Behind the US "AI Manhattan Project" stand these people.

One day in April 2018, an unusual employee protest erupted at Google's campus in Mountain View, California, USA.

The cause was that Google had taken on a project from the Pentagon called "Project Maven," which used AI to help the US military analyze satellite reconnaissance images. More than 3,000 employees jointly wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai with very strong - worded statements: "Helping the US government with military surveillance - and the potential for lethal consequences - is unacceptable."

Two months later, under pressure, Google announced that it would not renew the contract.

But just six or seven years ago, another Silicon Valley company was doing the exact opposite. In 2011, when roadside bombs became the number - one killer of US troops in Afghanistan, a software company called Palantir sent engineers to Kandahar to help special forces predict the locations where bombs were buried. The CEO of this company is Alexander Karp, and its most important investor is Peter Thiel.

Thiel is one of the most mysterious and influential figures in Silicon Valley and the spiritual leader of the "PayPal Mafia." You've probably heard of the names in this circle: Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks... They started from PayPal and later built business empires such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, and Yammer respectively. Now, they have formed a huge network spanning capital, technology, and politics. And Karp's net worth once exceeded $18 billion after Palantir's stock price soared in the past year.

In November 2024, 21 years after Palantir was founded, Karp wrote this book, The Tech Republic.

The Manifesto of a Silicon Valley "Traitor"

To understand this book, you first need to understand its author.

Karp is a very peculiar person. He obtained a Juris Doctor from Stanford and became close friends with Peter Thiel there. Thiel was also the only one who supported him to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. His tutor there was the famous "Contemporary Hegel," Jürgen Habermas - yes, the German philosopher who wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. A disciple of the Frankfurt School later became the head of the largest intelligence software company in the United States. This fragmentation of identity is in itself a good drama.

The name Palantir is taken from the "seeing - stones" in The Lord of the Rings, meaning the ability to see things far away. The company was founded in 2003 because at that time, Peter Thiel noticed the declining ambition of Silicon Valley in the defense sector. He proposed to Karp to create a company that was not just catering to the consumer market.

The seeing - stones in The Lord of the Rings. Source: https://www.cbr.com/lord - of - the - rings - rings - of - power - palantiri - explained/

From the day it was founded, Palantir stood in opposition to the mainstream of Silicon Valley: it only did business with the government, serving only the military and intelligence agencies. While other entrepreneurs were rushing to develop social, entertainment, and consumer apps, Karp took his engineers to Afghanistan and Iraq to help the US military track roadside bombs.

In the context of Silicon Valley, Karp is a "traitor."

And this book is both a confession and a manifesto from the "traitor."

The Disappearing Engineer - Politicians

The book begins by telling a forgotten piece of history: Silicon Valley was once the center of US military - industrial production.

In the 1950s, Fairchild Semiconductor built reconnaissance satellite equipment in Mountain View; the entire US Navy's ballistic missiles were produced in Santa Clara County; military - industrial giants such as Lockheed, Westinghouse, and Ford Aerospace had tens of thousands of employees in Silicon Valley.

Even earlier, scientists and engineers were at the core of national decision - making. In November 1944, before World War II ended, President Roosevelt wrote to Vannevar Bush - an engineer later known as the "Science General" - to discuss how to continue the wartime scientific research system in peacetime so that the United States could maintain its global leadership. With just a half - page proposal, Bush convinced Roosevelt to establish the National Defense Research Committee. A 15 - minute meeting laid the foundation for the US scientific research system for the next 80 years.

"In that era, engineers were at the core of the nation's mythology," Karp wrote.

This tradition can be traced back to the founding generation of the United States. Thomas Jefferson designed sundials and studied copy machines; Benjamin Franklin was one of the most productive engineers of his time. When he invented the lightning rod, he was also involved in politics; James Madison dissected an American weasel with his own hands and measured 33 dimensions to study whether North American animals were smaller than their European counterparts.

The word "scientist" was not invented until 1834 in a book review. Before that, it was called "natural philosopher," and cross - disciplinary work was the norm: a person could study linguistics, chemistry, zoology, and physics at the same time because the total amount of human knowledge was not large enough to require specialization.

What happened later?

A 2023 survey showed that scientists and engineers accounted for only 1.3% of the members of US state legislatures. The political stage is full of lawyers.

Karp used a set of data to show the decline of scientists and engineers in the United States: in 1971, only 6% of Harvard graduates went into finance and consulting; in 2007, this proportion rose to 47%. Engineers left national affairs, and the smartest minds flocked to Wall Street.

Silicon Valley then turned in another direction - towards consumers.

Silicon Valley Chose Consumers

In 1996, a vice - president of strategic planning at Disney received an invitation from the theme park department to become its head. This was a golden opportunity - from the Disneyland in California in 1955 to the Walt Disney World in Orlando in 1971, theme parks were the cash cows of this entertainment empire.

But Toby Lenk refused. He wanted to start a business, selling toys on the Internet.

His company was called eToys. When it went public in 1999, its market value reached $10 billion. Lenk's personal net worth may have once reached $850 million. He said a very era - appropriate thing to Advertising Age: "We are deliberately losing money quickly in order to build a brand."

Two years later, eToys went bankrupt. Its stock price dropped from $85 to 9 cents.

Karp included this story in his book, but his target of criticism was not Lenk personally, but the direction of the entire era.

"Online advertising, shopping, social media, video - sharing platforms - these are the main themes of the digital age. The grand declaration of a generation of entrepreneurs is just one word: build. No one asks what needs to be built and why."

He continued to add:

"What is called innovation today attracts a large amount of talent and capital, but it will be forgotten before the end of this decade."

This statement is harsh, but it makes sense.

Think about it. What have the smartest engineers been doing in the past two decades? Optimizing advertising click - through rates, designing addictive recommendation algorithms, and reducing the time it takes to deliver takeout from 30 minutes to 25 minutes.

David Graeber asked a sharp question in Bullshit Jobs: "Where are the flying cars? What about force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, anti - gravity sleds, interstellar travel, the elixir of life, and Mars colonies? Where are all these technological wonders that children who grew up in the mid - to - late 20th century thought should exist by now?"

"We must roar against this misallocation of capital and culture," Karp wrote. "Do not go gentle into that good night!" (Let us not go gentle into that good night! Quoted from Dylan Thomas's poem)

Swarm and Improvisational Theatre

The third part of the book is, in my opinion, the most inspiring: Karp tries to define what "engineer thinking" is.

He starts with a German biologist.

At 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 1951, in a park in Munich, a group of bees began to gather. Martin Lindauer was on the scene, observing how this swarm of bees chose a new nest.

The process of bees choosing a nest is an interesting collective decision - making process: scout bees go out separately to find potential locations and then return to report to their companions using a "dance language" - the distance of the dance indicates the distance of the nest, and the angle indicates the direction. The location that gets the most "votes" from the bees becomes the final choice.

There is no queen bee directing the whole process, and there is no central control.

Lindauer observed that on that afternoon, the scout bees reported eight potential locations. After a few hours of "debate," a location in the north gradually lost favor (maybe it was flooded by rain at night), and new locations emerged. Finally, a location 300 meters away won. At 9:40 a.m. the next day, the entire swarm took off and moved into the new home.

"This is what a startup should be like," Karp wrote.

He then told another case: the flight of a flock of starlings. Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi's research found that a flock of starlings seems to move as a whole, but the direction signals actually come from the birds at the edge - they are the first to see predators, and then the information spreads throughout the entire group within a fraction of a second.

"In a swarm of bees and a flock of birds, there is no hierarchical reporting, no meetings to prepare PPTs for superiors, and no pre - meetings just for the sake of having a meeting. There is only the swarm and the flock."

In contrast is the traditional enterprise. In the 1960s, the electronics manufacturer Philco had a thick set of internal regulations that specified in detail what furniture could be placed in the offices of senior executives - according to their ranks.

Karp said that Palantir tries to establish a culture of "constructive disobedience." The founder's direction will be internalized, but it will also be challenged, adjusted, and reshaped by subordinates. "A certain degree of confrontation within an organization is necessary if you want to build anything meaningful."

He also gives each new employee a book: Impro by British theater director Keith Johnstone. This book is about the principles of improvisational comedy, but Karp believes it reveals the essence of entrepreneurship:

"Exposing yourself on the stage, stepping into a role, requires embracing chance and psychological flexibility. This is the same as starting a company from scratch to serve a market that does not yet exist."

Johnstone has a core idea: status is "acted" out. Senior executives should not be senior executives in all situations; real leadership is instrumental, used to achieve goals, not an inherent attribute.

"When it's unclear 'who is in charge of a certain area' within an organization, it may actually be a good thing," Karp wrote. "Because maybe that person should be you."

The Ghost of the "AI Manhattan Project"

If the first half of the book is a diagnosis, the second half is a prescription.

Karp's core argument is: the atomic age is ending, and the software age has arrived.

At dawn on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the world's first atomic bomb was tested. J. Robert Oppenheimer was there, and Vannevar Bush was there. That purple flash echoed in the desert for a long time. Since then, nuclear weapons have shaped the world order for 80 years.

But Karp believes that this era is being replaced by the software age.

He gave an example. The F - 35 fighter jet project was launched in the 1990s and is planned to be in service until 2088 - that's more than 60 years from now. The total budget for the entire project is $2 trillion. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said a blunt truth: "Do we really think that there will still be manned aircraft controlling the skies in 2088?"

In 2024, the US Department of Defense applied for a budget of $1.8 billion for AI capacity building - only 0.2% of the total defense budget.

Karp's appeal is straightforward: the United States needs a new "Manhattan Project," this time for AI.

Interestingly, this book was written in November 2024, and in November 2025, the US government actually launched a national - level AI research project codenamed "The Genesis Mission." The executive order states at the beginning that the urgency and ambition of this mission "are comparable to the Manhattan Project, which was crucial for our victory during World War II."

This is no coincidence.

The group of Silicon Valley people represented by Karp - Peter Thiel's investment circle, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. - are the behind - the - scenes promoters of this policy shift. They are called the "tech right," and their core concept is that technology companies should not be neutral service providers but should be deeply bound to the national mission.

From the Manhattan Project to The Genesis Mission, from Vannevar Bush to Karp, this historical thread is closing. A new era of "big science" is coming.

This book is their manifesto.

The Lack of Faith

In the second half of the book, Karp shifts his fire from Silicon Valley to the entire US elite class.

He tells the story of the Skokie case in 1976. Frank Collin, the leader of an American Nazi Party, wanted to hold a parade in Skokie, Illinois - a town where many Jews lived, and many of them were survivors of World War II. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stood up to defend Collin on the grounds of the First Amendment.

The then - executive director of the ACLU was Aryeh Neier, who was born in a Jewish family in Berlin in 1937 and fled Nazi Germany as a child. He received thousands of letters of condemnation, and 30,000 members quit. But he insisted: "I must use freedom to restrain power, even if the temporary beneficiary is the enemy of freedom."

Karp's question is: Are there still such people today?

In 2023, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were summoned to Congress to testify and were asked, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews count as harassment?" University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill's answer was: "It depends on the context."

Karp's evaluation is sharp:

"These three presidents are completely unaware of the internal contradictions in their positions - on the one hand, advocating freedom of speech, and on the other hand, actively controlling language in other situations to avoid offending others. Their testimonies were calm, precise, and calculated - typical of the new administrative class: clinical, cautious, and most importantly, emotionless."

Later, it was reported that the testimonies of two of the presidents were prepared by the large law firm WilmerHale. As a result, both of them lost their jobs.

Karp's deeper - level criticism is that contemporary elite culture systematically punishes any sincere expression of belief.

"Our generation of leaders has been taught that faith itself is the enemy, and not believing in anything - except perhaps believing in themselves - is the surest path to rewards. As a result, those responsible for making the most important decisions often aren't sure what their beliefs are or, more fundamentally, whether they have any real beliefs."

This makes me think of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind written in 1987. Bloom said that contemporary American college students "are neither inspired by our political heritage nor able to seriously criticize it." Thirty - odd years have passed, and those students have become today's managers. And the culture that nurtured them has systematically eliminated anything approaching courage, Karp said.

Some Necessary Criticisms

At this point, I have to talk about the problems with this book.

First, the author's conflict of