Palantir's Sankar Calls Bloomberg Strike Report 'Wrong'

The Palantir CTO went on television and called the Bloomberg story wrong.

Shyam Sankar, interviewed by Margaret Brennan on CBS's Face the Nation, was asked about reporting that tied a strike which killed schoolchildren to over-reliance on Palantir's AI tooling. "The Bloomberg reporting is wrong. Yeah," he said. He attributed the incident to human error, declined to go further pending a final report, and said the company has since "built additional AI agents that did more checking."

On the Pentagon's move to stop using Anthropic's Claude, he was flatter. "No impact." The Department of Defense, he told Brennan, already draws on "a wide range of model providers" including xAI, OpenAI, and NVIDIA's Nemotron, casting institutional sovereignty as a function of a crowded model menu rather than any single vendor relationship.

He saved his sharpest line for the AI-safety camp. Effective altruism, he told Brennan, is "really this millenarian doomsday cult meets messianic complex." The doomsayers, in his telling, "have basically been wrong" on job displacement; economists, he said, "see that actually we're having job growth."

Then the figure he came to deliver. "The ability to execute 1000 strikes in a single day would have taken two weeks of planning by 50 people before, and being able to do that with one person in four hours provides you a significant battlefield advantage." He named no product, no operation, and no customer.