Palantir CTO Thinks AI-Driven Mass Unemployment Is a ‘Fundraising Shtick’

The chief technology officer of one of the most consequential mass-surveillance companies in the world, Palantir, thinks that artificial general intelligence is a fantasy and that the narrative that AI will replace jobs is a marketing tactic.

“I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with A.G.I,” Sankar told the New York Times in an interview published on Thursday.

“The doomerism of Silicon Valley is both a fund-raising shtick, where the Frontier Labs can say: My technology is so powerful, it’s going to lead to mass unemployment, so you better invest in me, or you’re going to be poor—and also it’s divorced from any sort of reality,” Sankar said.

He isn’t the only one who has raised skepticism over the future of AI and its relationship to labor.

AGI, sometimes referred to as superintelligence, is a yet-to-be-developed AI system that could theoretically outperform human intelligence on virtually all scales. It has become the holy grail for AI-first Silicon Valley companies like Meta, which has undertaken a multibillion-dollar spending spree to be the first to reach it. Many experts warn of the perils of AGI if it is achieved, while others are skeptical that the technology can ever reach that level of sophistication.

But AI need not evolve into superintelligence before it can start fundamentally shifting the way our society operates. The most recent and major hit has been to labor. CEOs across industries have been open about their plans to have AI replace current or potential future workers as a profit-maximization effort. Amazon just recently laid off 14,000 corporate workers, citing the “transformative” potential of AI. Meanwhile, a recent Stanford study found that AI might have already started disproportionately crushing the young graduate job market.

Still, despite all these findings, many remain suspicious.

New York University professor of management and organizations Robert Seamans told Gizmodo in August that AI adoption across the corporate sector remains relatively low. Instead of AI being the culprit behind the layoffs, Seamans thinks it’s a scapegoat for the performance of the firm, because it’s much harder to blame tariffs or economic uncertainty for hiring reductions.

Others, like author Cory Doctorow, believe that bosses “love the story” of AI overtaking the workforce because they want to have workers “terrified that they’re about to be replaced by a chatbot, it gives them a chance to put them in their place.”

Doctorow thinks that AI can’t successfully replace the work of many workers and there might be some evidence to back this up. An MIT study in August found that corporate AI pilots are not good at generating real revenue gains.

But of course, Sankar’s observations on just how powerful AI technologies can get might be at least partially self-motivated, and Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist interviewing him, pointed this out to Sankar pretty clearly.

“It’s in your interest, in a way, to convince yourself that the moral stakes of your work is always going to be somewhat constrained,” Douthat said.

The moral backlash to their work has been something Palantir has had to deal with in recent years.

Palantir’s self-proclaimed moral purpose is to build technologies to be used as a force for good, according to Sankar. That purpose is hard to grasp when seen in conjunction with Palantir’s prolific work as a defense contractor and surveillance technology provider.

Sankar himself is rather passionate about “optimizing the kill chain,” something that he talks about in almost every interview, and he made sure to mention several times in this one.

When asked if Palantir’s software was involved in the Trump administration’s controversial strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Sankar just said: “Yeah, our software is deployed ubiquitously across the military.”

Palantir also works with the U.S. government, and particularly ICE, to help turbocharge their surveillance efforts. In August, ICE announced that Palantir would build a $30 million surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS to help with the agency’s mass deportation campaign. Then, an Amnesty International report from August found that AI products by American companies like Palantir were used by the Department of Homeland Security to target non-citizens who speak out for Palestinian rights.

“I think a lot of the policies, a lot of things that people are struggling with right now in the U.S., were voted on at the ballot box. What ICE is doing was voted on at the ballot box,” Sankar said to justify the company’s involvement.

When asked how Palantir determines which governments to work with and what projects to say yes to, Sankar said that they look for legal use, trust in the government, and potential for misuse and abuse. So it’s rather surprising that they have an ongoing strategic partnership with the Israeli military, whose actions in Gaza amount to a genocide according to UN authorities.

Late last year, Storebrand Asset Management, a major Norwegian investor, sold all of its Palantir holdings due to concerns about international human rights violations. The company shared that an analysis indicated that Palantir aided an AI-based IDF system that ranked Palestinians based on the likelihood to launch “lone wolf terrorist” attacks, which then led to preemptive arrests.

Sankar is adamant that Israel is a morally appropriate partner.

Earlier this year, Sankar was among four Silicon Valley executives to join the U.S. Army Reserve as officers, the other three being Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, and current OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil. His decision to join, he says, was inspired by his “observation in Israel after Oct. 7.”

“Israel is an incredibly technical country. Bountiful resources of technologists,” Sankar said. “The IDF got more modernization done in four months after Oct. 7 than in the 10 years that I’d worked with them prior.”

Perhaps Palantir’s claims to being a force for good are also, in their own way, a “fundraising schtick.”