An Interview with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar About the AI Religious War

The AI industry currently prioritizes the supply of intelligence over the diffusion of technology into real-world economic workflows. Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, argues that companies must move beyond treating AI as a mere headcount-reduction tool and instead use it to dominate markets by building unique, sovereign systems. Rather than ceding proprietary operational data to frontier labs, firms should maintain control over their post-training pipelines to preserve competitive alpha. Furthermore, the prevailing "AI safety" discourse functions as a secular religion, rejecting pragmatic systems engineering in favor of extremist, binary outcomes. True progress requires shifting from "bench-maxing" on generic models to solving specific, high-stakes problems—such as optimizing production for the submarine industrial base—where human and machine intelligence collaborate within a governed, programmable ontology.