Across Europe, governments are reconsidering their relationship with the Palantir platform. The French domestic intelligence service has replaced it with a national provider. Spain has ordered its public companies to stop signing contracts with the company. The Swiss army rejected it outright, the British Parliament wants to expel it from the National Health Service (NHS). In Germany, the Constitutional Court repealed police function laws that allowed two federal states to use its technology.
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This is not a wave of anti-Americanism. It is about refusing to hand over essential state functions to a company that is not accountable. A company that sued the mayor of London for assessing the ethics of a supplier in a public procurement process. A company that took the Swiss magazine Republik to court over its reports, with the result that 22 of the 23 charges it made in its complaint were dismissed.
And yet, on September 24, in Berlin, the communication company Axel Springer will present Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir, with its annual award. The reason is that it considers Thiel’s company a vital element for the resilience of democracies. It is a strange expression for a company that resorts to courts to challenge democratic decisions and act against journalists who investigate it. While much of the continent works to reduce its dependence on Thiel, Germany’s largest publisher decides to honor him.
The award announcement came the day after the U.S. president’s prime-time television appearance to claim, citing recently declassified documents, that China stole the last elections. Even though the documents held by his own government indicate otherwise. Among them is a CIA memo concluding that Beijing had no intention of covertly interfering in the election outcome. Still, Trump ordered to go to court.
Four months before the midterm elections, the message was clear: the last elections were lost because someone committed a crime; the upcoming ones in November are already in the hands of his prosecutors.
Thiel is not a mere spectator of this administration: he invested fifteen million dollars in the independent political action committee (super PAC) that promoted J.D. Vance’s candidacy – a former employee of his own investment fund – for the Senate. It was the largest contribution ever made by a single donor in a Senate campaign. Vance is now Vice President of the U.S.
Thiel has been openly expressing his beliefs for two decades. In 2009 he wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. The reason he gave is often omitted, and it is precisely the most important: according to him, the extension of voting rights to women and the growth of the welfare state created an electorate that would never choose the economic model he advocated. He did not lament the corruption of democracy. He lamented that democracy worked. Since then, he has funded political movements worldwide that start from the same premise: considering popular vote as an obstacle that must be managed.
For a decade, his attitude toward that conviction was escape: floating cities, private currencies, and a New Zealand passport. Around 2016 he changed strategy: if you can’t leave the state, conquer it. He supported Trump when almost no one in Silicon Valley did and declared, at the first National Conservatism movement conference, that libertarianism had failed and that the United States needed a strong national state to face China.
Michael Kratsios, who led Thiel Capital for seven years, now leads White House technology policy and advises the president; he co-authored the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and has spent this year opposing AI regulation both in the U.S. and Europe, while offering allied governments a U.S. AI ecosystem as an alternative. Palantir, originally funded by the CIA’s investment arm, underwent a 20-year process to become the operating system of the U.S. state security apparatus. Such power is no longer won through elections. It is won through money and contracts.
Thiel has been expressing for two decades that he does not believe freedom is compatible with democracy
Germany already awarded Thiel another prize of this kind, and Mathias Döpfner was also involved then. It was in 2021 when Thiel received the Frank Schirrmacher award, with Döpfner as a jury member. The tribute speech was given by former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whom Thiel Capital hired a few weeks after he resigned amid a corruption investigation.
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Springer is not a neutral referee. Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, was part of its supervisory board and later its shareholder committee, alongside Mathias Döpfner. Additionally, Springer internally uses Palantir software. Moritz Döpfner, son of Springer’s CEO, was chief of staff at Thiel Capital, and Thiel boosted his fund with an initial investment of 50 million dollars. Both hold stakes in Stark, the drone manufacturer whose contract with the Bundeswehr was partially reduced by the Bundestag in February, partly due to Thiel’s involvement.
Just a few weeks ago, Döpfner interviewed Karp on his podcast, where he denied any authoritarian sympathies. The interview was amplified by Bild. Springer also owns Politico Europe. The Berlin tribute will be conducted by Bari Weiss, whose outlet The Free Press was founded with funding from Silicon Valley and was sold last year for 150 million dollars to a media group aligned with Trump. Weiss cordially interviewed Thiel a few days after the 2024 elections.
Thiel cultivates power wherever he can. He does so by appearing where the authoritarian right gains ground. In April he was received by Chilean President José Antonio Kast at the Palacio de la Moneda; he has also bought a house in Buenos Aires next to that of Argentine President Javier Milei, whose government is developing a state artificial intelligence platform aimed at anticipating and neutralizing dissent. He has even clashed with the Church. In March he gave four lectures on the Antichrist, accessible by invitation only, a few blocks from the Vatican. Several Catholic universities supposedly involved hurried to distance themselves.
According to Thiel, the advent of the Antichrist comes with promises of security and peace. Therefore, anyone who seeks to limit technological development is working for him. Two months earlier, Pope Leo XIV had dedicated his first encyclical precisely to that danger, warning against the concentration of technological power in private hands. In July, Thiel accused the Pope of serving Beijing for holding that position.
These anti-democratic ideas run through all of Thiel’s written work, with the premise that the “exceptional founder” should not be subject to the same rules as the rest. In market terms, this is called a monopoly. Within the state framework, this is precisely what I have been documenting for two years on the platform The Authoritarian Stack: the transfer of national payment, police, intelligence, and defense communications systems to private powers too strong for any government to disconnect. That dependence ends up becoming an instrument of pressure. In June, Washington threatened to impose 100% tariffs on any country that taxes U.S. tech companies, ignoring already signed trade agreements.
The danger is not a single man, but the techno-authoritarianism Europe must defend itself against
The independent press has precisely the duty to oversee this type of power: the union between private wealth and public authority, capable of deciding which rules apply and which do not. This task is difficult when both parties are integrated into the same corporate balance sheet. It should be emphasized that Springer’s CEO shared a shareholder committee with Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp; his son’s investment fund was born thanks to Thiel’s money. Both participate alongside Thiel in a defense company investigated by the Bundestag. Elsewhere this would be called a conflict of interest. In Berlin, on September 24, it will be called an award.
Europe is right to be wary, and the reason goes far beyond a specific contract. Thiel is not defending democracy, but rejecting the principle on which it rests: that power must answer to the law and to citizens. That European hospitals, police forces, armies, and public space should depend on infrastructures owned by a man who despises democracy and finances the far right worldwide is, at its core, not a technological issue. It is a matter of pluralism, the rule of law, and freedom of the press.
But the danger was never represented by a single man. The real danger, as we said, is techno-authoritarianism: the fusion between private wealth and power – financial and technological – with the state, beyond any democratic control. This is what Europe must now defend itself against.
