Palantir’s Co-Founder Thinks We Should Be Less Judgmental About That Deadly Iran School Strike

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, recently discussed America's AI-assisted warfare during a Reuters-hosted event. While acknowledging the tragedy of the US strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran, Lonsdale expressed the difficulty of passing judgment from an external perspective. He suggested that it may have been a single bad choice among 99 good choices that led to the disastrous outcome.

Lonsdale also proposed that Iran might have intentionally misled the US military into targeting the school on the first day of the Trump administration's war in Iran, ultimately killing over 150 people, mostly children. The Pentagon later attributed the attack to overreliance on Palantir technology. Lonsdale argued that the true facts of the incident remain unclear, and the attack may potentially be classified as a war crime.

However, when asked about accountability for companies operating in the defense and tech sectors, Lonsdale suggested that there should be laws regulating their actions. As a managing partner of venture capital firm 8VC, Lonsdale has $6 billion invested in high-tech defense companies and is increasingly engaged in lobbying on industry issues.

His conservative think tank, Cicero Institute, and its lobbying arm, Cicero Action, are involved in defense-lobby spending, which could benefit his 8VC portfolio. Despite these potential conflicts of interest, Lonsdale maintained that it is possible to be a "perfectly moral" person in the weapons business, as there is a perceived need for skilled people in defense to prevent catastrophic events like 9/11.