Palantir CTO tells Stratechery he doesn’t regret working with Anthropic

Palantir was caught in Anthropic’s 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’s work for the US national security system ran through Palantir, and asked whether Sankar regrets it.

“Yes, we were stuck in the middle. I don’t regret it. We still work with Anthropic, we work with both frontier labs.” 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’s AI.

On AI safety

Sankar had sent Thompson a list of topics before the interview. One asked whether effective altruism has turned AI safety into a secular religion. “Clearly I think so,” 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’s beliefs, he said. His concern is when those beliefs are presented to the public as technical critiques.

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. 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’s arguments fit Palantir’s business model, just as Anthropic’s safety warnings fit its own. 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.