Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee, helped pass one of the country’s toughest AI laws. Now Silicon Valley’s biggest names are trying to stop his rise to Congress.
The company’s UK and Europe boss has become a lightning rod for the British public’s fear of a US tech takeover
The hall was packed with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Just as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “a similar revolution is brewing today”, said the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he said in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.
It was not a typical peroration for a big UK government contractor with more than £600m in deals with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. But Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech company, is no typical contractor. In recent years it has gained firm footholds across Britain’s public sector while appalling critics with its leadership’s rightwing rhetoric and its work for the US and Israeli militaries and Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown.
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Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Silicon Valley debate: it’s becoming part of Africa’s creative revolution. In Nigeria, filmmakers and digital artists are experimenting with AI tools to create films, archive disappearing oral histories and imagine new African futures. Obinna Okere-keocha, founder of Naija Artificial Intelligence Film Festival, and filmmaker Malik Afegbua, use AI to preserve fading oral traditions by creating digital archives.
The gentle French garment is now as cursed as the infamous megacorp, which has accumulated $80m in government contracts in Australia alone
It’s taken me years to find a chore coat with a cut that flatters my big tits but, now that I finally own one, I want to incinerate it.
Such is the power of brand contamination; infamous data surveillance megacorp Palantir, has decided to bang a logo on a chore coat to sell as corporate merch.
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Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions
Since the surreal scene at the 2024 presidential inauguration, when a row of big tech titans took their VIP seats and signaled their new alliance with Maga, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley’s AI ambitions and shareholder priorities.
Washington has doled out billions in lucrative federal subsidies and contracts to the cash-rich sector, bloating an AI bubble that experts warn may imperil the entire economy while prohibiting any guardrails on the fast-moving technology.
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AI is capable of mimicking a real person. It’s clear this capability exists, and the ethics of using AI for this purpose are often very clear. But increasingly, new applications are leading to ethically murky results.
The good
For example, the CEO of a company, or a politician, could choose to create a clone using AI tools, creating a chatbot plus an avatar — a digital twin — that can interact with people on their behalf. Silicon Valley is big on the idea: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are working on, or have already created, digital twins of themselves.
Cloned politicians include Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who used an authorized voice clone to campaign from prison, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who used voice-cloned robocalls to speak with constituents in languages like Mandarin and Yiddish.
This kind of use case is probably ethical — as long as the people interacting know that they’re dealing with a digital clone and not a real person.
The bad
The f
