(2024-05-17)

‘We’re the peace activists": my surreal, soul-sucking day at Palantir’s first AI warfare conference. On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city’s biggest convention hall welcomed America’s military-industrial complex.

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.

At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered

Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels

In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one.

Karp, who’s known as a provocateur, aggressively condoned violence,

he mocked fresh graduates of Columbia University, which had some of the earliest encampment protests in the country.

“The peace activists are war activists,” Karp insisted. “We are the peace activists.”

Karp and Schmidt spoke alongside the CIA deputy director, David Cohen, and Mark Milley, who retired in September as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,

“Before we get self-righteous,” Milley said, in the second world war, “we, the US, killed 12,000 innocent French civilians. We destroyed 69 Japanese cities. We slaughtered people in massive numbers – men, women and children.”

It was, frankly, jarring to hear a recent top US official defend Israel’s mass killing of Gazan civilians by invoking wartime massacres that not only preceded the Geneva Conventions, but helped justify their creation.