Palantir and Clearview Are Turning Ukraine’s War Into an R&D Lab — With Vera Bergengruen

Vera Bergengruen is a senior correspondent at Time. She joins Big Technology Podcast after a recent trip to Ukraine, where she reported on how Palantir and Clearview are putting their technology in the Ukrainians’ hands, and using the war as a way to enhance their offering. We also discuss how Ukraine is embracing the moment and positioning itself as a military tech powerhouse with plans to export what it’s learned. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  The war in Ukraine is pushing the cutting edge of tech in warfare forward. Effectively, it's an R and D lab for companies like Palantir and Clearview. We'll explore how it's all going down right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Vera Bergen-Gruen. She's a senior correspondent at Time. She's based in Washington DC where she covers the overlap of national security, politics and technology. She's a former colleague of mine from the BuzzFeed News days. And she's just back from a trip to Ukraine where she did some fascinating reporting on Clearview and on Palantir. Vera, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. So can you talk a little bit quickly about what Ukraine is like right now? What your trip was like? Does it feel like a war zone in places like Kiev?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was very interesting. I actually arrived during what people there said was one of the calmest periods the war has had. You know, it was, you know, they had several weeks since there had really been any major air raid alerts. The city itself felt, you know, for for an outsider coming in feels fairly normal. You obviously know you're in a city that's that's been going through a war. But at the same time, you know, someone who was there for the first time, it's really interesting how life seems to go on as normal. Businesses are going, you know, people are traveling back and forth. And but of course, coming in and out of Ukraine, you still can't fly in, you have to drive in or take a train. And, you know, you're very aware you are in a country at war. But of course, we just, you know, right after I left, there was another major wave of air raid sirens, a bunch of drones.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  And so, you know, there's really never a moment of rest. But this has been, the the general sense was that this was kind of a small respite before the winter when Russia's really gonna pick it up.

• 2:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow. So you're so there's more on the way, right? Like, coming soon?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 3:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  What was the train out like? I mean, I imagine that the people leaving, you know, there are people running away from the war, people who have just dipped in and are leaving again.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, obviously, fighting age males, for the most part, can't leave Ukraine, except, you know, unless you really have a reason, unless you have permission. So it's mainly women and children. They are, you know, it's not like taking the Amtrak. It's full of people with, you know, a lot of their belongings, you know, in the middle of the train. The train mainly goes through the night with the lights off. So it's definitely a very kind of surreal feeling. They, you know, they have all kinds of warnings on the TVs on what to do if there's, you know, if there's any kind of emergency on the on the way there. And then usually get stuck at the border for a couple of hours as they check everyone in, you know, leaving Poland and leaving Ukraine and then entering Poland. But, you know, you can really tell that, you know, there's a lot of dramatic scenes at the train station. People are saying goodbye. And it's mainly the young men staying behind

• 3:55Speaker 01

  and saying goodbye to family members who are either leaving for good or kind of coming in to check on family and going back.

• 4:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  You went to Ukraine, you didn't need to go to the front lines to report on the story that you were after, or the stories multiple, because there's actually this fascinating tech story unfolding within that country, where Western tech companies are effectively using this war zone as a R and D lab to better their products and to see what type of experiences they can enable, for lack of better words, at the extreme, at the limit. So the first company that you started to really dig into is Clearview AI, which we kind of know as this like facial recognition company that's kind of creepy and used by political, by,

• 4:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  used by police in the United States, but ended up being used for some fascinating uses out there. So talk a little bit about what caught your eye about Clearview and what you started to learn when you started reporting on the company in Ukraine.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's interesting that you said that earlier because that's definitely true. I spent the first year and a half of this war covering the technology and digital front on the Ukraine war from DC, which, you know, I could do all my interviews, I could see the effect of all of their technology without having to go in person. But of course, once I actually got there, it was interesting. I was looking at tech companies, local tech companies by Ukrainians that were really kind of trying to build out and take advantage of the fact that they were able to help their country, obviously, in their mind, in their view, win this war on the technology front. They find themselves to be much more limber, much less, you know, like the Russia is this kind of Soviet era, slow-moving country, and they think that they have the advantage on the tech front and that they're convinced,

• 5:43Speaker 01

  you speak to officials there, they think that's exactly what's going to help them win this war. But I was very interested in Western tech companies also coming in and offering a lot of this, you know, their technology, often for free. And a lot of them being companies that have a controversial reputation in Western countries, in Europe, in the US because of, you know, what they call kind of bad tech, right? Like, you know, kind of creepy tech, tech that we don't tend to like when it's used against us in peacetime. But then you use it in a war and it's, you know, what it gives the Ukrainians is again, free access to extremely effective technology in a country that doesn't have or isn't really using many regulations. It's like the Wild West. You can, you can come in and use, you know, facial recognition software. You can use, you know, drones.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  You can kind of develop anything you want and you can use it there. And then, you know, on the tech front, uh, for the Western companies, it's kind of, you know, a bit of reputation laundering going on for many of them. They are, you know, companies that are having a reputational problem in the West. They're being called on to testify, they're being sued. And here they are kind of being the heroes. They are getting to go give something that is helping, you know, what people kind of consider a black and white war. And the West is considered, for the most part, you know, people generally, especially at the beginning, were just wholeheartedly supporting Ukraine. And anything you can do to help Ukraine is a good thing for the company, right? And so when I was there, uh, one of the things that I knew that ClearView AI, which is a American facial recognition, uh, software that's being used by police departments.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Here in the US, it's pretty controversial. It has been used in Europe and sued in Europe because Europe has much stronger privacy regulations. So it's kind of been banned from being used in a lot of these countries. In the US, they can sell the software to private companies. And I, I, I knew they were, it was being used there, but it wasn't really revealed how much. And everyone I spoke to, every high level of law enforcement or military official was obsessed with ClearView. They couldn't stop talking about it because it's incredibly effective. It's, and that's what makes it creepy again, what's, what's, that's what people don't like in the US. If DHS or ICE has it, it's being used in a different way. But I, I got there and I was trying to talk about different kinds of tech. And they all said, yes, but have you heard about ClearView? You know, we love this company, uh, and that's kind of where it began.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I, I started asking them how they were using it. And when I reached out to the company itself, it turned out that the CEO was very obviously eager to tell me about all the good uses.

• 8:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so wild.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  They, yeah.

• 8:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. He's such a mysterious person and he's like, just like, yes, let's talk about this.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I mean, we have to keep in mind the context. I mean, again, it's a company that's considered creepy, you know, it's considered, it's, you know, a lot of people have, you know, if people know about ClearView, it usually has a kind of negative connotation, unless you're a cop. Cops love this stuff. And so, you know, the New York Times, there's a New York Times reporter who just published a book about ClearView. I mean, they're currently going through a particular reputational issue here. And so I think when I called them up and said, I want to talk about how it's, you know, this tech is being used in Ukraine, they were, they were really excited. The CEO himself connected me to five, six different high-level Ukrainian officials. And, you know, two days later, I was in Kyiv talking to them. So they clearly wanted this out there.

• 8:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So talk a little bit about how they're actually using this software because they have used it in some very fascinating ways.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they kind of started using it to identify Russians. So at the very beginning of the war, a couple of days in, the CEO himself goes on Zoom, gives a couple of officials a demo and gives them a code, basically for a free month of ClearView and they start using it. And he says that in the first Zoom session, basically, one of the officials kind of told him, can I show you something? And he shared a screen and had identified a bunch of dead Russian soldiers. And it immediately felt, you know, you basically upload a photo, it shows you everywhere that photo appears on the internet, which makes it pretty easy to find social media profiles, names, hometowns, all of that. And they first used it to identify dead Russian soldiers. They wanted to know kind of who was coming in. Then they started identifying more living Russian soldiers. And just, you know, what

• 9:45Speaker 01

  they did is they would put all these photos on a website and kind of have their names, ages, hometowns on there. And they started promoting this heavily in Russia through Telegram groups and stuff like that, kind of saying like, hey, if you think your son's fighting here, he might be dead. The Russians won't tell you, like, come check it on this website. And this was their own, you know, kind of campaign of truth that they were calling, you know, waging it in terms of. Informing the Russian population about the cost that the war was having. And the website actually called no losses, which is kind of, you know, it's kind of making fun of the fact that Russia said they weren't suffering any losses. Yeah. And so, you know, they were using it for Russians, but it clearly started being expanded pretty quickly because it was so effective. Russians started coming into the country a couple of months later, wearing full face coverings.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  This was in the height of the summer because they realized that they were being, you know, immediately identified.

• 10:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And why wouldn't they want to be identified? Is it just that like they would be, they wouldn't be able to travel anymore or they have sanctions? Like, what does the average Russian soldier care?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I think according to the Ukrainians, and you know, what it kind of makes sense is if you are out there, you're in Bucha, you're outside of Ukraine, committing what is considered an international war crime. You're, you know, hurting civilians in your basement, you're depriving them of water. Most of the stuff you're doing, and it's considered an illegal invasion, right? So, I mean, basically, if your face is out there as having participated in this, you might be on a sanctions list, you might be, you might not be able to leave Russia in the future. And most of these people are pretty young and I think they realize, you know, they definitely don't want the rest of the world to be closed off to them.

• 11:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Fascinating. Okay, so they use it as this sort of information warfare against Russian citizens to try to make the war a little bit less, less popular.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Right. And then they, from speaking with people, it was interesting. I knew that was, that was the kind of known use case, but then I realized that they were actually using against, not against, on Ukrainians. They started filming a lot of these meetings that they were having in Russian occupied territories where they would, you know, there was kind of these pro-Russian groups that would meet in order to hold referendums and plan these things. And so they started identifying the Ukrainians who would participate because they're considered collaborators and, you know, they would, if they ever come back into non-occupied Ukraine, they would arrest them. So that was a way that they were using it on Ukrainians. And one of the most interesting cases that again, ClearView was very eager to publicize, and the Ukrainians too, was that there was, you know, tens of thousands of Ukrainian

• 12:10Speaker 01

  kids who were taken from orphanages or from these kind of foster homes in Ukraine. When that were occupied by Russia and a lot of them were taken to Russian families to be adopted, to put in foster homes, to be reeducated in these kind of camps. And when Russians were adopting their kid and posting photos on social media, two of you were scraping all of that of Russian social media networks. And so they were able to basically confirm that these kids were in Russia and who their adoptive parents were and that they were alive. And, you know, I think they, uh, they were able to identify quite, you know, I think over almost 200 kids that way, which was a, again, a really interesting case for technology, use of technology that we think of as kind of a police tool.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  But if they're saying, you know, we're prosecuting war crimes, we're finding kids, it's kind of harder to have a problem with that tech, at least that's what they're counting on.

• 13:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Like, what do you even do once you know that you have a kidnapped child, uh, living with another family? And, you know,

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, for them, I think it's a way to, it's, it's X-ray vision into aspects of a war in a way we've never really seen used before in a modern conflict. They are able to have names and faces and identifications for almost every wrongdoing in their minds, right? And so collaborators, Russians, again, these kids, even checkpoints, they started using this at checkpoints. If people lost their IDs, they were able to confirm that you were who you said you were. So it's really taken over. It's really kind of, you know, it's really wrapped itself into almost every Ukrainian law enforcement agency. Uh, over a dozen agencies are using this and that the concern, I think, for a lot of people is that how do you rein this in? You know, in peacetime, how do you start putting regulations on this very, very effective

• 13:58Speaker 01

  tool, which is obviously still being provided for free? They're not paying for it.

• 14:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So are there any answers? I mean, can you even put the genie back in the bottle on something like this?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  From my experiences in speaking with people, I don't think so. They are absolutely all in. They are, you know, there are several issues with that. You know, if they want to join the European Union, European Union has some of the strictest data and privacy regulations on earth. They're going to have to do something then. But for now, you know, they've actually invited the CEO to the country. They kind of rolled out the red carpet. They gave him all these like, you know, certificates and medals and, you know, basically, again, which remember this is being provided for free. It's in everyone's interest for that to continue in Ukraine. But I think they are, you know, they basically put out a statement that was pretty controversial that said, "We are going to use ClearView to build the digital infrastructure of our country."

• 14:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  What?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  We're going to use ClearView to, yeah. They're like, "We're going to use this for customs. We're going to use this for banking." And a lot of Ukrainian tech, you know, tech workers, lower level officials I've spoken with are extremely upset by that because they know, you know, they call it a, you know, a company with a bad reputation and they don't want to be seen as the kind of country that like includes this and makes it an integral part of their government. So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens then. And, you know, ClearView is even talking about opening an office there, so.

• 15:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's the success rate for like identifying people with ClearView? Like there must be false positives. And what happens if you have a false positive at a checkpoint? Or as, you know, saying somebody is a soldier or finding a kid, like imagine a kid grows up and then like they come and get the kid, but you know, they can't identify who the kid is or it's the wrong match or what happens then?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really good question. Yeah, I mean, from speaking to them, they basically made it sound like there was never, almost never a false, you know, identification.

• 15:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  But that's impossible.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Right, which is impossible. You know, they themselves, you know, the tests they have done, you know, they've put in some independent reviews, you know, it's over 99% effective, but that's not 100%. And I know here in the US, it's also depends on people's skin color.

• 16:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sucks for the 0.1% that gets shot at a checkpoint.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Well, we also know that here in the US, people have been put in jail. The wrong person has been identified and actually, you know, had been put in prison for something. So we know that it doesn't work all the time. They weren't really giving me many examples, but so far, it sounds like they, according, at least on the war crimes prosecution front, and a lot of these, they say that they use identification as a first. It basically cuts down by 90% the work they have to do. And then the extra 10% is confirming it through a different way. So they say that they haven't really had that many issues like this and that they're not making decisions fully based on that. But again, it's just interesting hearing them talk about it because the unbridled enthusiasm, the fact that they were able to identify Russian soldiers who were almost completely burned, and they were still able to, again, we can't confirm this,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  but allegedly detect who they were, makes them pretty confident in using this technology with very few holds barred. But I think we are definitely going to hear some cases like that. They weren't eager to share them.

• 17:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Do you think the reputation laundering will work for them? Like, do you think that if they play a pivotal role in Ukraine's ability to hold off Russia, that it will be something that will make ClearView's reputation change?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It's hard to see how it fully changes in the US and in Europe, right? I mean, in these countries that have already, it just goes against the law in many of these countries to have all of your citizens' data scraped and stored, even if it's public. So I'm not sure that can fully change. But I do think that the company is basically correct. I mean, I think that's where we're heading. I think it's going to be hard to imagine in the future that these things are going to be widely used. I mean, I traveled for Thanksgiving and I didn't even think twice before just scanning myself into TSA. You know, like, I feel like these things are so convenient. We're going to see them everywhere. And I think that they see this as, you know, I told, the CEO told me, you know, we're going to be on the right side of history. Facial recognition is going to be used in every single conflict going forward.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And people are going to realize that the benefits far outweigh any negatives. You know, that when you're in a war, life or death situation, your privacy basically falls by the wayside. I think that's a hard case to make in the US when people are identifying immigrants, ISIS using this tech to do all kinds of stuff. I think that's never going to be easy to do. But I do think that he's not wrong that we're going to see it more and more, right?

• 18:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay. So bottom line, and we're going to talk a little bit about how this might expand into other conflicts in the second half here. But bottom line for you in terms of, you know, you reported on Clearview, you traveled to Ukraine, you've spoken with people who've used it. You think it's good or bad that it's being deployed this way in Ukraine?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Myself? You know, it is, I'm on the side of, it's really difficult, it's really hard to argue against it when you see how effective it is at making people survive a war, making, you know, again, like, imagine the number of war crimes you can prosecute that would never be prosecuted if you couldn't identify the person. So it's really, I think it's, it's, it's really difficult to, to say that it's a good thing without any controls, right? In a country like Ukraine that didn't have strong privacy regulations, it's kind of the perfect storm. It's going to apply it, and we don't know what's going to happen afterwards. I think, but I do, I do, as someone who came in feeling extremely creeped out by it, you know, the CEO offered to run my own face through it, and I actually, I wish

• 19:30Speaker 01

  I had done it. I kind of said no, because I got creeped out. I was like, no, yeah, I don't really want to see what's out there about me. As someone who came in kind of preconditioned to think of it as a negative, I do think that it was hard to argue with a lot of the positive results. But at the same time, I do think that, you know, imagine this in any, in a country that we don't consider to, you know, there's a lot, you know, so I don't know. That's not quite the answer, but I do think.

• 19:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  What you're saying is it's complicated.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Changing my mind. Yeah.

• 19:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. It is complicated. It's fascinating that. It's good you went out and reported on it. At least we know about it. And definitely been used in some really interesting use cases that probably would not fly in the US. But this is obviously the future that the company sees. All right, let's take a quick break. We have Vera Bergen-Gruen, senior correspondent, and time on this, in the second half of the show, we're going to talk a little bit about how this stuff spreads, but also about Palantir. So stay tuned, we'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by AVPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data.

• 20:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AVPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. AVPoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to AVPoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 21:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology,

• 22:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 22:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Vera Bergen-Gruen. You can find her stories about all about this conflict, about how this technology is being used at Time Magazine. So definitely check that out. We're also going to talk a little bit about Palantir. So ClearView is not the only company that's trying to really expand and make inroads in Ukraine, right?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Right. You know, Palantir, as you mentioned, is their biggest partner. It came in very early. It's CEO was the first Western CEO, you know, official tech CEO to basically go in and meet with Zelensky. And they're basically become, they've completely ingrained themselves into the Ukrainian government. So Palantir was the other big company that I focused on while I was there.

• 23:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, you say first partner, they were the first partner with the government?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Or? Yeah, so basically, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, we thought, you know, you've had Elon Musk offering Starlink, right? At the beginning of the Ukraine war, we had a lot of tech companies actually speaking to with officials, they said, you know, they were so grateful and yet they were overwhelmed with offers from every major, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, everyone was offering to help Ukraine. They were offering cloud space, they were offering them money, they were offering them tools and they didn't, for Ukraine is an extremely tech savvy country with a highly, you know, highly skilled workforce and they still weren't able to utilize all of that. But Palantir signed contracts with them, right? They've got memorandums, they've got like contracts of understanding where they've partnered with specific agencies, they've opened an office in Ukraine and they are specifically

• 24:02Speaker 01

  working with the Ukrainian government to make their software available to the government to do all kinds of stuff.

• 24:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so what are they doing?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, they've got so many buckets that they're, they're using this and overall, you know, they're obviously like a massive data analytics firm. And so they've got all kinds of ways to use their, you know, to use commercial satellite imagery overlaid with a lot of the analytics software to really make, make it easier to make battlefield decisions, to make it easier to basically see every stage of the conflict. I covered a couple of things while I was there. One of them was with the Ministry of Economy, for example, they're able to make it much easier to prioritize demining. Ukraine is by far the most mined country in the world right now, which is kind of crazy. You know, NGOs basically say it's going to take 700 years to demine that country. It's just completely littered.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  In unexploded mines, bombs, it's landmines. Uh, you know, unexploded pieces of shrapnel, it's, it's everywhere. And, you know, usually this would take, I mean, they're still finding some for World War II. Right? But what they're doing is, uh, you know, obviously using satellite imagery, using, you know, all again, like just imagine layers and layers of data. Uh, you know, where, where are the schools? Where are the most people, um, using cellphone data to see where people are moving? All of this to prioritize how to, um, you know, where to, to start to mining? And which areas likely actually haven't seen anything? And basically having all these input, all these data streams put into one place, which to us sounds kind of basic, but is very difficult to do. And even having, you know, they've got their own almost little like large, it's not their,

• 25:40Speaker 01

  you know, like a large language model style panel where, uh, officials can ask it questions. They can say, you know,

• 25:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Show me the schools most impacted by this, show me this. And it's, it's just a very intuitive way for any official to almost have like a decision making partner, uh, without having to spend, you know, a week getting all this data from different agencies. And that's kind of the main part that Palantir is helping the Ukrainian government with.

• 26:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so Vera, I'll, I'll be honest. So I've seen inside Palantir software once, um, and it seemed pretty cool, the way that it could take a lot of data points and sort of make sense of them. But that was years ago. And I'm curious if you had it in your reporting, a chance to either see it or get a sense as to what Palantir technology actually is like? What is the interface? What does it allow people to do? How does this technology work the way that this company says it works?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, that's a good point. And the, the thing is they've got, obviously the part that they show all journalists and all the people who want to, uh, an inside look, they've got their famous, you know, meta constellation interface and all of that. Um, they're only going to show us so much, but I think it's, at least for me, when I was talking to, to the officials as well, who are, um, again, fairly tech savvy, but aren't all inside Palantir people. Um, it's fairly easy to see how having a fairly powerful tool like that, like having a way to aggregate all data streams, having a way to have extremely, again, like it's very expensive to get that, you know, detailed on the ground kind of satellite imagery and then overlaid with other kinds of data. Having all of that available to a government like Ukraine, which is able to supply it

• 27:18Speaker 01

  with their own. Information, right? Um, it's again, I don't think I'll be able to fully, I don't want to explain it uh the wrong way. But it was very, it's clearly a very, so you know, I'm not sure if sophisticated is the right word, but it's a very uh comprehensive way to make battlefield decisions, right? Uh, in a way that like a country like Ukraine just would never have access to otherwise. And it's extremely expensive and extremely, it's you know, twenty years of of of development being made available to a country in war. And so, um, you know, obviously I'm still putting together a lot of my reporting for the for the eventual story, but I do think that from from speaking with them at least, also having um access to

• 28:00Speaker 01

  all of the um, basically all of the engineers at Palantir, all the people who are helping them with this. It's a, it's a kind of a private government partnership that I haven't, I at least have not seen before in a country at war. And I think that's we're gonna see a lot more of. It's not gonna be necessarily the U- US just giving the military hardware. It's gonna be private companies partnering with governments for this, right?

• 28:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, when you call it like a private public partnership, it's basically that the Palantir company, it's not just that they give the software, right? Like they have consultants along with it. And so are they just ingrained in the Ukrainian military machine?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, they have, it's it's kind of hard to tell, right? I, from what they tell us, they basically have, you know, they got, they've set up a Kiev office. And they are working closely with Ukrainians, teaching them basically, you know, for example, using demining as an example, or um, I, you know, I went to the Ministry of Education. They were showing me how they were using Palantir software in order to figure out like which schools were most affected, where they should do testing, like, it's just a way of aggregating all of Ukraine's data in one place. Obviously, they're using it in all kinds of ways on the military front, which my story didn't focus on, and and a lot has been written on. That's obviously extremely effective as well. But um, but when I say ingrained, I mean that, you know, they are, they are using this, you know, you see, you know, they they're, they're trained by Palantir. They're working with Palantir.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  And um, and again, they're, they're, they're planning on doing this in the long term. This is like a, this is not a, this is not a Starlink terminal, it's not a one-use thing. It's, it's, they're changing the ways that they do things. And and and it is a government that before the war was already pretty much moving towards digitizing a lot of their systems. This is just, you know, helping them quite a bit. And obviously for Palantir, um, it seems like also a pretty good opportunity to to put a lot of this to the uh, to you, to use Ukraine as a test case.

• 29:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  So now, yes, so I want to build on that. We've talked a little bit about how ClearView and Palantir are in Ukraine. But it doesn't seem like, and you put it very interestingly. It's not just drop your product in and run out. It's obviously a place where they're doing a lot of R and D and they're building and they're testing new products. So can you talk a little bit about how they're expanding and how they're testing and doing R and D inside Ukraine and what the implications of that are?

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's interesting because the, I think the way that most people have heard of it, if they've heard of it, is drones, right? That's, it's become this massive drone war. All kinds of, you know, breakthroughs have happened when it comes to drone warfare. And that's an easy way where you can imagine a company that develops drones coming in, testing them in an actual war. Like, you know, I actually, it was interesting. I was speaking to someone who was at a European kind of defense expo, a big, you know, defense conference. And they said that people aren't even buying anything that doesn't have the tested in Ukraine stamp on it, basically. They don't want to buy stuff that hasn't been tested in Ukraine. Because when you think about it, it's the only war of this kind that we've seen recently. Like, it's like, you know, because of the way that, it's almost like a 20th century

• 30:54Speaker 01

  war with 21st century technology. And so it's very valuable. What Ukraine has is, is literally in its hot war in its battlefield, as tragic as it is, is also very lucrative. And I think they know that. They know that allowing people to come test things is very useful. Obviously, that's easy to think of when we think of drones or military hardware. When it comes to tech or software, what the question I posed to all of them was, you know, you know, obviously Palantir basically is, is, is making its products better. It's making its products a lot better to be able to use this in a war zone and to be able to test it in a country like Ukraine. And the other thing that they're learning a lot from, from speaking to them and to people

• 31:38Speaker 01

  who work with them is that, you know, they're using a lot of Ukraine's tech talent. They supply them with something, but the Ukrainians are known as being incredibly creative when it comes to, you know, to tech. And so they say that they give them something and they start, you know, they're like, oh, I've never thought of using it this way before. I've never thought of doing this. And, you know, they're already going to the backend and making all kinds of changes. And so on ClearView's side, they said that too. They said, you know, we train government officials all the time and we've never seen people run with it that quickly and make it their own. And so I've asked all of these CEOs, you know, Are they making your product better? And they say, yes, they're definitely making our product better. They're improving it. I've asked the Ukrainian officials and they kind of say, you know, I think it's a fair trade. I think it's a fair trade that we kind of help them develop their products.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  We help them, you know, basically apply them to a war in a way that can sharpen them and make them much more marketable. But, you know, we are obviously getting the use of this technology. So it's, it's, it's on the tech, I think on the digital front, there's a lot going on. We won't see for a couple more months, for a couple more years, until we really know exactly what came out of this. But like I said, I mean, everything that's being tested there is, is, is, is making this, I mean, volunteers go to dispute this because they, they obviously have a lot of clients. It's a very successful company. But from speaking with everyone, they are very much getting a ton out of using their products in Ukraine.

• 32:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So who is going to own this IP? Like, does Ukraine, the country, you know, for being this testing ground for these software developments, like, get any ownership out of it?

• 33:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's kind of a crazy question to ask.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  That's what the Ukrainians want.

• 33:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It is, it is weird. Yeah. Well, I asked, it's interesting because if you speak to Ukrainian officials, military, digital ministry, people like that, they kind of say, you know, we, we're very grateful. They know that they, and they know that they need to keep these Western partnerships, you know, like it needs to be a good partnership, it needs to be a good relationship. They're not going to talk shit about it. But they also very much say that, you know, they became very aware that they didn't want, they weren't going to just test anything and they weren't just going to let anyone in to do whatever they want. And so they kind of pushed back on the, on the idea that this is like a, you know, Wild West R and D testing ground. They say, we, we, we basically accept some of the stuff, we test it. If it's useful to us, we agree to use it.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  But it's almost like they've upped their standards and what they've Been doing is they're making, building their own massive homegrown military tech industry. Their idea, from speaking to many people, and they say this openly, is that they basically want to be the next Israel. They want their entire future economy to be based on military tech. And almost all of it's being developed right now. And so, all of these different things, I mean, Palantir's a little different because they're basically, you know, it's this different partnership. But all of these things, when you ask them what they're doing with it, they say, "We're trying to develop our own version." Or, "We're taking, we're learning from it, but we're developing our own version." They're very, and even on the Palantir front, a lot of the things that they're learning from it, they're trying to develop, you know, develop Ukraine's tech version of it.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And I think the number of military startups has increased tenfold in the last year and a half. It's like the only thing that's bringing money into Ukraine, given that the rest of the economy was basically stopped in many senses. And so, Ukraine is, you can tell from speaking with them, is extremely invested in, again, their homegrown military tech industry, and owning the IP, keeping it inside the country, making that the backbone of their future economy. You know, how successful that is, you know, you speak to some of these Western companies, and they kind of, you know, they acknowledge that they're very smart and they're very driven, but it's not quite, obviously, going to be Google, Microsoft, some of the stuff these companies can provide. But it's going to be really interesting, because the Ukrainians now seem very aware that what they have is, is something that they actually plan to build their economy

• 35:27Speaker 01

  on, and that they need to manage the relationships with Western companies that they have started.

• 35:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's kind of bleak to say.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a future of warfare, I think, unfortunately.

• 35:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me ask you one follow-up to that. I mean, there's been all this fear about like, the future of like, when tech, you know, sort of collides with war, that things are going to get really bad and autonomous and all that stuff. I mean, what do you, you know, you've been studying this like, real close. Do you think that war is just going to get worse with all this tech? Or like, do you think it's just kind of a way to be a little bit more efficient in war? I mean, how nervous should we be about all this very powerful technology being applied for the use in conflict?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it depends what you mean by efficient at war, right? Uh, I guess you could be more efficient at war in a way that is pretty horrific. Um, I do think that it's going to make it, and we saw this obviously with the last 20 years, you know, and the wars in the Middle East. But, uh, you know, it makes it easier for fewer and fewer people sitting further and further away to make bigger and bigger decisions, right? Uh, and so I think a bunch of people sitting somewhere completely different can basically end a war. Um, and can also be, uh, have pretty big impact. So, uh, I do think it's, I mean, it's hard not to think that that is bleak because, um, at the same time, you know, I do think that a lot of these things, um, again, the cleaver example is not the best one, but I do think, for example, just like, uh, there's a lot of, um,

• 36:51Speaker 01

  ways to dissuade people from doing, there's a lot of deterrence factors now that we didn't have before, where people can already see it playing out and don't want to really get into that whole mess, don't want to have, you know, soldiers fighting. And a lot of these wars might have second thoughts sometimes, depending on who they're fighting for. Um, I think that there are a lot of these things are going to get more efficient, but I mean, again, having an incredible amount of transparency into war through tech. I'm not sure that's a good thing, you know, that's necessarily going to be a good thing either. So it's, it's, it's going to be really interesting to see whether it kind of ends up being a deterrence factor where, where we resolve more things politically, because we already know how it's going to go down the road. When you think of nukes, things like that. Or whether it's just going to be something where, um,

• 37:32Speaker 01

  the country that has, and again, the country that has the least qualms about unleashing a lot of this tech. Uh, if you think about China, if you think about a lot of countries, uh, that's something that both Palantir and Clever, for example, are so, uh, they make such a big point of the fact that they would never give this to any adversarial country, to the US and to the West. They're like, we only give this to Ukraine because we believe in Ukraine's side. Um, but then, of course, again, you've got countries like China developing all of this no holds barred. And, you know, the country that's willing to use it is likely going to be the winner. So it's, you know, and we're not even talking about AI. So it's, uh, it's going to be, uh, really interesting to see how, how all of that, uh, you know, pans out. Because it's going to basically require a lot of Western countries to, to be willing to keep up.

• 38:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Palmer Lucky was on, the CEO of Anduril, talking about how it's a strategic imperative for the US to develop as much.

• 38:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tech for war as possible because it just dissuades other countries from engaging in conflict with us. But it's also going to find its way to battlefields.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  That was the argument for the nuclear arms race, right?

• 38:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, you know, that was the idea. Now, I guess now instead of, you know, going head to head, nuclear powers fight proxy wars.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  So. Right, right.

• 38:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  That seems to be worse. Net it out. All right, Vera, thank you so much for joining. Great having you on.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Thanks so much.

• 38:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, awesome. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling the audio. LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. And all you, the listeners, appreciate you being here week after week. We'll be back Friday with another show covering the week's news, so I hope you stay tuned for that. And until then, take care. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.