Shyam Sankar, then president of Palantir Technologies, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 2020. Credit: World Economic Forum \/ Sikarin Fon Thanachaiary \/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr (cropped) Palantir was caught in Anthropic\u2019s clash with the US Department of War, its chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, told Ben Thompson for Stratechery, in an interview published on Thursday. Thompson noted that Anthropic\u2019s work for the US national security system ran through Palantir, and asked whether Sankar regrets it. \u201cYes, we were stuck in the middle. I don\u2019t regret it.<\/p>\n
We still work with Anthropic, we work with both frontier labs.\u201d Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO, to Stratechery He said many of the parties probably did not handle the dispute well. Since then, Palantir has put a lot of work into letting customers swap one AI model for another safely, he said. In October, Sankar told CBS that the Pentagon had already replaced Anthropic\u2019s AI. On AI safety Sankar had sent Thompson a list of topics before the interview.<\/p>\n
One asked whether effective altruism has turned AI safety into a secular religion. \u201cClearly I think so,\u201d he answered. He said talk of AI bringing either utopia or the end of humanity rejects human agency, and with it the duty to engineer AI systems carefully. He does not mind anyone\u2019s beliefs, he said. His concern is when those beliefs are presented to the public as technical critiques.<\/p>\n
On customers and China Sankar said almost all the customers he has seen use AI mainly to cut staff and costs failed to reach even that goal. The ones succeeding want to use AI to win their markets, he said. Palantir does not use DeepSeek itself, but lets commercial customers choose their models, he said. He said Chinese labs are behind the frontier for now.<\/p>\n
He expects them to stop releasing open-weight models once they feel they are at the frontier. DeepSeek has since released the code for its Super-Agent. Thompson pushed back during the interview. He said Sankar\u2019s arguments fit Palantir\u2019s business model, just as Anthropic\u2019s safety warnings fit its own.<\/p>\n
Sankar replied that founders lead both companies, and that each builds its strategy on what it believes. Anthropic has told investors its safety views could make it a political target. Get the TNW newsletter \u2715 Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shyam Sankar, then president of Palantir Technologies, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 2020. Credit: World Economic Forum \/ Sikarin Fon Thanachaiary \/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr (cropped) Palantir\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}