Data-processing giant Palantir Technologies on Saturday posted a sales brochure cum manifesto that called for Silicon Valley to pledge itself heart and soul to the US military-industrial complex. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” Palantir posted in a 22-point summary of "The Technological Republic" by CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. The stakes, it said, could not be higher. “The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications,” the company said in its post on X. “One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending,” it read. “A new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.” But the scope of the post went far beyond the usual corporate goal of chasing after defense contracts, going on to propose the introduction of a mandatory US national service and an end to the post-war “neutering” of the Japanese and German militaries. It also suggested a more muscular role for tech companies in fighting “violent crime” and denounced the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures". The document’s final points have proved some of the most controversial. Having slammed what it described as the “elite’s intolerance of religious belief”, the post called on the US to reject “a vacant and hollow pluralism”. “Certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful,” the post read. Just which cultures those might be remained up to the reader's own judgement. Alternately ridiculed for its would-be warrior-poet prose and pilloried for its full-throated support of US militarism – even as the world reels from the shockwaves of the US-Israeli war on Iran – the backlash owes much to the already-ominous cloud hanging over the company that posted it. 'Optimizing the kill chain' Launched by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir famously takes its name from the seeing stones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series. Rescued from the island kingdom of Westernesse, these stones allowed the men of the West to see and to speak across vast distances, binding the realms of their Middle Earth colonies to one another until plague and civil war saw them slide into ruin. What Palantir does is more mundane, though its scope seems as wide-reaching at times. Palantir provides its customers with data-processing software that allows them to pull together information scattered across different platforms and formats. By doing this, analysts can pick out complex patterns that would otherwise remain buried in the raw data, and refine their work accordingly. It is the nature of these clients, and the use to which these tools are put, that have earned Palantir its somewhat sinister reputation. The US government remains its main client, using its services extensively through its military, intelligence and police forces. Former Palantir employees are among those criticizing its partnership with the administration of US President Donald Trump.