President Donald Trump singled out Palantir Technologies Inc. for its “great war fighting capabilities and equipment” in a Truth Social Post on Friday.
“Just ask our enemies,” Trump said in the post.
Trump's tweet came minutes after a segment on Fox Business discussing Michael Burry's bear case against Palantir, in which the money manager made famous by The Big Short has argued that rival Anthropic PBC is winning the race for enterprise AI spending. Trump's social media post echoed comments made by guest Michael Lee, who was championing the role Palantir's technology played in the raid to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.
Last month, the Pentagon notified Anthropic that it had determined its products pose a risk to the US supply chain, after the startup demanded assurances that its AI wouldn't be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons. Anthropic is challenging the Pentagon designation in court.
Palantir was set up in the early 2000s by Thiel and four other co-founders, including Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp, and secured early investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm. The company relies on the US government for the largest share of its revenue, with contracts worth close to $900 million with the Pentagon last year, along with smaller contracts for ICE, as well as Treasury and other government agencies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government.
The Pentagon is planning to make Palantir's Maven Smart System a so-called program of record, which will provide “will provide the stable funding and resourcing necessary” for development, integration and for commanders to fight and win wars, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Weinberg said in the memo.
The US military already uses the Maven digital mission control platform in every combatant command, or regional theater. The system provides a digital map display of battlefields, helps identify and select targets and pairs them with weapons systems. The system is widely in use in US operations against Iran.
The defense software's shares erased losses after Trump's post. The stock was down about 1.5% at 11:30 a.m. in New York after declining as much as 7.3% earlier on Friday.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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