Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 3
Palantir chief executive Alex Karp has urged governments to bring their leading technology experts home from the United States to help shape national artificial intelligence policies, warning that countries cannot afford to treat the AI race as a political or theoretical debate.
Speaking during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Karp said nations needed technical expertise to decide which models, software and computer chips to use while protecting sensitive data and intellectual property.
“You need to get them to come home to your country and sit next to you and explain what regulations, in your terms, what your regulations look like, what should the stack look like, what model should we use, what software we should use, what chips we should buy,” Karp said.
He argued that most of the people capable of making such decisions were currently in the United States. Governments, he said, should persuade those experts to return and work for their countries.
“You are now going to do this for my country, and you’re gonna set the policy in my country,” Karp said, describing the message national leaders should deliver to their technology pioneers.
His remarks carry particular relevance for countries such as India, which have produced a large pool of technology executives, engineers and researchers working at leading American companies.
Karp said governments should focus less on announcing large spending commitments and more on determining who would control those investments.
“You don’t need money. You need knowledge,” he said. “I don’t wanna hear how much money you spend. Who’s gonna get the money? Like, the money doesn’t matter as much as who gets it.”
He warned that poorly designed AI systems could transfer a country’s proprietary knowledge to foreign companies. Governments, businesses and security agencies, therefore, needed application layers that could control data, train models and keep sensitive information within protected environments.
Karp said AI sovereignty meant controlling the weights, data and knowledge used by artificial intelligence systems rather than exporting them to third parties.
“This is really game time,” he said. “Bad implications of AI are a waste of time; they’re a joke, they’re expensive, they token max, they may even be migrating your data to someone else. But the mistake people make is that good implementations of AI are not a joke.”
Countries would have to decide which parts of the AI technology stack they could develop domestically and which would depend on American or other foreign companies, he said. That would include computing capacity, data management, models, software and electricity.
“You need access to compute, you need access to your own data,” Karp said. “So the stack is compute, data, ability to manage data, ability to control the models, ability to train the models, and ability to compete against certain competitors and adversaries.”
Karp also criticised regulations drafted without sufficient technical expertise. He said some companies deploying large language models could end up transferring valuable information to model providers, even when governments intended to strengthen national control.
“This is not sovereignty. This is anti-sovereignty,” he said. “And whoever’s telling you this works needs to be fired because they are hurting your country.”
Karp co-founded Palantir Technologies with Peter Thiel and others. The US company develops software used for data integration, artificial intelligence, defence, intelligence and commercial operations. Karp has served as its chief executive since its early years.
Palantir was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Its software has been used by US government agencies, allied governments and private companies for security, battlefield, supply-chain and data-analysis operations.
