Palantir is adding an AI company to its arsenal for military and spy work

To further solidify its position as a provider of artificial intelligence for spies and soldiers, Palantir announced Thursday that it will add Anthropic’s Claude models to the suite of tools it provides to U.S. intelligence and military agencies.

Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded tech company named after a tricky crystal ball, has been busy winning contracts with the Pentagon and striking deals with other AI developers to host their products on Palantir cloud environments certified to process secret information.

Its dominance in the military and intelligence AI space-And association with newly elected President Donald Trump –has resulted in the company’s value soaring over the past year. In January, Palantir’s stock was trading around $16 per share. Its value had risen to more than $40 per share by late October, then took off big to around $55 after Trump won the presidential election this week.

In May, the company landed one A $480 million deal to work on an AI-powered prototype enemy identification and targeting system called Maven Smart System for the US military.

It is in August announced it would provide Microsoft’s major language models on the Palantir AI platform to military and intelligence customers. Now Anthropic has joined the party.

“Our partnership with Anthropic and (Amazon Web Services) provides America’s defense and intelligence communities with the toolchain they need to securely leverage and deploy AI models, delivering next-generation decision advantage for their most critical missions,” said Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer of Palantir. said in one statement.

Palantir said Pentagon agencies can use the Claude 3 and 3.5 models to “rapidly process large amounts of complex data,” “streamline document review and preparation” and make “informed decisions in time-sensitive situations while retaining their decisions. authorities.”

What kind of time-sensitive decisions those will be and how closely they will be tied to killing people is unclear. While all other federal agencies are required to publicly disclose how they use their various AI systems, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community are exempt from that lineswhich includes the government of newly-elected President Donald Trump can still be demolished.

In June, Anthropic announced that it was expanding government agency access to its products and would be open to granting exemptions to some of those agencies from its general use policy. These exceptions would “allow Claude to be used for legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis, such as combating human trafficking, identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns, and providing advance warning of potential military activity.”

However, Anthropic said it is not willing to waive rules that prohibit the use of its tools for disinformation campaigns, the design or use of weapons, censorship or malicious cyber operations.