Thomas. O

it’s pretty wild that VCs poured billions into web3 and the category didn’t produce one breakout company

I put on my fraud detection hat whenever I see a 22 year old Tech bro who supposedly dropped out of college to fund an AI startup. In this case, what I found about this Kled guy is incredibly disturbing. K5 Global is Kled’s lead investor. K5 Global is a firm that frequently invests alongside the Palantir and Thiel network. Another Kled backer, Aglaé Ventures, owned by Bernard Arnault, has a massive AI portfolio that intersects with the same labs that Palantir’s AIP integrates with. Basically, Kled is the Data Harvester for Palantir. Their job is to mobilize hundreds of thousands of gig workers, mostly from the Global South, to upload personal photos, videos, and documents. They convert raw human life into a machine readable product. Their clients like Palantir act as the Data Refinery. Palantir’s software, specifically Foundry and AIP, is designed to take that data and make it actionable for governments and corporations to put into global surveillance and military use. We can safely conclude that this Kled guy and other similar AI startups harvesting user data are human meat shields. They are specifically set up and funded to do the dirty work for Silicon Valley tech empires. Understand that these Large AI labs are currently being sued by artists, writers, and publishers for stealing data through web scraping. To win these court cases, OpenAI and Palantir need to prove they have clean, consented data. Buying a dataset from Kled, where every user signed a 50 page digital consent form in exchange for $20, gives these billion dollar tech companies a free pass. Also, imagine if Palantir, a company already criticized for government surveillance and US military war campaigns, offered to pay people in developing countries to film their living rooms and daily activities. It would look like a global surveillance network. By using Kled as a middleman, they get the same data but keep their hands clean in the public eye. Even though we cannot verify his claim of Nigerians defrauding his company, what we can verify is that he is an industry plant. He is set up to allow AI data labs to continue harvesting user data for global surveillance and military use.