Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar Talks Defense Tech Adoption

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Dani** (0:13)
Let's head to the US. Army War College, where defense and technology leaders are gathering this week to discuss the future of America's defense industrial base. Bloomberg Washington correspondent Tyler Kendall is there with Palantir's chief technology officer, Tyler.

**Tyler Kendall** (0:26)
Hey, Dani, thanks so much. As you mentioned, I'm pleased to say I'm joined now by the chief technology officer of Palantir, Shyam Sankar. Shyam, it's so nice to see you here on a day where we are talking about bolstering the US defense industrial base, made perhaps even more urgent by the fact we are seeing the conflict in Iran. The Pentagon keeps asking defense tech to move faster. Can you give us a status update on what the relationship is right now between innovative companies and the Pentagon and what hurdles still remain?

**Shyam Sankar** (0:56)
Well, I don't want to sound too Pollyannish, but I really think this team at the Pentagon has dismantled almost every hurdle that exists and has sent a clear signal that they want to hear about the remaining hurdles that people do confront.
They've sent a clear message that this team should meet the urgency of the moment here. And while we can look at the conflict in Iran and look at the rate at which we're expending munitions, really this is a challenge that's grown over the last 30 or 40 years of how we've managed and thought about our defense industrial base.

**Tyler Kendall** (1:27)
I'm not sure if everyone would agree with the fact that the Pentagon has dismantled the hurdles. What about when it comes to defense spending, for example? I'm curious how you're tracking that. Trump administration has requested 1.5 trillion dollars, seeming to indicate that there is a big need from the administration's view to help bolster our own capabilities, including when it comes to replenishing our stockpiles.

**Shyam Sankar** (1:50)
Well, I think it's going to be very clear that we need both more of our existing exquisite weapons and we need capital to invest in a whole new class of weapons to meet the asymmetry of the moment here. And the side that moves faster is going to win. And our exquisite weapons are amazing, but most of them we really built in the 80s. And they've been designed in a way that meets the manufacturing of the 80s. And we're starting to see enormous success with a whole new generation of weapon systems. We look at the Sironics kinetic strikes in Iran just a couple of days ago.
We look at the success that these new platforms are happening in conflicts in Ukraine.
We need to be moving capital there. If you look at the 27 budget, there's a huge amount of resource that's made available to these autonomous systems and to AI, which really, I'd say the Pentagon has actually one of the fastest places to adopt AI in the American economy. Given the stakes, they're existential, it's a binary win-lose. Nonetheless, they've done all of that by essentially cobbling together budgets from various line items. 27 will be the first time they put a real stake in the ground, real capital that's committed to accelerate the pay setting projects that will drive us to an entire revolution in how we fight.

**Tyler Kendall** (2:56)
So part of this is about keeping the US competitive.
We saw the other week the French government actually decided to end its relationship with Palantir, in part because of a need to bolster their own domestic capabilities. And we're seeing this play out among some other European allies. Talk about this concern about being too reliant on US tech. Are you concerned at all about Palantir losing a foothold in Europe or that this could expand to other international markets that you're part of?

**Shyam Sankar** (3:25)
The product really stands for itself. I think serious people, the Germans have looked at it, they've examined the software, they know there's no back doors in it. There's a huge part of this that really comes down to almost an economic argument of we really want to spend our money on our own companies. And I don't begrudge them that. I think the kind of vicious underhanded campaign of lies and rumors is probably beyond the line of what's fair there. But every country should make a decision based on what's going to give them the most amount of deterrents.
And clearly the US has carried the load there. We have the most experience, the most reps, the most innovation stimulus here. And I think it's going to take an entire allied Western force to really confront the challenges across the axis of authoritarianism that's clearly present and creating chaos in the world.