Earlier this year, the co-founder of America’s most controversial intelligence-tech company, Palantir, published a book, The Technological Republic – a distillation of a lifetime’s philosophical musing and a call to arms. The “treatise”, written by Alex Karp – often billed in the company’s mythology as the liberal yin to co-founder Peter Thiel’s hard-right libertarian yang – urges Silicon Valley to abandon its frivolous pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit capital and talent to a “national project” – nothing less than a battle for Western civilisation in the teeth of Chinese aggression. America needs “a new Manhattan Project… to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield” and head off this existential threat, he writes.

Karp, one of a “gang of five” who founded Palantir in 2003, “brims with American chauvinism”, says The New York Times. Safe to say, he does not believe in appeasement, observing that the whole point is to “scare the crap out of your adversaries”. Palantir’s contribution to this process is “the finding of hidden things” – its ability to sift through mountains of data to perceive “patterns of suspicious or aberrant behaviour”, to join the dots. In the wake of 9/11, the CIA bet on Palantir auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from and was an early financial backer. The company is often credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden in 2011 so that Navy SEALS could kill him, but it’s unclear if this is true.