Alex Karp's Palantir manifesto officially declares US software to be a weapon of US hegemony, which European customers help to finance. International criticism is growing and the term "technofascism" is doing the rounds. What this means for Europe - and why digital sovereignty is no longer negotiable.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has published a 22-point manifesto on X together with Nicholas Zamiska - condensed from the book "The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West". The document is not a PR text, but an ideological declaration of war: US software is suddenly openly and officially defined as an instrument of "hard power", Silicon Valley as an extension of the Pentagon, and pluralism is dismissed as "hollow". Anyone who pays a cloud bill in Europe is now financing a player that describes its own role more clearly than ever before. This is precisely why Europe must take this moment seriously - for what it is: an ultimate wake-up call for digital sovereignty.
The manifesto summarizes the core theses of the book in 22 points, which Karp and Zamiska see as their ideological position statement. The tone is not that of a software provider, but that of a geopolitical player.
Three strands run through the text:
The international criticism is scathing: An annotated critical classification by TechPolicy.Press dissects the document point by point: Al Jazeera classifies the geopolitical context and quotes several prominent critics.
An unpleasant truth emerges in the analysis: When the CEO of one of the largest software suppliers to the Western security architecture publicly declares his platform to be a tool of US national power projection, this is no longer a PR stunt. It is a declaration of war on all customers outside the USA. International observers are using the term "techno-fascism" to illustrate the danger the manifesto poses to international cooperation.
From a European perspective, three points in the manifesto are particularly relevant - not because they are surprising, but because they make a previously unspoken reality explicit.
The manifesto would be a side note if Palantir had no productive contracts in Europe. But the company has, and not in short supply. The British National Health Service NHS has signed a data platform contract worth around 330 million pounds with Palantir - the most sensitive patient data infrastructure of a G7 country is thus running with a provider that is developing ImmigrationOS for ICE in parallel: an AI platform for identifying and tracking migrants, financed by a 30 million dollar no-bid contract. Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat) documents the critical examination of this dual role: Palantir "sells operational software to defense, intelligence, migration and law enforcement agencies." Mark Coeckelbergh describes the manifesto as an "example of techno-fascism", while economist Yanis Varoufakis warns of an "AI-driven threat to human existence " - to be read on Al Jazeera. In a detailed analysis, The Nation comes to a similarly alarming conclusion.
There are also ongoing Palantir installations in Germany, particularly in several state police forces. With the manifesto, each of these installations has a new risk profile: the provider itself has made it clear that its software is not intended for a neutral service role, but is part of an explicit geopolitical mission.
The manifesto makes it unmistakably clear that anyone using Palantir, Microsoft or AWS productively today is no longer just buying software - they are also buying political leverage. The manifesto has only stated what has been in the small print of contracts for years.
Furkan Yildiz sums up the operational dimension: with every cloud bill, European customers "actively finance the expansion of precisely this US power structure" - and concludes with the sentence that translates the manifesto into a European logic of action: "Real sovereignty hurts at the beginning. Dependence kills you in the end."
The mechanics behind this are sober: cloud revenues finance the research and development budgets of US providers, which in turn flow to a considerable extent into defense, intelligence and security-related programs. This was already the case before the manifesto; the manifesto merely makes it publicly justifiable. A German hospital CIO who today extends a full Microsoft 365 configuration is also using his budget to proportionally finance the infrastructure that, in Karp's interpretation, is explicitly part of the "defense of the West" as a US-led order. This is not a moral judgment - it is a procurement reality that every IT manager must be able to justify from now on.
The real shock of the manifesto is not its aggressiveness - but its honesty. Karp has just taken away the last excuse for European procurers to continue treating US platforms as neutral infrastructure.
Sovereignty is not an exercise in rhetoric, but a procurement decision. In concrete terms, this means four levers that should appear in every European IT strategy over the next twelve months:
SecureCloud operates its platform 100 percent in Germany on its own hardware at noris network AG, BSI C5:2020-certified, with key management in Europe, Bring Your Own Key on request and exclusively open source core components. We deliver exactly what authorities, hospitals, banks, law firms and regulated SMEs need now: a productive cloud, mail and collaboration platform that does not require CLOUD Act exposure, FISA 702 access or vendor lock-in.
For us, the Palantir manifesto is not an occasion for polemics, but for strategic clarity. Karp has spoken a truth that many European procurers have so far preferred to suppress: US software is hard power. This sentence takes away our customers' fear of taking "extreme positions" when they switch to a European platform - they simply follow the US market leader's self-description.
The Palantir manifesto is the clearest indication yet that the era of "neutral" US software is over - issued by the CEO of one of the most influential US software providers himself. Europe now has everything it needs to make a well-founded procurement decision: an official self-disclosure from the provider, a growing number of productive European alternatives and a regulatory framework (DSA, DMA, EU AI Act, BSI C3A) that makes sovereign infrastructure operationally measurable for the first time. What is missing now is not another study, but a procurement decision. Sovereignty hurts at the beginning - dependency hurts more at the end.