew Turpin, who works at Palantir as Senior Adviser, is a former U.S. military officer who previously served as the U.S. National Security Council’s Director for China during the Trump administration.

He helped formulate economic and security countermeasures against China, including sanctions, tariffs and export controls, while also coordinating actions among allies.

Turpin sees relations with China and Russia as a comprehensive, long-term strategic competition across a broad range of economic, intelligence, diplomatic and military domains, just like the Cold War with the former Soviet Union. The key to this new competition is data.

China is using the data generated by its enormous population of 1.4 billion people to improve AI technologies, such as facial recognition, which it exports to authoritarian states for domestic surveillance and censorship.

It is widely believed to be waging a “hybrid war” against democratic governments such as Taiwan by exploiting their vulnerabilities to cyberattacks and propaganda.

While some argue that authoritarian regimes have an advantage in the data race, Turpin said democracies “should be quite confident about the pluralistic natures of our systems.”

“Democracies have to both ensure security and civil liberties. As a company, we feel you can protect sensitive data while also sharing data when it’s mutually beneficial. This also overlaps with the Japanese government’s policy of ‘data free flow with trust.’”

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Karp issued a statement titled “On the Defense of Europe.”

There he asserted, “Our software is in the fight around the world. The center will hold. But we need an allied technology industry in Europe to step up and fight this battle alongside us in order to win.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could be the beginning of a global bifurcation, but Karp believes that Palantir’s data analytics software will be on the right side of the fight.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Q: Are democratic countries like the United States or Japan at a major information disadvantage when compared to China and its strategy to reign in its big tech firms and maintain exclusive government control over data flows?

A: Palantir is playing a very large role on a number of classified projects in the context of artificial intelligence and very sophisticated machine learning. There’s a general assertion that non-democratic countries have an advantage in building software because they have unfettered access to data. But the most important advantage is the know-how about building a tech company. And the kind of tech companies that build our kind of software are mostly, almost exclusively, built here in the United States.

Now, software comes down to building a software culture that retains and recruits and trains people. The West in general, and America, in particular, are still by far the best at building enterprise software.

I’d be very passionate about changing that so there are more software companies in Japan and Europe.

America’s form of capitalism, innovation, and, quite frankly, ability to build the bomb, convinced people around the world America's values were right. It was not that the values themselves, in the absence of these accomplishments, convinced people that the American model was the best.

Q: What is your outlook for tomorrow? Will we see an increasingly bifurcated world between digital democracies and techno-authoritarian states, contesting data and AI?

A: As you would say in English, “buckle up.” It’s going to be very, very rough waters, I think--politically, economically and culturally. I believe we’re going to see massive disruptions, both inside and outside countries.

(Evan Ingram contributed to this article.)