Shyam Sankar

1/ We are in an undeclared state of emergency. America's adversaries are circling, and the American industrial base that dominated the 20th century is dormant. For the CCP, it is not enough for China to prosper... America must fall. It's time to Mobilize. Coming March 2026.

“In his envisioned mobilization effort, Sankar stresses the importance of driven individuals in business and in the armed services to overcome the system’s inertia.” Read “Activating defense,” by Henrik Bering. @BombardierBooks @ssankar newcriterion.com/article/activa…

M-day was Yesterday!

The U.S. has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI. We will be taking action to protect American innovation. These foreign entities are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs. Foreign entities who build on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the models they produce. The U.S. government is committed to the free and fair development of AI technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from open-source to proprietary models. Read the memo: whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…

Every era has its orthodoxy. And every orthodoxy is eventually broken by one person who refuses to stay quiet. This is that person.

22 years building data systems in the NHS. Led 150 engineers on FDP. No commercial relationship with Palantir. No one asked him to speak. He spoke anyway — because the people who actually built the thing were watching it get killed by a debate led by people who never logged in. History remembers the person who stands up when everyone with knowledge is sitting down.

Just finished “Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop WWW 3” by @ssankar & @Madeline_Zimm Hands down one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. Everyone should read this book ASAP 🇺🇸🔥

Loved @timhwang's Wartime Footing report so much I had to review it with @ssankar

EXCLUSIVE: How the Military Uses Palantir, and AI, for War. The military has wanted war AI since Vietnam. Since then, between 60-70 programs attempting to make it have failed. Palantir was, arguably, the first to enter this environment with a new approach: actually identifying the problems by going out into the field. Here, the first substantial report on how Palantir built AI for the military, and exactly how they’re using it, including: • How the outdated targeting tech that Palantir is replacing — including PowerPoint — may have contributed to the accidental bombing of an Iranian school in February. • New details on the conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic, Palantir’s former AI partner, concerning an update that crippled the CDC’s AI systems and heightened the administration’s fears over who controls this powerful tech. This piece includes sourcing from military case studies, private and public demos of Palantir’s tech, and interviews with Palantir’s Akshay Krishnaswamy, chief architect; Ted Mabrey, head of commercial business; various vertical leaders and engineers at Palantir; Emil Michael, the under secretary of war for research and engineering; as well as sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Essentially, despite fears that the Pentagon is using AI to drop missiles “quicker than the speed of thought,” sidelining human judgment entirely, mainly what it’s doing is replacing spreadsheets, calls, chats, and PowerPoint — to plan targets faster and more carefully. Read the full piece from @dodgeblake 👇

Rare to read an article about Palantir that is both incisive and accurate. "Per Mabrey: “I remember [Alex] Karp telling me, ‘What justifies a good product thesis?’ And him saying, ‘You have a really critical societal problem that is defined by irreconcilable trade-offs, where if you can make any progress against those trade-offs, you’ve created intrinsic value in the world.” Believing that tech can matter that much requires a certain disposition. Which is why optimism, sitting downstream of the courage and capacity to “care and be able to see past something,” is probably Palantir’s number one recruiting filter, Mabrey said: “Before we get into what you believe, it’s like, can you believe? How cynical are you?” “You can build a product that matters more,” Mabrey said, adding: “And if that’s not true, then what the fuck are we doing here?”

NEW from Shyam Sankar (@ssankar): The ‘Jagged Intelligence’ of Genius Andrej Karpathy coined the term “jagged intelligence” to describe how AI is smart about some things and dumb about others. Just like AI, human intelligence is also “jagged” — and technologists’ intelligence is more jagged than most. Right now, a debate is unfolding over how the U.S. should use AI in war. Some AI builders have decided America and its leaders can’t be trusted with their tools. They think micromanaging access will protect democracy. We’ve seen this movie before. During WWII, brilliant scientists debated how nuclear weapons might be used, and whether it was right for the U.S. to develop them in isolation. Niels Bohr argued for preemptive disclosure of nuclear weapons to the Soviets; others, led by Leo Szilard, put together a petition urging Truman not to drop the bomb without warning Japan. Ironically, given his later views, Robert Oppenheimer dismissed the Szilard petition, asking (correctly): “What do [the scientists] know about Japanese psychology? How can they judge the way to end the war?” As Shyam writes, the job of a scientist, or a technologist, is to build the thing and tell leaders what it does. In a democracy, the decision of how to use it isn’t theirs to make — and, in this case, restricting the technology doesn’t make us safer or freer. It simply gives an advantage to the actual tyrants (the CCP.) Read the full story 👇

The most dangerous man in the room isn't the tyrant. It's the brilliant idealist who's decided he knows better than everyone else what freedom looks like. Epistemic humility isn't weakness. It's the prerequisite to preserving democracy. Otherwise it is tyranny by tech bro. shyamsankar.com/p/the-jagged-i…

what do these books have in common? answer: New York Times Best Seller List

Strongly recommend @ssankar’s “Mobilize”. It is a story of how America needs to rebuild its industrial base but more than that it’s a story of many unsung patriots who have worked hard to give us our capabilities.

The biggest knock against this Iran adventure, especially if it ends inconclusively, is that we've now burned through a chunk of our expensive weapons stocks. But maybe that's a blessing in disguise? Some thoughts after reading @ssankar's book. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

America's ability to deter our enemies is dependent on our ability to revitalize our industrial base. @ssankar understands that. It was an honor to hold a fireside chat last night on his new book, "Mobilize." This is a must-read.

Ever since my book Mobilize launched earlier this week, I’ve been flooded with messages from people asking how they can help save the American industrial base. Now we’re launching a new fellowship to connect patriots to the movement: Are you a veteran with an active security clearance looking for a new mission? A cleared, tech-savvy civilian who wants to do more than ride a desk? Palantir wants YOU for the American Tech Fellowship-Mobilize. We started ATF last year to identify and train elite American talent to revitalize our country.  Now we’re launching a new, accelerated ATF cohort (ATF-Mobilize) to teach America’s cleared workforce how to wield industry-leading software to reboot the defense industrial base. ATF-Mobilize fellows will participate in eight weeks of live, virtual training on Palantir Foundry and AIP, guided by domain experts from Palantir and our partner, Ontologize. They will learn-by-doing, building custom tools solo and with their peers. Graduates will gain mission-critical skills and access to a growing alumni network. They will also be considered for jobs at Palantir and our customers supporting urgent missions across the defense industrial base. ATF-Mobilize is your chance to deploy from your couch to a job in the engine rooms of American power. We want the best of the best. We want heretical heroes. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Applications are live now. Training begins April 28.  Mobilize is a movement. Move out with us: #recruiting" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mobilizebook.com/#recruiting

"AI is going to be the antidote to the managerial revolution of the 20th century." - Palantir CTO @ssankar "All this power that was sucked away from the frontline workers, who actually knew what they were doing, to an amorphous blob of middle managers — that's being reversed. All the bureaucracy is getting cut." "In the military, I'm seeing incredible AI application developers who are not formally trained computer scientists. What happened? I've been doing this for 20 years. This feels like a discontinuity. Where did these people come from?" "I realized they've always been there. The thing is — what would this guy have done 10 years ago? Make a PowerPoint? Try to convince some program manager that his ideas were good, only to be told they weren't?" "Now he just goes away in a corner for 2 weeks and builds it. And he's arguing about something that's empirical. And the commander is like, 'This works. Let's go.'"

@ChairmanG 🤣🫡🇺🇸

There are two things most people who don't know @ssankar well (or only know him as an engineer) would be surprised to learn: (1) he has a freakish deadlift, it's actually upsetting how much weight he can deadlift; (2) he just wrote an incredible book. On #2, if you want to learn the true story of Project Maven, if you want to understand how we mobilize to prevent WW3, or if you just want to learn to be a better leader and patriot, read this book (it's also very fun to read). In general I don't promote heresy during Lent, but this is the heretic's guide to saving the Republic.

“It was the American Industrial Base that underwrote American victory and Pax Americana. It can once again if we embrace it as our savior.” - Palantir CTO, @ssankar Mobilize 🇺🇸