Alright, folks, buckle up. I gotta talk about Palantir and Fox News. Yeah, that Palantir, the one that makes your spidey-sense tingle just hearing the name. They've been quietly embedding their AI brainiacs into the Fox News digital newsroom for a year now, a move initially reported by Fox News hires Palantir to build AI newsroom tools - Axios. The official line is it's all strictly commercial, just for "story discovery, production, and distribution." They swear up and down this AI ain't gonna be writing your headlines or crafting narratives. It’s just "tools," they say. Just like a scalpel is "just a tool" for a surgeon, right? Or a surveillance camera is "just a tool" for, well, Palantir's other clients.
Give me a break. This isn't about better SEO. This is about shaping what you see – and more importantly, what you don't see – in a way that’s far more insidious than a poorly-written blog post. When you hand the keys to your "topic radar" and "article insights" over to a company with Palantir's track record, you ain't just getting efficiency; you're getting a subtle, pervasive influence on the informational ecosystem. Who decides what's a "trending topic"? What metrics define "performance analysis"? These aren't neutral questions, not when you're talking about a company whose CEO, Alex Karp, is out there declaring Palantir "completely anti-woke" and then, in the same breath, bragging about how they're "the most important software company in America and therefore in the world." Sounds less like a tech guru and more like a guy building his own personal empire, doesn't it?
Let's be real, Alex Karp is a character straight out of a graphic novel. The unkempt grey hair, the tai chi obsession, the Norwegian bodyguards, the billions he pulls down ($6.8 billion in 2024, if you're keeping score) while owning twenty homes globally. This ain't your average Silicon Valley nerd, and Palantir ain't your average tech company. They were co-founded by Peter Thiel, for crying out loud, and named after Tolkien's "seeing stones"—devices for surveillance, for those who forgot their Middle-earth lore. Karp even calls his employees "hobbits" and talks about "saving the shire." But whose shire are we saving, exactly, when that "seeing stone" technology ends up with ICE for deportations, the Pentagon for drone programs, or the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza?
My question here is, how naive do they think we are? To believe this shift to "newsroom tools" is somehow separate from their core mission of "defending the west," which, let's be honest, has morphed into a pretty flexible definition over the years. Karp, who once voted for Hillary Clinton and backed Kamala Harris, now "admires what Trump has done on many things" and writes million-dollar checks for his inauguration. He says he's "making nice with Trump" because working with the government necessitates it. I mean, sure, it's just "making nice" when you're donating $5 million towards a military parade. It’s a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't even begin to cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire for information integrity when the lines between "defense," "data analysis," and "news production" get this blurry.
And what about the sheer cost? Other newsrooms reportedly find these strictly commercial AI deals too expensive. So, why Fox? What's the real value proposition here, beyond just better "efficiency"? Is it the prestige? The access? Or is it something more profound about controlling the flow of information on a massive scale? Karp thinks his primary competition isn't other tech companies; it's "the woke left and the woke right." He’s convinced Palantir has "won the cultural moment." When you hear stuff like that, you start to wonder if these "newsroom tools" are less about journalistic aid and more about ensuring that the "cultural moment" stays exactly where Palantir and its powerful allies want it to be. They expect us to believe this nonsense, and honestly... it's a tough pill to swallow when you consider Palantir's history with things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
So, Fox News Digital president Porter Berry says Palantir isn't training on their proprietary IP. Fine. But they're still building custom AI that influences what stories get prioritized, how they're produced, and where they're distributed. Think of it like this: your news feed isn't just a river of information; it's a carefully cultivated garden. Palantir isn't planting the seeds, they say, but they're building the automated irrigation system, the climate control, and the robot gardeners that decide which plants get sunlight, which get trimmed, and which never even see the light of day. They're shaping the soil, folks. That ain't just "tools"; that's the whole damn ecosystem.
Karp's biographer calls him "fascinating" and "fun to talk to,' despite his combative, eccentric personality, a trait often highlighted in profiles like ‘Fear really drives him’: is Alex Karp of Palantir the world’s scariest CEO? - The Guardian. I'll bet. I'm sure he's a riot at parties, especially when he's talking about how Palantir has prevented "innumerable terror attacks" in Europe, or railing against identity politics. But while he's busy being "anti-woke" and making nice with presidents, his company's share price has climbed nearly 600% in the past year. Palantir is nearing $1 billion in revenue, making it a top performer in the S&P 500. They're doing just fine, offcourse, even with all the controversy. This isn't just about money; it's about power. It’s about being indispensable, like IBM in the 1960s, as Karp himself aspires to be. And what better way to become indispensable than to subtly control the very narrative that informs the public?
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe it really is just about efficiency. Maybe the idea that a company with a history of building "ultimate state surveillance tools" and a CEO who shifts political allegiances as easily as he changes his tai chi routine is just helping Fox News write better headlines is the most cynical take of all. Or maybe, just maybe, the truth is staring us right in the face, and we're just too busy scrolling to see it.
