Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar says he does not regret the position Palantir was placed in during Anthropic's clash with the US Department of War. In an interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery, Sankar said Palantir was stuck in the middle but still works with Anthropic and other frontier labs.

Palantir was caught in Anthropic’s clash with the US Department of War, and its chief technology officer does not regret the position it ended up in. Shyam Sankar told Ben Thompson of Stratechery in an interview published Thursday.

Does Palantir regret working with Anthropic?

Thompson pointed out that Anthropic’s work for the US national security system ran through Palantir and asked whether Sankar regretted that arrangement. “Yes, we were stuck in the middle. I don’t regret it. We still work with Anthropic, we work with both frontier labs,” Sankar said.

He added that many of the parties involved 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.

Debate over AI safety

Is AI safety a secular religion, according to Palantir?

Before the interview, Sankar sent Thompson a list of topics. One asked whether effective altruism has turned AI safety into a secular religion. “Clearly I think so,” he answered.

Sankar 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 said he does not mind anyone’s beliefs. His concern arises when those beliefs are presented to the public as technical critiques.

Customers, China and DeepSeek

Sankar said almost all the customers he has seen use AI mainly to cut staff and costs have failed to reach even that goal. The ones succeeding want to use AI to win their markets, he said.

Are Chinese AI labs ahead of the frontier?

Palantir does not use DeepSeek itself, but it lets commercial customers choose their own models, Sankar said. He said Chinese labs are behind the frontier for now, and 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.

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