Palantir just sued Republik, a small Swiss magazine, for publishing investigative journalism based on 59 freedom of information requests. The reporting documented what the Swiss government already concluded: Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks to data sovereignty, and Swiss agencies rejected the company at least nine times.

Palantir does not disagree with the reporting. They’re invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute to force Palantir’s propaganda. A law designed to correct factual errors is being weaponized to compel a publication to run corporate marketing fluff.

This is classic Palantir information warfare, to cheat when they can’t win.

Truth Inversion Tactics

In 2016, Palantir knew their product wouldn’t be selected on its merits so they sued the U.S. Army in the Court of Federal Claims to force adoption. The company cynically invoked the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 — a law requiring agencies to consider buying products before building one. The Army at this point had spent over $3 billion developing DCGS-A, its intelligence analysis platform. Palantir argued the Army could not shut them out.

The court said the Army violated procurement law by building, which made little sense. The practical outcome was a total inversion of the law’s intent. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act exists to prevent vendor lock-in and promote interoperability. Palantir used it to promote vendor lock-in and prevent interoperability.

Yeah, it’s as stupid as it sounds.

Gotham is one of the most proprietary, dependency-creating platforms in the defense sector. It was designed so that once your data, workflows, and analyst training live inside Palantir’s ecosystem, they don’t leave.

Just think of how bad the American Justice system has to be for a judge to rule that the way to prevent lock-in is to privatize lock-in.

The Swiss military identified this exact problem in the internal report that Republik published. Using Palantir’s software would increase unsafe dependence on a provider with Nazi origins, risk data leaving the country, and leave unclear who has access to data shared with the company. It’s a genuinely awful product. Which is why Palantir has fired up their legal team again.

We see the same structural logic today as before: invoke a law designed to protect a value, to instead destroy that value.

Element	U.S. Army (2016)	Swiss Republik (2025)
Law invoked	Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act	Swiss right-of-reply statute
Stated purpose of law	Prevent vendor lock-in; require open competition	Correct factual errors in reporting
Palantir’s claim	Army illegally excluded commercial alternatives	Magazine denied adequate right to respond
What Palantir actually sought	Forced adoption of its proprietary platform	Forced publication of its corporate messaging
Was the underlying claim factually contested?	No — Palantir didn’t dispute DCGS-A existed; argued process was illegal	No — Palantir doesn’t claim the reporting is false
Actual outcome vs. law’s intent	Anti-lock-in law produced lock-in	Error-correction law used to suppress accurate reporting
Target	Army procurement bureaucracy that couldn’t match Boies Schiller litigation	Small independent magazine that can’t match Palantir’s legal budget
Amplification strategy	Rep. Duncan Hunter ran Congressional interference; casualty stories filed in court	Streisand Effect now international via FT, European Federation of Journalists, UK Parliament

Propaganda Abuses a Grain of Truth

The inversion depends on the original principle being sound. Nobody argues against competition in procurement. Nobody argues against balance in press coverage. Palantir takes the principle and inverts it, a modern day “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Work is good, keeps you healthy, so here’s a work camp that murders you.

In the Army case, Palantir built its litigation around “curated” field testimony about the 82nd Airborne’s IED casualties, commanders allegedly requesting Palantir and being denied, DCGS-A systems “collecting dust.” This was advocacy, the opposite of evidence, amplified by a congressman dramatically shouting at Gen. Odierno in hearings. The Army’s own test evaluation reports were accused of being doctored to turn the accusation itself into the story, regardless of whether any evaluation supported it. Hitler notably made trials against him into a victimization complaint, inverting perception of his aggression into a campaign to enable it.

The court didn’t actually rule the Army failed to consider a useful product. It ruled the Army didn’t follow a procedure exactly. That narrow procedural victory became a crack that Palantir smashed open, grabbing an $800 million contract that forced permanent platform dependency.

In Switzerland, Palantir doesn’t need the platform that it claims to need. They published a blog post. They have access to every major media outlet and social platform on earth. The whole right-of-reply lawsuit is a bald-faced lie. They are forcing a small magazine to host Palantir’s lies under the threat of legal attack. The European Federation of Journalists called it what it is: a SLAPP suit.

Asymmetric Abuse

The Army’s procurement office was no match for Palantir’s heavily funded litigation team at Boies Schiller. Republik certainly can’t match the legal budget.

The inversion strategy requires the target to lack the resources to expose in court that the law is being used against its own purpose.

Capitulate to American billionaires or be sued into default is the choice Palantir’s aggressive legal strategy creates.

A company that brags about optimizing kill chains and whose CEO talks about scaring and occasionally killing enemies can’t handle a Swiss statistical office ignoring its emails, or a small magazine publishing government documents.

The pattern recognition software apparently has no shame, doesn’t flag self-inflicted reputational damage.

A Zurich court rules in March. Let’s see if they make the U.S. Army error. Whatever the outcome, the method is clearly documented. Palantir cheats by inversion: take a law built to protect openness, competition, or accountability, and use it to destroy exactly those things.

Trump declared the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict “solved” last October and called it his “eighth war” ended, mostly “within a day.”

Trump had nothing to do with it.

The momentary ceasefire was actually brokered by Turkey and Qatar. Pakistan’s leadership understood the Trump play immediately: soak him as a “genuine man of peace,” cynically nominate him for a Nobel peace prize, and watch the tariff rate drop from 50% to 19% while India gets punished.

Geopolitical analyst Christine Fair put it plainly:

I don’t think Trump is a sophisticated creature. I think with Trump, flattery goes a really, really long way.

She may as well have been talking about Mussolini.

The corrupt transaction was naked; Pakistan bought favorable treatment with words that cost nothing, and Trump put on pants that didn’t exist to walk around taking credit for a peace he didn’t make.

Today?

Boom. Pakistani jets are bombing Kabul, Kandahar, and Paktia. Pakistan’s defence minister says “patience has run out” and Trump’s big peace deal is “open war.” The ceasefire didn’t hold because it was never built to hold. It was built to generate a headline for corrupt coin transfers.

The same pattern plays out everywhere Trump puts on his victory pants.

In June 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer dropped bunker-busters on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump announced he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Eight months later, his own envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” The Pentagon’s own assessment said the strikes set Iran back one to two years — and an early intelligence assessment leaked to CNN said it was closer to months. The IAEA says nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium remains unaccounted for at the bombed sites. So what did “obliteration” actually produce? The largest American military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq: two carrier strike groups, more than 150 aircraft repositioned, F-22s deployed to Israel for the first time, over 10,000 additional service members flooding the region. Trump killed a nuclear deal that capped enrichment at 3.67%, bombed facilities that were under international inspection, declared the problem solved, and created a crisis that now requires a permanent war footing to manage.

Each “win” is an ever-bigger setback. The man is a bankruptcy magnet, as a financial and moral loser.

This is what happens when foreign policy serves one man’s vanity instead of the people caught in the bombing runs. His push for a pause becomes a permission structure for wealth extraction and radical power shift, deepening the conflict and increasing pain.

Every conflict gets a Trump message that nobody with power is actually watching, he just wants a piece of credit, so they pay and rearm and wait. Gaza ceasefire violations are still being tracked. The India-Pakistan “peace” was a bilateral military understanding that India says had nothing to do with Washington. Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” into a standoff that looks more like 2003 every day. Pakistan-Afghanistan was “solved” into open war.

Trump claims victories the way Enron claimed stock gains. Authoritarians love medals, lots and lots of shiny medals, not to describe reality but to replace it with garbage. The con only works if you never go back and check.

Afghan women hit by mortar shells at refugee camps and Iranian civilians bracing for another decade or two of American bombs are the cost of a bankrupt foreign policy run on attention-seeking social media vibes. Counting the days of dead and wounded was never part of any Trump “peace” deal.

Related: The man who wisely bet against Elon Musk and said that Trump’s DOGE was a total fraud, has made a fortune by being right.

Pete Hegseth is weakening the United States military to punish a company that is good. The Defense Secretary is about to rip the most capable AI model out of the Pentagon’s classified networks, force every major defense contractor to purge it from their systems, and replace it with a weaker model that generates Nazi content. The things he wants to eliminate never prevented a single military operation. The Pentagon’s own users love Anthropic Claude. But not angry Pete.

The Pentagon gave Anthropic until 17:01 today to remove two contractual safeguards from its AI model Claude: a prohibition on mass surveillance of Americans, and a prohibition on autonomous weapons that fire without human involvement.

If the company refuses to allow surveillance and autonomous weapons Hegseth will simultaneously label the American company a foreign adversary (“supply chain risk”) and invoke the Defense Production Act to compel it to hand over its technology anyway.

Legal experts point out Hegseth’s threats are inherently contradictory. You can’t declare a company a national security risk and simultaneously argue its technology is so essential to national defense that a Korean War-era emergency statute must be invoked to seize it.

The stupid.

Dean Ball, who wrote the White House’s own AI Action Plan, called it “a whole different level of insane.” The contradiction is the point, like saying bombing of Iran “obliterated” their nuclear production, therefore we now have to go to war with Iran to stop their nuclear production. The Nazis called it their “permanent improvisation”.

The Misogynist Who Wants Power

The Pentagon’s lead negotiator is Under Secretary of War Emil Michael. Late Thursday, after Amodei publicly rejected the Pentagon’s “final offer,” Michael posted on X calling the Anthropic CEO “a liar” with a “God-complex” who “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military.” That sounds like projection.

Emil Michael is worth knowing. A disgraced man at Uber, he proposed spending a million dollars on opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists and their families, especially targeting a female reporter who’d criticized the company’s culture.

Attacking women apparently is a theme.

Senior Vice President Emil Michael floated making critics’ personal lives fair game. Michael apologized Monday for the remarks. […] He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted. Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

This is the guy telling Anthropic to enable surveillance for automated weapons. It’s obvious who he would be putting most at risk.

He was involved in a visit to a Seoul escort bar with company executives. He was implicated in a small group of Uber executives who obtained and reviewed the medical records of a rape victim in India. Eric Holder’s investigation into Uber’s workplace culture specifically recommended his firing.

This is the man the Pentagon chose to handle negotiations over whether AI should be used for mass surveillance. This is the man publicly calling a CEO a liar for refusing to remove safeguards against it.

Trust Breakdown

When CBS asked why the Pentagon won’t simply put the surveillance and weapons restrictions in writing, Michael said those uses are already illegal and barred by Pentagon policy. “At some level,” he said, “you have to trust your military to do the right thing.” He literally used a slippery slope fallacy. What’s the level?

The Pentagon says currently it would never use AI for mass surveillance. It also says it will not accept written language promising not to use AI for mass surveillance, because it may use AI for mass surveillance.

Anthropic says the restrictions haven’t prevented any military use of Claude to date. The Pentagon doesn’t dispute this. The demand to strip the safeguards is entirely about the principle that only Trump can set conditions, the only law is Trump. Even conditions the Pentagon itself claims are redundant with existing law aren’t ok, because they weren’t set by Trump.

When restrictions are truly redundant, the campaign to eliminate them makes no sense unless America is already a military dictatorship. Former DOJ official Katie Sweeten put it plainly:

If these are the lines in the sand that the DOD is drawing, I would assume that one or both of those functions are scenarios that they would want to utilize this for.

The Compromise That Wasn’t

The Pentagon sent a “best and final offer” overnight Wednesday. Anthropic laughed and said it “made virtually no progress” on the two safeguards. It actually went backwards. New language framed as compromise was not.

paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.

Translation: we promise not to do it until we decide to do it.

This is a pattern anyone familiar with rape investigations recognizes. Language is structured so that consent is assumed and withdrawal of consent is impossible: she wanted it. It’s now being used as institutional capture. The written promise contains its own override, meaning the premise is to ignore the promise. The safeguard exists on paper and nowhere else.

The Weapon Example

The Lawfare analysis by Alan Rozenshtein lays out the legal terrain clearly. Biden used DPA Title VII — information-gathering authority — to require AI companies to report on training activities. Republicans called even that “overreach.”

Remember?

Hegseth is now threatening Title I, the core compulsion power, against a domestic company for refusing to remove ethical restrictions from its own product. Irony has never been a constraint on power. Hegseth is expressing authoritarian rule and Republicans are all for it now.

The real audience for this isn’t Anthropic. It’s every other American tech company watching the end of democracy. OpenAI, Google, and xAI have reportedly agreed to “all lawful purposes” language. Musk’s xAI is so thirsty it signed on for classified work with no restrictions, just like how its Grok model produced Nazi content that Anthropic’s safeguards were designed to prevent.

None of the other companies responded when asked whether they’ve agreed to allow mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.

The message is comply without conditions or Trump will make an example of you. He’s the guy who allegedly hit a 13 year old girl in the head when she bit his penis. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell used deranged language to call surveillance concerns “fake” and “being peddled by leftists in the media.” This from the people who said Civil Rights are over and rebranded the Department of Defense back to the “Department of War.”

The Stake

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote Thursday that frontier AI systems

are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons [and cannot] exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day.

He is correct.

He expressed concern that AI surveillance could piece things together:

scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life.

He also pointed out what should be obvious:

[the Pentagon’s threats] are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.

Amodei said if the Pentagon proceeds, Anthropic

will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.

The company isn’t threatening or taking power.

It isn’t retaliating.

It’s saying it would rather lose a contract than engage in mass surveillance and autonomous killing.

The Pentagon brought six officials to the Tuesday meeting (Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, Under Secretary Michael, Under Secretary Duffey, spokesman Parnell, and general counsel Earl Matthews) as institutional confrontation, not negotiation.

Hegseth praised Claude to Amodei in the same meeting where he threatened to destroy the company.

The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now,

A Defense official told Axios.

The problem for these guys is they are that good.

Trump hates good.

The Historical Pattern

Governments that demand the right to surveil their own citizens without written constraints always say they won’t abuse it. Governments that demand autonomous killing capability always say there will be humans in the loop.

The authoritarian ask is always the same: remove safeguards and don’t put conditions in writing. The historical record of what happens next is unambiguous.

The DPA was designed to redirect steel production during the Korean War. It’s now being weaponized to compel an American company to strip ethical safeguards from artificial intelligence so the military can use it without conditions. Congress hasn’t legislated guidelines on autonomous weapons or AI surveillance. Into that void steps a Defense Secretary who declared AI “will not be woke” from the stage at Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters, while the Nazi-spigot xAI holds a competing Pentagon contract.

The deadline is nearly here. What happens will tell us whether any American company can refuse to build tools for Trump attacks on Americans without being labeled an enemy of Trump.