OpenAI said it will allow users in the U.S. to make purchases directly through ChatGPT using a new Instant Checkout feature powered by a payment protocol for AI co-developed with Stripe.
The new chatbot shopping feature is a big step toward helping OpenAI monetize its 700 million weekly users, many of whom currently pay nothing to interact with ChatGPT, as well as a move that could eventually steal significant market share from traditional Google search advertising.
The rollout of chatbot shopping features—including the possibility of AI agents that will shop on behalf of users—could also upend e-commerce, radically transforming the way businesses design their websites and try to market to consumers.
OpenAI said it was rolling out its Instant Checkout feature with Etsy sellers today, but would begin adding over a million Shopify merchants, including brands such as Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori “soon.”
The company also said it was open-sourcing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a payment standard developed in partnership with payments processor Stripe that powers the Instant Checkout feature, so that any retailer or business could decide to build a shopping integration with ChatGPT. (Stripe’s and OpenAI’s commerce protocol, in turn, supports the open-source Model Context Protocol, or MCP, that was originally developed by AI company Anthropic last year. MCP is designed to allow AI models to directly hook into the backend systems of businesses and retailers. The new Agentic Commerce Protocol also supports more conventional API calls too.)
OpenAI will take what it described as small fee from the merchant on each purchase, helping to bolster the company’s revenue at a time when it is burning through many billions of dollars each year to train and support the running of its AI models.
How it works
OpenAI had previously launched a shopping feature in ChatGPT that helped users find products that were best suited to them, but the suggested results then linked out to merchants’ websites, where a user had to complete the purchase—analogous to the way a Google search works.
When a ChatGPT user asks a shopping-related question—such as “the best hiking boots for me that cost under $150” or “possible birthday gifts for my 10-year old nephew”—the chatbot will still respond with product suggestions. Under the new system, if a user likes one of the suggestions and Instant Checkout is enabled, they will be able to click a “Buy” button in the chatbot response and confirm their order, shipping, and payment details without ever leaving the chat.
OpenAI said its “product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.” The company also emphasized that the results are not affected by the fee the merchant pays it to support Instant Checkout.
Then, to determine which merchants that carry that particular product should be surfaced for the user, “ChatGPT considers factors like availability, price, quality, whether a merchant is the primary seller, and whether Instant Checkout is enabled,” when displaying results, the company said.
OpenAI said that ChatGPT subscribers, who pay a monthly fee for premium features, would be able to use the same credit or debit card to which they charge their subscription or store alternate payment methods to use.
OpenAI’s decision to launch the shopping feature using Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol will be a big boost for that payment standard, which can be used across different AI platforms and also works with different payment processors—although it is easier to integrate for existing Stripe customers. The protocol works by creating an encrypted token for payment details and other sensitive data.
Currently, OpenAI says that the user remains in control, having to explicitly agree to each step of the purchasing process before any action is taken. But it is easy to imagine that in the future, users may be able to authorize ChatGPT or other AI models to act more “agentically” and actually make purchases for the user based on a prompt, without having to check back in with a user.
The fact that users never have to leave the chat interface to make the purchase may pose a challenge to Alphabet’s Google, which makes most of its money by referring users to companies’ websites. Although Google may be able to roll out similar shopping features within its Gemini chatbot or “AI Mode” in Google Search, it’s unclear whether what it could charge for transactions completed in these AI-native ways would compensate for any loss in referral revenue and what the opportunities would be for the display of other advertising around chatbot queries.
The CMG Active Listening scandal involves Cox Media Group (CMG), a major American media company, which admitted to using „Active Listening“ technology that allegedly captures conversations through smartphone microphones and smart devices to target users with hyper-specific advertisements[1][2][3]. This revelation has sparked significant controversy and prompted responses from major American tech companies.
American Tech Companies Listed in CMG’s Presentations
Companies Named as Partners
According to leaked CMG pitch decks obtained by 404 Media, the following American tech giants were explicitly identified as CMG partners or clients in their Active Listening program[4][5][6]:
Google (including Google Ads and Bing search)
Meta (Facebook’s parent company)
Amazon (Amazon Ads)
Microsoft (including Bing search engine)
Tech Company Responses and Denials
Google’s Response:
Google took the most decisive action, removing CMG from its Partners Program immediately after the 404 Media report was published[1][4][5]. A Google spokesperson stated: „All advertisers must comply with all applicable laws and regulations as well as our Google Ads policies, and when we identify ads or advertisers that violate these policies, we will take appropriate action“[6].
Meta’s Response:
Meta denied any involvement in the Active Listening program and announced an investigation into whether CMG violated Facebook’s terms of service[7][4]. A Meta spokesperson told Newsweek: „Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads, and we’ve been public about this for years. We are reaching out to CMG to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data“[8][9].
Amazon’s Response:
Amazon completely denied any collaboration with CMG on the Active Listening program[4][6]. An Amazon spokesperson stated: „Amazon Ads has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so“[9][10].
Microsoft’s Response:
While Microsoft was mentioned in the pitch deck as a partner through its Bing search engine[4][11], the company has not provided a public response to the allegations at the time of these reports.
Apple’s Response:
Although not directly implicated as a CMG partner, Apple responded to the controversy by clarifying that such practices would violate its App Store guidelines[12]. Apple emphasized that apps must request „explicit user consent and provide a clear visual and/or audible indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity“[12].
How the Active Listening Technology Allegedly Works
According to CMG’s marketing materials, the Active Listening system operates by[1][13][14]:
Real-time voice data collection through smartphone microphones, smart TVs, and other connected devices
AI analysis of conversations to identify consumer intent and purchasing signals
Data integration with behavioral data from over 470 sources
Targeted advertising delivery through various platforms including streaming services, social media, and search engines
Geographic targeting within 10-mile ($100/day) or 20-mile ($200/day) radius
CMG’s pitch deck boldly stated: „Yes, Our Phones Are Listening to Us“ and claimed the technology could „identify buyers based on casual conversations in real-time“[14][15][9].
Legal and Privacy Implications
The scandal has raised significant legal and privacy concerns[16][17]. Senator Marsha Blackburn sent letters to CMG, Google, and Meta demanding answers about the extent of Active Listening deployment and requesting copies of the investor presentation[17].
CMG initially defended the practice as legal, claiming that microphone access permissions are typically buried in the fine print of lengthy terms of service agreements that users rarely read thoroughly[14][18]. However, privacy experts note that such practices would likely violate GDPR regulations in Europe and potentially face legal challenges in various US jurisdictions[19][16].
Current Status
Following the public backlash, CMG has:
Removed all references to Active Listening from its website[3][20]
Claimed the presentation contained „outdated materials for a product that CMG Local Solutions no longer offers“[7][8]
Stated that while the product „never listened to customers, it has been discontinued to avoid misperceptions“[8]
The scandal has reignited long-standing consumer suspicions about device surveillance and targeted advertising, with many users reporting eerily accurate ads that seemed to reflect their private conversations[13][21][22].
Scientists were able to create a bespoke treatment for KJ Muldoon’s rare genetic disorder within six months. It could be a blueprint for potentially life-saving, gene-editing Crispr therapies.
Last August, KJ Muldoon was born with a potentially fatal genetic disorder. Just six months later, he received a Crispr treatment designed just for him.
Muldoon has a rare disorder known as CPS1 deficiency, which causes a dangerous amount of ammonia to build up in the blood. About half of babies born with it will die early in life. Current treatment options—a highly restrictive diet and liver transplantation—aren’t ideal. But a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine was able to bypass the standard years-long drug development timeline and use Cripsr to create a personalized medicine for KJ in a matter of months.
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“We had a patient who was facing a very, very devastating outcome,” says Kiran Musunuru, professor for translational research at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was part of the team that made KJ’s treatment.
When KJ was born, his muscles were rigid, he was lethargic, and he wouldn’t eat. After three doses of his custom treatment, KJ is starting to hit developmental milestones his parents never thought they’d see him reach. He’s now able to eat certain foods and sit upright by himself. “He really has made tremendous strides,” his father Kyle Muldoon says.
The case is detailed today in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine and was presented at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy annual meeting in New Orleans. It could provide a blueprint for making customized gene-editing treatments for other patients with rare diseases that have few or no medical treatments available.
When the body digests protein, ammonia is made in the process. An important enzyme called CPS1 helps clear this toxic byproduct, but people with CPS1 deficiency lack this enzyme. Too much ammonia in the system can lead to organ damage, and even brain damage and death.
Since KJ’s birth, he has been on special ammonia-reducing medicines and a low-protein diet. After receiving the bespoke Crispr drug, though, KJ was able to go on a lower dose of the medication and start eating more protein without any serious side effects. He’s still in the hospital, but his doctors hope to send him home in the next month or so.
Both KJ’s parents and his medical team stop short of calling the Crispr therapy a cure, but they say it’s promising to see his improvement. “It’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, director of the Gene Therapy for Inherited Metabolic Disorders Frontier Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Penn Medicine, who led the effort with Musunuru. She says the Crispr treatment probably turned KJ’s severe deficiency into a milder form of the disease, but he may still need to be on medication in the future.
Ahrens-Nicklas and Musunuru teamed up in 2023 to explore the feasibility of creating customized gene-editing therapies for individual patients. They decided to focus on urea cycle disorders, a group of genetic metabolic conditions that affect the body’s ability to process ammonia that includes CPS1 deficiency. Often, patients require a liver transplant. While the procedure is possible in infants, it’s medically complex. Ahrens-Nicklas and Musunuru saw an opportunity to find another path.
When KJ was born, the researchers used genome sequencing to determine the specific genetic mutation driving his disease. It turns out KJ had actually inherited two different mutations in the CPS1 gene—one from each parent. The team decided to target the mutation that had been reported before in an unrelated patient known to have severe CPS1 deficiency; the other hadn’t been seen before.
KJ’s team turned to Crispr, the Nobel Prize-winning technology that can precisely edit DNA. So far, only one Crispr-based medicine is commercially available. Approved in late 2023, it treats sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. Other Crispr-based therapies are in development for more common diseases that affect tens or hundreds of thousands of patients.
The allure of Crispr is its potential to directly address the underlying genetic cause of a disease rather than simply treat symptoms, as the vast majority of current medicine does. The approved Crispr therapy, Casgevy, is given as a one-time treatment. But the Philadelphia-led team specifically designed KJ’s therapy to be redosable out of safety concerns, starting with a low dose to ensure there were no adverse effects. Terry Horgan, a 27-year-old with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, passed away in 2022 shortly after receiving the first known custom Crispr treatment. His death was likely due to a reaction to the virus used to deliver the Crispr molecules.
For KJ’s treatment, researchers used a version of Crispr called base editing that can change one “letter” in a DNA sequence to another. They packaged the base-editing components in tiny bubbles called lipid nanoparticles, which were then delivered via an IV infusion.
Before it could be given to KJ though, it was tested for safety in mice and monkeys. Since the drug was unapproved, the team needed permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use the experimental treatment in an individual patient. The researchers applied to the FDA on February 14 and received approval on February 21. They gave KJ his first dose on February 25.
“The clinical responses described are impressive,” says Timothy Yu, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who wasn’t involved in making KJ’s treatment. He says the Philadelphia team’s approach was a “very thoughtful and comprehensive end-to-end process.”
Yu’s lab has been working on customized genetic medicines based on antisense oligonucleotides, or ASOs—short molecules that block the production of proteins. Yu developed a personalized ASO in 10 months for a young girl with Batten disease, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. The treatment was dubbed milasen, after the patient, Mila. It was the first medicine that was tailor-made to treat a single patient’s genetic mutation. The treatment temporarily improved Mila’s condition and quality of life, but ultimately, she died in February 2021 at 10 years old.
“The superpower of Crispr base editing is its broad applicability to many types of genetic mutations. Its kryptonite is that we are in the very early days of demonstrating efficient and safe Crispr delivery to many different organs,” Yu says. ASOs, meanwhile, are well vetted for use in the brain, spinal cord, and eye, which are more difficult to address with Crispr.
Crispr could potentially address a variety of genetic diseases and types of cancer, but getting it to the right place in the body remains a challenge. The approved Crispr medicine, Casgevy, involves removing a patient’s cells and editing them outside the body, an arduous and expensive process. A drug given directly to the body would be much more practical. The liver is an easy first target because lipid nanoparticles naturally gravitate there, but only some diseases can be treated in this way.
Since urea cycle disorders primarily originate in the liver, they could be a prime target for custom Crispr medicines. “We’ve just written a new playbook,” says Fyodor Urnov, scientific director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, who collaborated on the paper.
Urnov says KJ’s case demonstrates that bespoke genetic treatments can be made quickly and used successfully to treat critically ill patients. “This could have failed in so many ways,” he says. “Nothing was a given.” Every day, he worried that KJ would pass away before they could finish making the therapy.
The team did not say exactly how much the therapy cost to produce, but Musunuru says it was comparable to the cost of a liver transplant, around $800,000. The companies involved in manufacturing—Aldevron, Danaher, and Integrated DNA Technologies—made in-kind contributions.
“Though it will take a lot of work to get there, my hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them,” Musunuru says.
Die lange geltende Steuerbefreiung für Elektrofahrzeuge in Österreich endet bald. Ab dem 1. April 2025 werden auch Elektroautos der motorbezogenen Versicherungssteuer (mVSt) unterliegen, was für Besitzer dieser Fahrzeuge eine jährliche Mehrbelastung von mehreren hundert Euro bedeuten wird. Diese Änderung betrifft sowohl bereits zugelassene Elektrofahrzeuge als auch Neuzulassungen und stellt eine bedeutende finanzpolitische Wende dar. Im Folgenden wird die Berechnungslogik der neuen Steuer erläutert und für die gängigsten Elektroautomodelle in Österreich berechnet.
Die Berechnungslogik der neuen KFZ-Steuer für Elektroautos
Die motorbezogene Versicherungssteuer für Elektroautos wird auf Basis von zwei wesentlichen Fahrzeugmerkmalen berechnet: der Dauerleistung (30-Minuten-Nennleistung) und dem Eigengewicht des Fahrzeugs. Beide Werte sind im Zulassungsschein vermerkt und bilden die Grundlage für die Steuerberechnung. Anders als bei Fahrzeugen mit Verbrennungsmotor, bei denen die Steuer anhand der Motorleistung und des CO₂-Ausstoßes berechnet wird, wurde für Elektrofahrzeuge eine spezielle Berechnungsmethode entwickelt.
Die Steuerformel beinhaltet Freibeträge für beide Komponenten, die vor der eigentlichen Berechnung abgezogen werden. Bei der Dauerleistung werden 45 kW abgezogen, beim Eigengewicht sind es 900 kg. Nach Abzug dieser Freibeträge erfolgt die Berechnung anhand einer gestaffelten Formel.
Leistungskomponente (pro Jahr)
Die Berechnung der Leistungskomponente erfolgt nach dem Abzug des Freibetrags von 45 kW in drei Stufen:
Für die ersten 35 kW: 3 Euro pro kW (mindestens jedoch 30 Euro)
Für die nächsten 25 kW: 4,2 Euro pro kW
Für jedes weitere kW darüber: 5,4 Euro pro kW
Gewichtskomponente (pro Jahr)
Nach Abzug des Freibetrags von 900 kg wird die Gewichtskomponente ebenfalls in drei Stufen berechnet:
Für die ersten 500 kg: 0,18 Euro pro kg (mindestens jedoch 36 Euro)
Für die nächsten 700 kg: 0,36 Euro pro kg
Für jedes weitere kg darüber: 0,54 Euro pro kg
Die Gesamtsteuer ergibt sich aus der Summe der Leistungs- und Gewichtskomponente. Da die Steuer über die Kfz-Haftpflichtversicherung eingehoben wird, wird sie in der Regel gemeinsam mit der Versicherungsprämie bezahlt.
Die 20 gängigsten Elektroautos in Österreich und ihre Steuerbelastung
Auf Basis der verfügbaren Zulassungsstatistiken für das Jahr 2024 und ergänzender Daten zu Gewicht und Leistung der einzelnen Modelle kann die zu erwartende Steuerbelastung berechnet werden. Insgesamt wurden in Österreich im Jahr 2024 etwa 44.622 Elektroautos neu zugelassen, was einem Rückgang von 6,3 Prozent im Vergleich zu 2023 entspricht. Dabei entfielen lediglich 23,5 Prozent der Neuzulassungen auf Privatpersonen, während der Rest auf Firmenfahrzeuge entfiel.
Tesla Model Y – Spitzenreiter bei den Zulassungen
Das Tesla Model Y mit einer Dauerleistung von 153 kW und einem präzise dokumentierten Eigengewicht von 1.997 kg muss künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 780 Euro rechnen. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 469 Euro (basierend auf der 30-Minuten-Leistung) und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 311 Euro. Als meistverkauftes Elektroauto in Österreich sind von dieser Steueränderung viele Fahrzeugbesitzer betroffen.
BYD Seal – Der Newcomer auf Platz 2
Der BYD Seal hat sich als Überraschung auf dem zweiten Platz der meistverkauften Elektroautos positioniert. Mit einem Leergewicht zwischen 2.055 und 2.185 kg (je nach Ausführung) und einer geschätzten Dauerleistung von etwa 105 kW muss dieses Modell mit einer Steuerbelastung zwischen 714 und 760 Euro rechnen. Die chinesische Limousine hat 2024 einen bemerkenswerten Markteintritt in Österreich hingelegt und zeigt die zunehmende Akzeptanz von Marken aus Fernost im europäischen Markt.
Škoda Enyaq – Etablierter Favorit auf Platz 3
Der Škoda Enyaq 85x mit einer Dauerleistung von 77 kW und einem beachtlichen Eigengewicht von 2.384 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 574 Euro belastet. Davon entfallen rund 96 Euro auf die Leistungskomponente und etwa 478 Euro auf die Gewichtskomponente. Der hohe Gewichtsanteil an der Gesamtsteuer wird bei diesem Modell besonders deutlich. Der Enyaq, für den Škoda 2024 ein Facelift eingeführt hat, fiel vom zweiten auf den dritten Platz zurück, blieb aber mit 2.310 Neuzulassungen eines der beliebtesten E-Autos in Österreich.
BMW iX1 – Starker Zuwachs auf Platz 4
Der elektrische BMW X1 (BMW iX1 xDRIVE30) mit einer Dauerleistung von 104 kW und einem Eigengewicht von präzise 1.940 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 493 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 206 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 287 Euro. Mit 2.291 Neuzulassungen im Jahr 2024 konnte der X1 ein beachtliches Wachstum verzeichnen.
BMW i4 – Stabiler Mittelklasse-Favorit
Der BMW i4, der mit 2.086 Neuzulassungen Platz 5 der meistverkauften Elektroautos in Österreich belegte, hat ein Leergewicht von 2.125 kg und eine 30-Minuten-Leistung von 105 kW (beim i4 eDrive40). Die jährliche Steuerbelastung wird sich auf etwa 567 Euro belaufen, wovon 210 Euro auf die Leistungskomponente und 357 Euro auf die Gewichtskomponente entfallen. Trotz des relativ hohen Gewichts bleibt der i4 aufgrund seiner ausgewogenen Verhältnisse ein beliebtes Modell in der elektrischen Mittelklasse.
Tesla Model 3 – Der Klassiker auf Platz 6
Das Tesla Model 3 mit einer Dauerleistung von 153 kW und einem genauen Eigengewicht von 1.851 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 686 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 469 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 217 Euro. Mit 2.077 Neuzulassungen und einem Plus von 6,7 Prozent konnte das Model 3, das im Herbst 2023 ein Facelift erhielt, seine Position auf dem österreichischen Markt festigen. Im Vergleich zum schwereren Model Y ist die Gewichtskomponente hier deutlich niedriger.
Audi Q4 e-tron – Premiummodell mit zunehmender Beliebtheit
Der Audi Q4 e-tron landete mit 1.599 Neuzulassungen auf Platz 7 der beliebtesten Elektroautos in Österreich. Mit einem Leergewicht von 2.145 kg und einer geschätzten Dauerleistung von etwa 90 kW wird die jährliche Steuerbelastung bei etwa 493 Euro liegen. Davon entfallen etwa 135 Euro auf die Leistungskomponente und 358 Euro auf die Gewichtskomponente. Als Premium-SUV positioniert, zeigt der Q4 e-tron, dass auch in höheren Preissegmenten die Nachfrage nach Elektrofahrzeugen wächst.
VW ID.4 – Der elektrische Tiguan-Nachfolger
Der VW ID.4 schaffte es mit 1.527 Einheiten auf Platz 8. Mit einem Leergewicht von mindestens 1.966 kg und einer geschätzten Dauerleistung von 85 kW wird die jährliche Steuerbelastung etwa 425 Euro betragen. Davon entfallen etwa 120 Euro auf die Leistungskomponente und 305 Euro auf die Gewichtskomponente. Als einer der ersten elektrischen Volumenhersteller im SUV-Segment hat der ID.4 eine wichtige Rolle in der Elektrifizierungsstrategie von Volkswagen.
Cupra Born – Sportlicher Ableger mit Designanspruch
Der Cupra Born, der im Vorjahr noch besser platziert war, rutschte mit 1.497 Neuzulassungen auf Platz 9 ab. Mit einem Leergewicht zwischen 1.811 und 1.946 kg (je nach Ausführung) und einer geschätzten Dauerleistung von 80 kW wird die jährliche Steuerbelastung zwischen 358 und 391 Euro liegen. Die sportliche Ausrichtung und das markante Design des Born sprechen besonders jüngere Käuferschichten an.
Volvo EX30 – Der Überraschungserfolg aus Schweden
Der Volvo EX30 schaffte es als Neueinsteiger mit 1.112 Zulassungen auf Platz 10. Mit einem Leergewicht von 1.850 kg (Single Motor) bzw. 1.960 kg (Twin Motor) und Dauerleistungen von 80 kW bzw. 105 kW wird die jährliche Steuerbelastung zwischen 374 und 517 Euro liegen. Als kompaktes Elektro-SUV mit Premium-Anspruch hat der EX30 eine interessante Nische besetzt und konnte trotz seines erst kürzlichen Markteintritts bereits viele Käufer überzeugen.
Weitere beliebte Elektroautomodelle und ihre Steuerbelastung
Für einige weitere beliebte Modelle, die zwar nicht unter den Top 10 rangieren, aber dennoch in Österreich verbreitet sind, können ebenfalls präzise Steuerbelastungen berechnet werden:
Der VW ID.3 mit einer Dauerleistung von 70 kW und einem dokumentierten Eigengewicht von exakt 1.934 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 362 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 75 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 287 Euro. Als kompakter Elektrowagen bleibt der ID.3 eine wichtige Säule im Elektrofahrzeugangebot von Volkswagen.
Der VW ID.5 Pro mit einer Dauerleistung von 89 kW und einem präzisen Eigengewicht von 2.117 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 463 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 132 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 331 Euro. Als Coupé-Version des ID.4 bietet der ID.5 eine sportlichere Alternative mit ähnlicher technischer Basis.
Der VW ID.7 Pro mit einer Dauerleistung von 89 kW und einem genauen Eigengewicht von 2.172 kg wird künftig mit einer jährliche Steuerbelastung von etwa 482 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 132 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 350 Euro. Als Flaggschiff der elektrischen ID-Familie von Volkswagen positioniert sich der ID.7 im oberen Mittelklassesegment.
Besondere Fälle: Extreme im Preisspektrum
Interessant ist auch ein Blick auf Fahrzeuge, die besonders hohe oder niedrige Steuerbeträge aufweisen werden:
Der Audi Q8 e-tron mit einer Dauerleistung von 158 kW und einem beachtlichen Eigengewicht von exakt 2.724 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 1.234 Euro belastet – eine der höchsten Steuerbelastungen im Elektroautosegment. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 496 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 738 Euro. Als Luxus-SUV im Premium-Segment ist der Q8 e-tron jedoch für eine wohlhabende Kundschaft konzipiert, für die diese zusätzliche Steuerbelastung vermutlich keine entscheidende Rolle spielen wird.
Am anderen Ende des Spektrums steht der Hyundai Inster mit einer Dauerleistung von 28 kW und einem Eigengewicht von präzise 1.503 kg, der mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von lediglich 144 Euro rechnen muss. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus dem Mindeststeuerbetrag für die Leistungskomponente von 30 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 114 Euro. Als eines der leichtesten und leistungsschwächsten Elektroautos auf dem Markt profitiert der Inster besonders von den Freibeträgen bei der Steuerberechnung.
Der Renault Zoe mit einer Dauerleistung von 51 kW und einem Eigengewicht von 1.577 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 153 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 30 Euro (Minimumbetrag) und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 123 Euro. Als eines der ersten massentauglichen Elektroautos bleibt der Zoe auch mit der neuen Steuer eine verhältnismäßig günstige Option.
Der kompakte BMW i3 mit einer Dauerleistung von 80 kW und einem erstaunlich geringen Eigengewicht von nur 1.345 kg wird künftig mit einer jährlichen Steuerbelastung von etwa 185 Euro belastet. Diese setzt sich zusammen aus einer Leistungskomponente von etwa 105 Euro und einer Gewichtskomponente von rund 80 Euro. Obwohl die Produktion des i3 bereits 2022 eingestellt wurde, sind noch viele Exemplare auf Österreichs Straßen unterwegs. Dank seiner innovativen Karbonkarosserie bleibt der i3 eines der leichtesten Elektroautos und profitiert entsprechend von der gewichtsabhängigen Steuerkomponente.
Auswirkungen und Kritik der neuen Steuer
Die Einführung der motorbezogenen Versicherungssteuer für Elektroautos wird in der Öffentlichkeit kontrovers diskutiert. Durch diese Maßnahme erhofft sich die Regierungskoalition nach Angaben des Verkehrsclubs ÖAMTC Mehreinnahmen von rund 65 Millionen Euro jährlich. Für das Jahr 2026 rechnet die Regierung sogar mit Einnahmen von 130 Millionen Euro, da die Zahl der E-Auto-Zulassungen kontinuierlich steigt.
Die Entscheidung stößt insbesondere bei Umweltverbänden und der Automobilwirtschaft auf Kritik, da sie die Attraktivität der Elektromobilität in einer ohnehin schon herausfordernden Marktphase weiter verringern könnte. Brancheninsider befürchten, dass sich vor allem Privatkäufer wieder verstärkt Verbrennungsfahrzeugen zuwenden könnten.
Allerdings bleibt der steuerliche Vorteil von elektrischen Firmenwagen unangetastet, was angesichts der Tatsache, dass rund 80 Prozent der Elektroautos in Österreich Firmenfahrzeuge sind, von Bedeutung ist. Zudem plant die Regierung Verbesserungen im Bereich der Ladeinfrastruktur, insbesondere an Autobahn-Raststätten, wo zusätzliche Schnellladestationen vorgesehen sind.
Fazit: Eine neue Ära für Elektromobilität in Österreich
Mit dem Ende der Steuerbefreiung für Elektroautos ab April 2025 beginnt in Österreich eine neue Phase der Elektromobilität. Die jährliche Mehrbelastung von durchschnittlich 400 Euro pro Jahr, in manchen Fällen sogar bis zu 500 Euro, stellt für viele E-Auto-Besitzer eine spürbare finanzielle Veränderung dar. Besonders schwere und leistungsstarke Elektro-SUVs werden dabei deutlich stärker belastet als leichte Kompaktmodelle mit geringerer Leistung.
Diese steuerliche Änderung fällt in eine Zeit, in der der Elektroautomarkt in Österreich ohnehin leicht rückläufig ist. Mit einem Rückgang der Neuzulassungen um 6,3 Prozent im Jahr 2024 gegenüber dem Vorjahr kämpft die Branche bereits mit Herausforderungen. Ob die neue Steuer diesen Trend verstärken wird oder ob andere Faktoren wie verbesserte Ladeinfrastruktur und neue, erschwinglichere Modelle diesen Effekt ausgleichen können, bleibt abzuwarten.
Für Kaufinteressenten lohnt es sich jedenfalls, bei der Modellauswahl auch die künftige Steuerbelastung zu berücksichtigen und vor dem Kauf eines Elektroautos die zu erwartenden Kosten genau zu berechnen. Die Besteuerung von Elektroautos markiert jedenfalls einen bedeutsamen Schritt in Richtung fiskalischer Gleichbehandlung verschiedener Antriebsarten, auch wenn die ökologischen Vorteile der Elektromobilität weiterhin durch andere Maßnahmen gefördert werden sollen.
Tabelle: Steuerbelastung der gängigsten Elektroautos in Österreich
Modell
Dauerleistung (kW)
Eigengewicht (kg)
Leistungskomponente (€)
Gewichtskomponente (€)
Gesamtsteuer (€)
Tesla Model Y
153
1.997
469
311
780
BYD Seal
105
2.120
210
504
714
Škoda Enyaq 85x
77
2.384
96
478
574
BMW iX1 xDRIVE30
104
1.940
206
287
493
BMW i4 eDrive40
105
2.125
210
357
567
Tesla Model 3
153
1.851
469
217
686
Audi Q4 e-tron
90
2.145
135
358
493
VW ID.4
85
1.966
120
305
425
Cupra Born
80
1.878
105
253
358
Volvo EX30 (Single Motor)
80
1.850
105
240
345
Extreme Fälle: Höchste und niedrigste Steuerbelastungen
Höchste Steuerbelastungen
Audi Q8 e-tron: 158 kW, 2.724 kg, Gesamtsteuer: 1.234 Euro
Mercedes EQS 450+: 140 kW, 2.480 kg, Gesamtsteuer: 1.046 Euro
BMW iX xDrive50: 140 kW, 2.555 kg, Gesamtsteuer: 1.083 Euro
Tesla Model S: 155 kW, 2.240 kg, Gesamtsteuer: 1.011 Euro
Googles search engine and the Browser Google Chrome could have been far better products if it wasn’t beholden to Google’s other business interests:
They allege that Google blocked the introduction of user-friendly features because they would have harmed the company’s advertising revenue, which depends on people clicking ads in their search results. “Why isn’t autocomplete better? Why isn’t the ‘new tab’ page more effective? Why isn’t browser history better?” says the ex-leader, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. The answer: “There’s all these incentives to get users to search.”
Google Selling Chrome Won’t Be Enough to End Its Search Monopoly
To dismantle Google’s illegal monopoly over how Americans search the web, the US Department of Justice wants the tech giant to end its lucrative partnership with Apple, share a trove of proprietary data with competitors and advertisers, and “promptly and fully divest Chrome,” Google’s browser that controls more than half of the US market. The government also wants approval regarding who takes over Chrome.
The recommendations are part of a detailed plan that government attorneys submitted Wednesday to US district judge Amit Mehta in Washington, DC, as part of a federal antitrust case against Google that started back in 2020. By next August, Mehta is expected to decide which of the possible remedies Google will be required to carry out to loosen its stranglehold on the search market.
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But the tech giant could still appeal, delaying enforcement of the judge’s order years into the future. On Wednesday, Google president Kent Walker characterized the government’s proposals as “staggering,” “extreme,” “a radical interventionist agenda,” and “wildly overbroad.” He wrote in a blog post that the changes being sought “would break a range of Google products—even beyond Search—that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.” He also asserted the privacy and security of Google’s users would be put at risk.
Among people who have worked for Google or partnered closely with the company, there’s little agreement on whether any of the proposed remedies would significantly shift user behavior or make the search engine market more competitive. Four former Google executives who oversaw teams working on Chrome, Search, and Ads told WIRED that innovation by rivals, not interventions by the government, remains the surest way to unseat Google as the nation’s dominant internet search provider. “You can’t ram an inferior product down people’s throats,” says one former Chrome business leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.
But a former Chrome engineering leader acknowledged that the search engine could have been a better product if it wasn’t beholden to Google’s other business interests. They allege that Google blocked the introduction of user-friendly features because they would have harmed the company’s advertising revenue, which depends on people clicking ads in their search results. “Why isn’t autocomplete better? Why isn’t the ‘new tab’ page more effective? Why isn’t browser history better?” says the ex-leader, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. The answer: “There’s all these incentives to get users to search.” Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on the assertion.
Still, competitors that stand to benefit from even a minor reduction in Google’s power are optimistic about the expected remedies. “I can see strong benefits in putting [Chrome] back in the hands of the community,” says Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a company that develops tools for websites, many of which depend on search traffic and advertising revenue controlled by Google. “Moderating that relationship to the corporate overlords is always going to be a healthy thing,” Rauch says.
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of the rival search engine DuckDuckGo, said in a statement that the government’s proposed remedies “would free the search market from Google’s illegal grip and unleash a new era of innovation, investment, and competition.”
Google’s antitrust battle with the Department of Justice began under the first Trump administration in 2020. The federal government, as well as a number of states, accused the tech giant of using anticompetitive tactics to dominate the search market, suppressing Americans’ access to other search providers. The Biden administration moved forward with the case and filed another of its own—accusing Google of illegally monopolizing advertising technologies that millions of websites and apps use to generate revenue. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Monday.
Both cases remain unresolved, and it’s unclear to what extent the Justice Department will keep up the pressure on Google after Donald Trump returns to the White House. On the campaign trail, Trump made mixed comments about the tech giant. In October, he expressed concerns about its power, but suggested that imposing onerous conditions on the company could hamper US efforts to achieve tech supremacy over China.
Judge Mehta has set aside nearly two weeks starting in April to hear arguments from the government and Google about the proposed punishments. The new Trump administration’s approach toward Google should become more apparent at that point, and it’s possible that government attorneys will be less willing to defend the proposals released Wednesday.
Walker’s blog on Wednesday highlighted possible ramifications of the proposals that Trump may view as concerning, including the chilling of AI investment and the appointment of a five-expert Technical Committee to monitor Google’s compliance with remedies. “And that’s just a small part of it,” Walker wrote about the proposed panel. “We wish we were making this up.”
The government is seeking to provide users with more choice over what search engines they use. It wants to end Google’s partnership with Apple, which receives tens of billions of dollars in search ad revenue for making Google the default search engine on iPhones. Google has similar deals with other companies, which also would be scuttled.
Google would also have to make changes to how it preferences its own services on Android or else sell, or be forced to sell, Android. The proposals call for Google to give advertisers a stream of data to help them study their purchases.
To give competitors a leg up, the government wants Google to share its search index and the data it collects about users when determining which results to show. The argument is that potential rivals would then be able to match the information advantage Google has amassed over decades studying the behavior patterns of its billions of users. In addition, Colorado’s attorney general proposed in Wednesday’s filing that Google fund “reasonable, short-term incentive payments” to users who opt for non-Google default search engines.
On top of having to divest of Chrome, Google would be banned from launching a new browser or investing in search, ad tech, and AI rivals for five to 10 years. The government says the restrictions would enable “fostering innovation and transforming the general search and search text ads markets over the next decade.”
Rauch, the Vercel CEO, believes that Google is unfairly using Chrome to direct people toward its AI chatbot, Gemini, as well as other services it owns, such as Google Docs, through a mix of nudges and incentives built into its search engine. “Google is stacking every advantage that they can by monopolizing this very important piece of software infrastructure,” Rauch says.
Turning over Chrome to a neutral steward like a nonprofit organization or an academic institution, Rauch says, would burst open the search box on the world’s most popular browser and give people access to a plethora of alternatives. Chrome already allows users to change their default search provider, but Google still nudges users back through alerts as they browse. “I could imagine, in a world where people are more equipped to choose rather than default, a lot of consumers might end up choosing Perplexity or ChatGPT, whereas today it’s a very roundabout thing,” Rauch says.
But financial and legal analysts have expressed doubts about how much the government’s proposals could really achieve. The former Google executives who spoke with WIRED are just as skeptical. Rajen Sheth, who oversaw parts of the Chrome business and now runs a software startup for building online courses, says users are gravitating toward what they are used to in what he believes is already an open marketplace. “Given the technology landscape and the different levers, are there things that will make a difference? It will be tough,” he says.
Getting access to Google’s proprietary data and having the opportunity to court iPhone users may help increase the odds that people turn to alternative search engines. But Google also has unmatched computing infrastructure, unique data from sibling services such as Maps, and more than a quarter-century of brand recognition with consumers. “No matter how much you level the playing field, people are going to go to the best product for the job,” the former Chrome business leader says.
Former Google executives say that what will supplant the company one day isn’t another traditional search engine, but something akin to ChatGPT that presents content to users in a more interactive way. That new technology isn’t fully developed yet, but it might be by the time the government’s lawsuit against Google is finally settled. That means Google’s place in the market could look vastly different before enforcement of the judge’s order even begins.
Nearly every weekday morning, a device leaves a two-story home near Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute commute along a major autobahn. By around 7 am, it arrives at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne—the US Army’s European headquarters and a key hub for US intelligence operations.
The device stops near a restaurant before heading to an office near the base that belongs to a major government contractor responsible for outfitting and securing some of the nation’s most sensitive facilities.
For roughly two months in 2023, this device followed a predictable routine: stops at the contractor’s office, visits to a discreet hangar on base, and lunchtime trips to the base’s dining facility. Twice in November of last year, it made a 30-minute drive to the Dagger Complex, a former intelligence and NSA signals processing facility. On weekends, the device could be traced to restaurants and shops in Wiesbaden.
The individual carrying this device likely isn’t a spy or high-ranking intelligence official. Instead, experts believe, they’re a contractor who works on critical systems—HVAC, computing infrastructure, or possibly securing the newly built Consolidated Intelligence Center, a state-of-the-art facility suspected to be used by the National Security Agency.
Whoever they are, the device they’re carrying with them everywhere is putting US national security at risk.
A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.
We tracked hundreds of thousands of signals from devices inside sensitive US installations in Germany. That includes scores of devices within suspected NSA monitoring or signals-analysis facilities, more than a thousand devices at a sprawling US compound where Ukrainian troops were being being trained in 2023, and nearly 2,000 others at an air force base that has crucially supported American drone operations.
A device likely tied to an NSA or intelligence employee broadcast coordinates from inside a windowless building with a metal exterior known as the “Tin Can,” which is reportedly used for NSA surveillance, according to agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Another device transmitted signals from within a restricted weapons testing facility, revealing its zig-zagging movements across a high-security zone used for tank maneuvers and live munitions drills.
We traced these devices from barracks to work buildings, Italian restaurants, Aldi grocery stores, and bars. As many as four devices that regularly pinged from Ramstein Air Base were later tracked to nearby brothels off base, including a multistory facility called SexWorld.
Experts caution that foreign governments could use this data to identify individuals with access to sensitive areas; terrorists or criminals could decipher when US nuclear weapons are least guarded; or spies and other nefarious actors could leverage embarrassing information for blackmail.
“The unregulated data broker industry poses a clear threat to national security,” says Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon with more than 20 years overseeing intelligence work. “It is outrageous that American data brokers are selling location data collected from thousands of brave members of the armed forces who serve in harms’ way around the world.”
Wyden approached the US Defense Department in September after initial reporting by BR and netzpolitik.org raised concerns about the tracking of potential US service members. DoD failed to respond. Likewise, Wyden’s office has yet to hear back from members of US president Joe Biden’s National Security Council, despite repeated inquiries. The NSC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“There is ample blame to go around,” says Wyden, “but unless the incoming administration and Congress act, these kinds of abuses will keep happening, and they’ll cost service members‘ lives.”
The Oregon senator also raised the issue earlier this year with the Federal Trade Commission, following an FTC order that imposed unprecedented restrictions against a US company it accused of gathering data around “sensitive locations.” Douglas Farrar, the FTC’s director of public affairs, declined a request to comment.
WIRED can now exclusively report, however, that the FTC is on the verge of fulfilling Wyden’s request. An FTC source, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, says the agency is planning to file multiple lawsuits soon that will formally recognize US military installations as protected sites. The source adds that the lawsuits are in keeping with years‘ worth of work by FTC Chair Lina Khan aimed at shielding US consumers—including service members—from harmful surveillance practices.
Before a targeted ad appears on an app or website, third-party software often embedded in apps called software development kits transmit information about their users to data brokers, real-time bidding platforms, and ad exchanges—often including location data. Data brokers often will collect that data, analyze it, repackage it, and sell it.
In February of 2024, reporters from BR and Netzpolitik.org obtained a free sample of this kind of data from Datastream Group, a Florida-based data broker. The dataset contains 3.6 billion coordinates—some recorded at millisecond intervals—from up to 11 million mobile advertising IDs in Germany over what the company says is a 59-day span from October through December 2023.
Mobile advertising IDs are unique identifiers used by the advertising industry to serve personalized ads to smartphones. These strings of letters and numbers allow companies to track user behavior and target ads effectively. However, mobile advertising IDs can also reveal much more sensitive information, particularly when combined with precise geolocation data.
In total, our analysis revealed granular location data from up to 12,313 devices that appeared to spend time at or near at least 11 military and intelligence sites, potentially exposing crucial details like entry points, security practices, and guard schedules—information that, in the hands of hostile foreign governments or terrorists, could be deadly.
Our investigation uncovered 38,474 location signals from up to 189 devices inside Büchel Air Base, a high-security German installation where as many as 15 US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored in underground bunkers. At Grafenwöhr Training Area, where thousands of US troops are stationed and have trained Ukrainian soldiers on Abrams tanks, we tracked 191,415 signals from up to 1,257 devices.
At Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, the US Army’s European headquarters, we identified 74,968 location signals from as many as 799 devices, including some at the European Technical Center, once the NSA’s communication hub in Europe.Courtesy of OpenMapTiles
In Wiesbaden, home to the US Army’s European headquarters at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, 74,968 location signals from as many as 799 devices were detected—some originating from sensitive intelligence facilities like the European Technical Center, once the NSA’s communication hub in Europe, and newly built intelligence operations centers.
At Ramstein Air Base, which supports some US drone operations, 164,223 signals from nearly 2,000 devices were tracked. That included devices tracked to Ramstein Elementary and High School, base schools for the children of military personnel.
Of these devices, 1,326 appeared at more than one of these highly sensitive military sites, potentially mapping the movements of US service members across Europe’s most secure locations.
The data is not infallible. Mobile ad IDs can be reset, meaning multiple IDs can be assigned to the same device. Our analysis found that, in some instances, devices were assigned more than 10 mobile ad IDs.
The location data’s precision at the individual device level can also be inconsistent. By contacting several people whose movements were revealed in the dataset, the reporting collective confirmed that much of the data was highly accurate—identifying work commutes and dog walks of individuals contacted. However, this wasn’t always the case. One reporter whose ID appears in the dataset found that it often placed him a block away from his apartment and during times when he was out of town. A study from NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence found that “quantity overshadows quality” in the data broker industry and that, on average, only up to 60 percent of the data surveyed can be considered precise.
According to its website, Datastream Group appears to offer “internet advertising data coupled with hashed emails, cookies, and mobile location data.” Its listed datasets include niche categories like boat owners, mortgage seekers, and cigarette smokers. The company, one of many in a multibillion-dollar location-data industry, did not respond to our request for comment about the data it provided on US military and intelligence personnel in Germany, where the US maintains a force of at least 35,000 troops, according to the most recent estimates.
Defense Department officials have known about the threat that commercial data brokers pose to national security since at least 2016, when Mike Yeagley, a government contractor and technologist, delivered a briefing to senior military officials at the Joint Special Operations Command compound in Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), North Carolina, about the issue. Yeagley’s presentation aimed to show how commercially available mobile data—already pervasive in conflict zones like Syria—could be weaponized for pattern of life analysis.
Midway through the presentation, Yeagley decided to raise the stakes. “Well, here’s the behavior of an ISIS operator,” he tells WIRED, recalling his presentation. “Let me turn the mirror around—let me show you how it works for your own personnel.” He then displayed data revealing phones as they moved from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida—critical hubs for elite US special operations units. The devices traveled through transit points like Turkey before clustering in northern Syria at a seemingly abandoned cement factory near Kobane, a known ISIS stronghold. The location he pinpointed was a covert forward operating base.
Yeagley says he was quickly escorted to a secured room to continue his presentation behind closed doors. There, officials questioned him on how he had obtained the data, concerned that his stunt had involved hacking personnel or unauthorized intercepts.
The data wasn’t sourced from espionage but from unregulated commercial brokers, he explained to the concerned DOD officials. “I didn’t hack, intercept, or engineer this data,” he told them. “I bought it.”
Now, years later, Yeagley remains deeply frustrated with the DODs inability to control the situation. What WIRED, BR, and Netzpolitik.org are now reporting is “very similar to the alarms we raised almost 10 years ago,” he says, shaking his head. “And it doesn’t seem like anything’s changed.”
US law requires the director of national intelligence to provide “protection support” for the personal devices of “at risk” intelligence personnel who are deemed susceptible to “hostile information collection activities.” But which personnel meet this criteria is unclear, as is the extent of the protections beyond periodic training and advice. The location data we acquired demonstrates, regardless, that commercial surveillance is far too pervasive and complex to be reduced to individual responsibility.
Biden’s outgoing director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, did not respond to a request for comment.
A report declassified by Haines last summeracknowledges that US intelligence agencies had purchased a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” about US citizens from commercial data brokers, adding that “in the wrong hands,” the data could “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.” The report, which contains numerous redactions, notes that, while the US government „would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times,” smartphones, connected cars, and web tracking have all made this possible “without government participation.”
Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Adam Smith, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said Smith was unavailable to discuss the matter, busy negotiating a must-pass bill to fund the Pentagon’s policy priorities next year.
Jack Reed and Roger Wicker, the leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Inquiries placed with House and Senate leaders and top lawmakers on both congressional intelligence committees have gone unanswered.
The DOD and the NSA declined to answer specific questions related to our investigation. However, DOD spokesperson Javan Rasnake says that the Pentagon is aware that geolocation services could put personnel at risk and urged service members to remember their training and adhere strictly to operational security protocols. “Within the USEUCOM region, members are reminded of the need to execute proper OPSEC when conducting mission activities inside operational areas,” Rasnake says, using the shorthand for operational security.
An internal Pentagon presentation obtained by the reporting collective, though, claims that not only is the domestic data collection likely capable of revealing military secrets, it is essentially unavoidable at the personal level, service members’ lives being simply too intertwined with the technology permitting it. This conclusion closely mirrors the observations of Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court, who in landmark privacy cases within the past decade described cell phones as being a “pervasive and insistent part of daily life” and that owning one was “indispensable to participation in modern society.”
The presentation, which a source says was delivered to high-ranking general officers, including the US Army’s chief information officer, warns that despite promises from major ad tech companies, “de-anonymization” is all but trivial given the widespread availability of commercial data collected on Pentagon employees. The document emphasizes that the caches of location data on US individuals is a “force protection issue,” likely capable of revealing troop movements and other highly guarded military secrets.
While instances of blackmail inside the Pentagon have seen a sharp decline since the Cold War, many of the structural barriers to persistently surveilling Americans have also vanished. In recent decades, US courts have repeatedly found that new technologies pose a threat to privacy by enabling surveillance that, “in earlier times, would have been prohibitively expensive,“ as the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals noted in 2007.
In an August 2024 ruling, another US appeals court disregarded claims by tech companies that users who “opt in” to surveillance were actually “informed” and doing so “voluntarily,” declaring the opposite is clear to “anyone with a smartphone.” The internal presentation for military staff presses that adversarial nations can gain access to advertising data with ease, using it to exploit, manipulate, and coerce military personnel for purposes of espionage.
Patronizing sex workers, whether legal in a foreign country or not, is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The penalties can be severe, including forfeiture of pay, dishonorable discharge, and up to one year of imprisonment. But the ban on solicitation is not merely imposed on principle alone, says Michael Waddington, a criminal defense attorney who specializes in court-marial cases. “There’s a genuine danger of encountering foreign agents in these establishments, which can lead to blackmail or exploitation,” he says.
“This issue is particularly concerning given the current geopolitical climate. Many US servicemembers in Europe are involved in supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion,” Waddington says. “Any compromise of their integrity could have serious implications for our operations and national security.”
When it comes to jeopardizing national security, even data on low-level personnel can pose a risk, says Vivek Chilukuri, senior fellow and program director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Before joining CNAS, Chilukuri served in part as legislative director and tech policy advisor to US senator Michael Bennet on the Senate Intelligence Committee and previously worked at the US State Department, specializing in countering violent extremism.
„Low-value targets can lead to high-value compromises,“ Chilukuri says. „Even if someone isn’t senior in an organization, they may have access to highly sensitive infrastructure. A system is only as secure as its weakest link.“ He points out that if adversaries can target someone with access to a crucial server or database, they could exploit that vulnerability to cause serious damage. “It just takes one USB stick plugged into the right device to compromise an organization.”
It’s not just individual service members who are at risk—entire security protocols and operational routines can be exposed through location data. At Büchel Air Base, where the US is believed to have stored an estimated 10 to 15 B61 nuclear weapons, the data reveals the daily activity patterns of devices on the base, including when personnel are most active and, more concerningly, potentially when the base is least populated.
Overview of the Air Mobility Command ramp at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.Photograph: Timm Ziegenthaler/Stocktrek Images; Getty Images
Büchel has 11 protective aircraft shelters equipped with hardened vaults for nuclear weapons storage. Each vault, which is located in a so-called WS3, or Weapons Storage and Security System, can hold up to four warheads. Our investigation traced precise location data for as many as 40 cellular devices that were present in or near these bunkers.
The patterns we could observe from devices at Büchel go far beyond just understanding the working hours of people on base. In aggregate, it’s possible to map key entry and exit points, pinpointing frequently visited areas, and even tracing personnel to their off-base routines. For a terrorist, this information could be a gold mine—an opportunity to identify weak points, plan an attack, or target individuals with access to sensitive areas.
This month, German authorities arrested a former civilian contractor employed by the US military on allegations of offering to pass sensitive information about American military operations in Germany to Chinese intelligence agencies.
In April, German authorities arrested two German-Russian nationals accused of scouting US military sites for potential sabotage, including allegedly arson. One of the targeted locations was the US Army’s Grafenwöhr Training Area in Bavaria, a critical hub for US military operations in Europe that spans 233 square kilometers.
At Grafenwöhr, WIRED, BR, and Netzpolitik.org could track the precise movements from up to 1,257 devices. Some devices could even be observed zigzagging through Range 301, an armored vehicle course, before returning to nearby barracks.
Our investigation found 38,474 location signals from up to 189 devices inside Büchel Air Base, around a dozen US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.Courtesy of OpenMapTiles
A senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and head of its data brokerage research project, Justin Sherman also leads Global Cyber Strategies, a firm specializing in cybersecurity and tech policy. In 2023, he and his coauthors at Duke secured $250,000 in funding from the United States Military Academy to investigate how easy it is to purchase sensitive data about military personnel from data brokers. The results were alarming: They were able to buy highly sensitive, nonpublic, individually identifiable health and financial data on active-duty service members, without any vetting.
“It shows you how bad the situation is,” Sherman says, explaining how they geofenced requests to specific special operations bases. “We didn’t pretend to be a marketing firm in LA. We just wanted to see what the data brokers would ask.” Most brokers didn’t question their requests, and one even offered to bypass an ID verification check if they paid by wire.
During the study, Sherman helped draft an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that requires the Defense Department to ensure that highly identifiable individual data shared with contractors cannot be resold. He found the overall impact of the study underwhelming, however. “The scope of the industry is the problem,” he says. “It’s great to pass focused controls on parts of the ecosystem, but if you don’t address the rest of the industry, you leave the door wide open for anyone wanting location data on intelligence officers.”
Efforts by the US Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation have been stalled for the better part of a decade. The latest effort, known as the American Privacy Rights Act, failed to advance in June after GOP leaders threatened to scuttle the bill, which was significantly weakened before being shelved.
Another current privacy bill, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, seeks to ban the US government from purchasing data on Americans that it would normally need a warrant to obtain. While the bill would not prohibit the sale of commercial location data altogether, it would bar federal agencies from using those purchases to circumvent constitutional protections upheld by the Supreme Court. Its fate rests in the hands of House and Senate leaders, whose negotiations are private.
“The government needs to stop subsidizing what is now for good reason one of the world’s least popular industries,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “There are a lot of members of Congress who take seriously the severe threats to privacy and national security posed by data brokers, but we’ve seen many actions by congressional leaders that only furthers the problem. There shouldn’t need to be a body count for these people to take action.”
The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away.
If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.
You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to rehumanize it.”
In the great room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent the Internet Archive’s employees, Kahle’s quirky way of immortalizing his circle. They are beautiful and weird, but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”
But the Internet Archive also has its foes. Since 2020, it’s been mired in legal battles. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, book publishers complained that the nonprofit infringed on copyright by loaning out digitized versions of physical books. In UMG Recordings v. Internet Archive, music labels have alleged that the Internet Archive infringed on copyright by digitizing recordings.
In both cases, the Internet Archive has mounted “fair use” defenses, arguing that it is permitted to use copyrighted materials as a noncommercial entity creating archival materials. In both cases, the plaintiffs characterized it as a hub for piracy. In 2023, it lost Hachette. This month, it lost an appeal in the case. The Archive could appeal once more, to the Supreme Court of the United States, but has no immediate plans to do so. (“We have not decided,” Kahle told me the day after the decision.)
A judge rebuffed an attempt to dismiss the music labels’ case earlier this year. Kahle says he’s thinking about settling, if that’s even an option.
The combined weight of these legal cases threatens to crush the Internet Archive. The UMG case could prove existential, with potential fines running into the hundreds of millions. The internet has entrusted its collective memory to this one idiosyncratic institution. It now faces the prospect of losing it all.
Kahle has been obsessed with creating a digital library since he was young, a calling that spurred him to study artificial intelligence at MIT. “I wanted to build the library of everything, and we needed computers that were big enough to be able to deal with it,” he says.
After graduating in 1982, he worked at the supercomputing startup Thinking Machines Corporation. While there, he developed a program called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), a way to search for data on remote computers. He left to cocreate a startup of the same name, which he sold to AOL in 1995. The next year, he launched a two-headed project from his attic: “AI and IA.”That “AI” was a for-profit company called Alexa Internet—“Alexa” a nod to the Library of Alexandria—alongside the nonprofit Internet Archive. The two projects were interlinked; Alexa Internet crawled the web, then donated what it collected to the Internet Archive. Kahle couldn’t quite make the business model work. When Amazon made an offer in 1999, it seemed prudent to accept. The Everything Store paid a reported $250 million in stock for Alexa, severing the AI from IA and leaving Kahle a wealthy man.
Kahle stayed on with Alexa for a few years but left in 2002 to focus on the Internet Archive. It has been his vocation ever since. “His entire being is committed to the Archive,” says copyright scholar Pam Samuelson, who has known Kahle since the ’90s. “He lives and breathes it.”
If Silicon Valley has a Mr. Fezziwig, it’s Kahle. He’s not an ascetic; he owns a handsome black sailboat anchored in a slip at a tony yacht club. But his day-to-day life is modest. He ebikes to work and dresses like a guy who doesn’t care about clothes, and while he used to love Burning Man—he and his wife, Mary Austin, got married there in 1992—now he thinks it’s gotten too big. (Their current bougie-hippie pastime is the seasteading gathering Ephemerisle, where boaters hitch themselves together and create temporary islands in the Sacramento River Delta every July.)
What he really loves, above all, is his job.
“The story of Brewster Kahle is that of a guy who wins the lottery,” says longtime archivist Jason Scott. “And he and his wife, Mary, turned around and said, awesome, we get to be librarians now.”
Kahle is now the merry custodian to a uniquely comprehensive catalog, spanning all manner of digital and physical media, from classic video games to live recordings of concerts to magazines and newspapers to books from around the world. It recently backed up the island of Aruba’s cultural institutions. It’s an essential tool for everything from legal research—particularly around patent law—to accountability journalism. “There are other online archiving tools,” says ProPublica reporter Craig Silverman, “but none of them touch the Internet Archive.” It is, in short, a proof machine.What makes the Internet Archive unique is its willingness to push boundaries in ways that traditional libraries do not. The Library of Congress also archives the web—but only after it has notified, and often asked permission from, the websites it scrapes.
“The Internet Archive has always been a little risky,” says University of Waterloo historian Ian Milligan, who has a forthcoming book on web archiving. Its distinctive utility is entwined with its long-standing outré approach to copyright. In fact, Kahle and the Internet Archive sued the government more than two decades ago, challenging the way the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 had expanded copyright law. He lost that case—but, certainly, not his desire to keep pushing.
One of those pushes came in 2005. At the time, beloved hacker Aaron Swartz was often working on Internet Archive projects, and he cocreated and led the development of a new initiative called the Open Library program along with Kahle. The goal was to create one webpage for every book in the world. Kahle saw it as an alternative to Google Books, one that wasn’t driven by commercial interests but loftier and decidedly kumbaya information-wants-to-be-free ambitions.
In addition to its attempt to catalog every book ever, the project sought to make copies available to readers. To that end, it scans physical books, then allows people to check out the digitized versions. For over a decade, it has operated using a framework called controlled digital lending (CDL), where digitized books are treated as old-fashioned physical books rather than ebooks. The books it lends out were either purchased by the Internet Archive or donated by other libraries, organizations, or individuals; according to CDL principles, libraries that own a physical copy of a book should be able to lend it digitally.
The project primarily appeals to researchers for whom specific books are hard to attain elsewhere, rather than casual readers. “Try checking out one of our books and then reading it—it’s tough going,” Kahle says. He’s not lying. A blurry scan of a physical book on a desktop screen compared to a regular ebook on a Kindle is like music from a tinny iPhone speaker versus a Bose surround sound system. Most borrowers read what they check out for less than five minutes.
Like other digital media, ebooks are typically licensed rather than sold outright, at a much higher rate than the cover price. Libraries who license ebooks get a limited number of loans; if they stop paying, the book vanishes. CDL is an attempt to give libraries more control over their inventory, and to expand access to books in a library’s collection that exist only as physical copies.
For years, publishers ignored the Internet Archive’s book-scanning spree. Finally, during the pandemic, after the Internet Archive took one liberty too many with its approach to CDL, they snapped.
In March 2020, as schools and libraries abruptly shut down, they faced a dilemma. Demand for ebooks far outstripped their ability to loan them out under restrictive licensing deals, and they had no way of lending out books that existed only in physical form. In response, the Internet Archive made a bold decision: It allowed multiple people to check out digital versions of the same book simultaneously. It called this program the National Emergency Library. “We acted at the request of librarians and educators and writers,” says Chris Freeland.
Kahle remembers feeling a vocational tug in that moment for the Internet Archive to do whatever it could to expand access. He thought they had broad support, too. “We got over 100 libraries to sign on and say ‘help us,’” Kahle says. “They stood behind the National Emergency Library and said ‘do this under our names.’”
Dave Hansen, now executive director of the nonprofit Authors Alliance, was a librarian at Duke University at the time. “We had tremendous challenges getting books for our students,” he says. “What they did was a good-faith effort.”
Not everyone agreed. Prominent writers vehemently criticized the project, as did the Authors Guild and the National Writers Union. “They are not a library. Libraries buy books and respect copyright. They are fraudsters posing as saints,” author James Gleick wrote on Twitter. (Today, Gleick maintains that the Internet Archive is not a library, though he says “fraudsters was a little harsh.”)
“They seem to work by fiat,” says Bhamati Viswanathan, a copyright lawyer who signed an amicus brief on behalf of the publishers in the Hachette case. Viswanathan thinks it was arrogant to circumvent the licensing system. “Very much like what the tech companies seem to be doing, which is, ‘we’re going to ask forgiveness, not permission.’”
The Internet Archive was in its first full-blown PR crisis. The coalition of publishing houses filed its lawsuit in June 2020, alleging that both the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive’s broader Open Library program violated copyright. A few weeks later, the Internet Archive scuttled the National Emergency Library and reverted to its traditional, capped loan system, but it made no difference to the publishers.
The publishing houses and their supporters maintain that the Archive’s behavior harmed authors. “Internet Archive is arguing that it is OK to make and publicly distribute unauthorized copies of an author’s work to the global public,” Terrance Hart, the general counsel for the Association of American Publishers, tells WIRED. “Imagine if everyone started doing the same. The only existential threat here is the one posed by Internet Archive to the livelihoods of authors and to the copyright system itself in the digital age.”
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After the lawsuit was filed, over a thousand writers signed a letter in support of libraries and the Internet Archive to be able to loan digital books, including Naomi Klein and Daniel Ellsberg. One supportive author, Chuck Wendig, had very publicly changed his mind after initially tweeting criticism. Even some writers who currently belong to and support the Authors Guild, like Joanne McNeil, were staunch supporters of the Archive. She sometimes reads out-of-print books using the lending service and still sees it as a vital tool. “I hope my books are in the Open Library project,” she says, telling me that she’s already aware that her critically acclaimed but modestly popular books aren’t widely available. “At least I’ll know that way there’s someplace someone can find them.”
The shows of support didn’t matter. The publishers didn’t back down. In March 2023, the Internet Archive lost the case. This September, it lost its appeal. The court refuted the fair use arguments, insisting that the organization had not proved that it wasn’t financially harming publishers. In the meantime, legal bills continue to pile up for the Internet Archive’s next challenge.
After the initial ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the parties agreed upon settlement terms; although those terms are confidential, Kahle has confirmed that the Internet Archive can financially survive it thanks to the help of donors. If the Internet Archive decides not to file a second appeal, it will have to fulfill those settlement terms. A blow, but not a death knell.The other lawsuit may be far harder to survive. In 2023, several major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony, and Capitol, sued the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project, a digital archive of a niche collection of recordings of albums in the obsolete record format known as 78s, which was used from the 1890s to the late 1950s. The complaint alleges that the project “undermines the value of music.” It lists 2,749 recordings as infringed, which means damages could potentially be over $400 million.
“One thing that you can say about the recording industry,” Pam Samuelson says, “is that there are no statutory damages that are too large for them to claim.”
As with the book publishing case, the Internet Archive’s defense hinges on fair use. It argues that preserving obsolete versions of these records, complete with the crackles and pops from the old shellac resin, makes history accessible. Copyright law is notoriously unpredictable, and some find the Internet Archive’s case shaky. “It doesn’t strike me, necessarily, as a winning fair use argument,” says Zvi Rosen, a law professor at Southern Illinois University who focuses on copyright.
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, thinks the labels are “vastly exaggerating the commercial harm” from the project. (If there was a sizable audience for extremely low-quality versions of songs, he reasons, why wouldn’t the labels be putting out 78-style releases?) On average, each recording is accessed only once a month. Still, Grimmelmann isn’t convinced that will matter. “They are directly reproducing these works,” he says. “That’s a very hard lift for a judge.”
It may be years before the case is resolved, which means the uncertainty about the Internet Archive’s future is likely to linger, and potentially spread. And if it is resolved through either a settlement or a win for the recording industry, other copyright holders could be inspired to sue. “I’m worried about the blast radius from the music lawsuit,” Grimmelmann says.In Kahle’s view, the Internet Archive’s legal challenges are part of a larger story about beleaguered libraries in the United States. He likes to frame his plight as a battle against a cadre of nefarious publishers, one piece of a larger struggle to wrest back the right to own books in the digital age. (Get him started on the topic, and he’ll likely point out that both ebook distributor OverDrive and publishing company Simon & Schuster are owned by the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.) He’s keenly aware that everything he has built is in danger. “It’s the time of Orwell but with corporations,” Kahle says. “It’s scary.”
Losing the Archive is, indeed, a frightening prospect. “There is a misperception that things on the web are forever—but they really, really aren’t,” says Craig Silverman, who thinks the nonprofit’s demise would make certain types of scholarship and reporting “way more difficult, if not impossible,” in addition to representing a disappearance of a bastion of collective memory.
Just this September, Google and the Internet Archive announced a partnership to allow people to see previous versions of websites surfaced through Google Search by linking to the Wayback Machine. Google previously offered its own cached historical websites; now it leans on a small nonprofit.
The Internet Archive also has challenges beyond its legal woes. For starters, it’s getting harder to archive things. As Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, told me, the rise of apps with functions like livestreaming, especially when they’re limited to certain operating systems, presents a technical challenge. On top of that, paywalls are an obstacle, as is the sheer and ever-increasing amount of content. “There’s just so much material,” he says. “How does one know what to prioritize?”
Then there’s AI, once again. Thus far, the Internet Archive has sidestepped or been exempt from the new scrutiny on web crawling as it relates to AI training data. This June, for example, when Reddit announced that it was updating its scraping policy, it specifically noted that it was still allowing “good faith actors” like the Internet Archive to crawl it. But as opposition to rampant AI data scraping grows, the Internet Archive may yet face a new obstacle: If regulators and lawmakers are clumsy in attempts to curb permissionless AI web scraping, it could kneecap services like the Wayback Machine, which functions precisely because it can trawl and reproduce vast amounts of data.
The rise of AI has already soured some creative types on the Internet Archive’s approach to copyright. While Kahle views his creation as a library on the side of the little guy, opponents strenuously dispute this view. They paint Kahle as a tech-wolf disguised in librarian-sheep clothing, stuck in a mentality better suited for the Napster era. “The Internet Archive is really fighting the battles of 20 years ago, when it was as simple as ‘publishers bad, anything that hurts publishers good,’” says Neil Turkewitz, a former Recording Industry Association of America executive who has criticized the Archive’s copyright stances. “But that’s not the world we live in.”
When I talk to Kahle over Zoom this September, shortly after he’d learned that the Internet Archive had lost the appeal, he’s agitated—an internet prophet literally wandering around in the wilderness. He’s perched in front of jagged cliffs while hiking outside of Arles, France, a blue baseball cap pulled over his hair, cheeks extra-ruddy in the sun, his default affability tempered by a sense of despondency. He hadn’t known about the timing of the ruling in advance, so he interrupted a weeklong vacation with Mary to jump back into work crisis mode. “It’s just so depressing,” he says.
As he sits on a rock with his phone in his hand, Kahle says the US legal system is broken. He says he doesn’t think this is the end of the lawsuits. “I think the copyright cartel is on a roll,” he says. He frets that copycat cases could be on the way. He’s the most bummed-out guy I’ve ever seen on vacation in the south of France. But he’s also defiant. There’s no inkling of regret, only a renewed sense that what he’s doing is righteous. “We have such an opportunity here. It’s the dream of the internet,” he says. “It’s ours to lose.” It sounds less like a statement and more like a prayer.
“I was too poor,” he said. “And then I was too rich.”
In fact, Mr. Karp, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies, the mysterious and powerful data analytics firm, doesn’t trust himself to drive. Or ride a bike. Or ski downhill.
“I’m a dreamer,” he said. “I’ll start dreaming and then I fall over. I started doing tai chi to prevent that. It’s really, really helped with focusing on one thing at a time. If you had met me 15 years ago, two-thirds of the conversation, I’d just be dreaming.”
What would he dream about?
“Literally, it could be a walk I did five years ago,” he said. “It could be some conversation I had in grad school. Could be my family member annoyed me. Something a colleague said, like: ‘Why did they say this? What does it actually mean?’”
Mr. Karp is a lean, extremely fit billionaire with unruly salt-and-pepper curls. He is introvert-charming (something I aspire to myself). He has A.D.H.D. and can’t hide it if he is not interested in what someone is saying. After a hyper spurt of talking, he loses energy and has to recharge on the stationary bike or by reading. Even though he thinks of himself as different, he seems to like being different. He enjoys being a provocateur onstage and in interviews.
“I’m a Jewish, racially ambiguous dyslexic, so I can say anything,” he said, smiling.
Unlike many executives in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp backed President Biden, cutting him a big check, despite skepticism about his handling of the border and his overreliance on Hollywood elites like Jeffrey Katzenberg. Now he is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, but he still has vociferous complaints about his party.
When he donates, he said, he does it in multiples of 18 because “it’s mystical — 18 brings good luck in the tradition of kabbalah. I gave Biden $360,000.”
The 56-year-old is perfectly happy hanging out in a remote woodsy meadow alone — except for his Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor and his bodyguards. (Mr. Karp, who has never married, once complained that bodyguards crimp your ability to flirt.)
“This is like introverts’ heaven,” he said, looking at his red barn from the porch of his Austrian-style house with a mezuza on the door. “You can invite people graciously. No one comes.”
The house is sparse on furniture, but Mr. Karp still worries that it is too cluttered. “I do have a Spartan thing,” he said. “I definitely feel constrained and slightly imprisoned when I have too much stuff around me.”
Asked about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Mr. Karp said, “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
So how did a daydreaming doctoral student in German philosophy wind up leading a shadowy data analytics firm that has become a major American defense contractor, one that works with spy services as it charts the future of autonomous warfare?
He’s not a household name, and yet Mr. Karp is at the vanguard of what Mark Milley, the retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called “the most significant fundamental change in the character of war ever recorded in history.” In this new world, unorthodox Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mr. Karp and Elon Musk are woven into the fabric of America’s national security.
Mr. Karp is also at the white-hot center of ethical issues about whether firms like Palantir are too Big Brother, with access to so much of our personal data as we sign away our privacy. And he is in the middle of the debate about whether artificial intelligence is friend or foe, whether killer robots and disembodied A.I. will one day turn on us.
Mr. Karp’s position is that we’re hurtling toward this new world whether we like it or not. Do we want to dominate it, or do we want to be dominated by China?
Critics worry about what happens when weapons are autonomous and humans become superfluous to the killing process. Tech reflects the values of its operators, so what if it falls into the hands of a modern Caligula?
“I think a lot of the issues come back to ‘Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things?’” Mr. Karp told me, as he moved around his living room in a tai chi rhythm, wearing his house shoes, jeans and a tight white T-shirt. “And I come down to yes. All these technologies are dangerous.” He adds: “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”
Inspired by Tolkien
Palantir’s name is derived from palantíri, the seeing stones in the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasies. The company’s office in Palo Alto, Calif., features “Lord of the Rings” décor and is nicknamed the Shire.
After years under the radar, Mr. Karp is now in the public eye. He has joked that he needs a coach to teach him how to be more normal.
Born in New York and raised outside Philadelphia in a leftist family, Mr. Karp has a Jewish father who was a pediatrician and a Black mother who is an artist. They were social activists who took young Alex to civil rights marches and other protests. His uncle, Gerald D. Jaynes, is an economics and African American studies professor at Yale; his brother, Ben, is an academic who lives in Japan.
“I just think I’ve always viewed myself as I don’t fit in, and I can’t really try to,” Mr. Karp said. “My parents’ background just gave me a primordial subconscious bias that anything that involves ‘We fit in together’ does not include me.
“Yes, I think the way I explain it politically is like, if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.”
Mr. Karp has his own unique charisma. “He’s one of a kind, to say the least,” said the Democratic strategist James Carville, who is an informal adviser to Palantir.
When I visited the Palo Alto office, Mr. Karp accidentally knocked down a visitor while demonstrating a tai chi move. He apologized, then ran off to get a printout of Goethe’s “Faust” in German, which he read aloud in an effort to show that it was better than the English translation.
“If you were to do a sitcom on Palantir, it’s equal parts Larry David, a philosophy class, tech and James Bond,” he said.
Mr. Karp at the Senate building in Washington last year. He was among the tech industry titans, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who took part in a discussion of A.I. with lawmakers.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Palantir was founded in 2003 by a gang of five, including Karp and his old Stanford Law School classmate Peter Thiel (now the company’s chairman). It was backed, in part, by nearly $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.’s venture capital arm.
“Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Mr. Karp told me.
He described what his company does as “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.
Mr. Karp does not believe in appeasement. “You scare the crap out of your adversaries,” he said. He brims with American chauvinism, boasting that we are leagues ahead of China and Russia on software.
“The tech scene in America is like the jazz scene in the 1950s,” he said in one forum. He told me: “I’m constantly telling people 86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American — and people fall out of their chair. It’s hard for us to understand how dominant we are in certain industries.”
In the wake of 9/11, the C.I.A. bet on Palantir’s maw gobbling up data and auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from. Palantir uses multiple databases to find the bad guy, even, as Mr. Karp put it, “if the bad guy actually works for you.”
The company is often credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden so Navy SEALs could kill him, but it’s unclear if that is true. As with many topics that came up in the course of our interviews in Washington, Palo Alto and New Hampshire, Mr. Karp zips his lips about whether his company was involved in dispatching the fiend of 9/11.
“If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him,” Mr. Karp explained, “you’ll never meet the pope again.”
He does crow a little about Western civilization’s resting on Palantir’s slender shoulders, noting that without its software, “you would’ve had massive terror attacks in Europe already, like Oct. 7 style.” And those attacks, he believes, would have propelled the far right to power.
Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West. Mr. Thiel said the company tries to work with “more allied” and “less corrupt” governments, noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, “with corrupt countries, you never get paid.”
“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s interesting how radical that is, considering it’s not, in my view, that radical.”
He added: “If you believe we should appease Iran, Russia and China by saying we’re going to be nicer and nicer and nicer, of course you’ll look at Palantir negatively. Some of these places want you to do the apology show for what you believe in, and we don’t apologize for what we believe in. I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”
As one Karp acquaintance put it: “Alex is principled. You just may not like his principles.”
Kara Swisher, the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” told me: “While Palantir promises a more efficient and cost-effective way to conduct war, should our goal be to make it less expensive, onerous and painful? After all, war is not a video game, nor should it be.”
Mr. Karp’s friend Diane von Furstenberg told me that he sees himself as Batman, believing in the importance of choosing sides in a parlous world. (The New York office is called Gotham and features a statue and prints of Batman.) But some critics have a darker view, worrying about Palantir creating a “digital kill chain” and seeing Mr. Karp less as a hero than as a villain.
Back in 2016, some Democrats regarded Palantir as ominous because of Mr. Thiel’s support for former President Donald J. Trump. Later, conspiracy theories sprang up around the company’s role in OperationWarp Speed, the federal effort pushing the Covid-19 vaccine program from clinical trials to jabs in arms.
In December 2016, Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, met with tech executives including the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Some critics focused on Palantir’s work at the border, which helped U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down undocumented migrants for deportation. In 2019, about 70 demonstrators blocked access to the cafeteria outside the Palo Alto office. “Immigrants are welcome here, time to cancel Palantir,” they shouted.
The same year, over 200 Palantir employees, in a letter to Mr. Karp, outlined their concerns about the software that had helped ICE. And there was a campaign inside Palantir — in vain — to get him to donate the proceeds of a $49 million ICE contract to charity.
I asked Mr. Karp if Mr. Thiel’s public embrace of Mr. Trump the first time around had made life easier — in terms of getting government contracts — or harder.
“I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “There’s a lot of reasons I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It was actually the opposite. Because Peter had supported Mr. Trump, it was actually harder to get things done.”
Did they talk about it?
“Peter and I talk about everything,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s like, yes, I definitely informed Peter, ‘This is not making our life easier.’”
Mr. Thiel did not give money to Mr. Trump or speak at his convention this time around, although he supports JD Vance, his former protégé at his venture capital firm. He said he might get more involved now because of Mr. Vance.
Palantir got its start in intelligence and defense — it now works with the Space Force — and has since sprouted across the government through an array of contracts. It helps the I.R.S. to identify tax fraud and the Food and Drug Administration to prevent supply chain disruptions and to get drugs to market quicker.
It has assisted Ukraine and Israel in sifting through seas of data to gather relevant intelligence in their wars — on how to protect special forces by mapping capabilities, how to safely transport troops and how to target drones and missiles more accurately.
In 2022, Mr. Karp took a secret trip to war-ravaged Kyiv, becoming the first major Western C.E.O. to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and offering to supply his country with the technology that would allow it to be David to Russia’s Goliath. Time magazine ran a cover on Ukraine as a lab for A.I. warfare, and Palantir operatives embedded with the troops.
A Ukrainian government handout image of Mr. Karp meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in 2022.Credit…Office of the President of Ukraine
While Palantir’s role in helping Ukraine was heralded, its work with Israel, where targeting is more treacherous, because the enemy is parasitically entangled with civilians, is far more controversial.
“I think there’s a huge dichotomy between how the elite sees Ukraine and Israel,” Mr. Karp said. “If you go into any elite circle, pushing back against Russia is obvious, and Israel is complicated. If you go outside elite circles, it’s exactly the opposite.”
Independent analysts have said that Israel, during an April operation, could not have shot down scores of Iranian missiles and drones in mere minutes without Palantir’s tech. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched-earth campaign in Gaza, the starving and orphaned children and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians have drawn outrage, including some aimed at Mr. Karp and Mr. Thiel.
In May, protesters trapped Mr. Thiel inside a student building at the University of Cambridge. In recent days, senior U.S. officials have expressed doubts about Israel’s conduct of the war.
Mr. Karp’s position on backing Israel is adamantine. The company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times last year stating that “Palantir stands with Israel.”
“It’s like we have a double standard on Israel,” he told me. If the Oct. 7 attack had happened in America, he said, we would turn the hiding place of our enemies “into a parking lot. There would be no more tunnels.”
As Mr. Karp told CNBC in March: “We’ve lost employees. I’m sure we’ll lose more employees. If you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it’s not a position.”
He told me, “If you believe that the West should lose and you believe that the only way to defend yourself is always with words and not with actions, you should be skeptical of us.”
He added: “I always think it’s hard because where the critics are right is what we do is morally complex. If you’re supporting the West with products that are used at war, you can’t pretend that there’s a simple answer.”
Does he have any qualms about what his company does?
“I’d have many more qualms if I thought our adversaries were committed to anything like the rule of law,” he said, adding: “A lot of this does come down to, do you think America is a beacon of good or not? I think a lot of the critics, what they actually believe is America is not a force for good.” His feeling is this: “Without being Pollyannaish, idiotic or pretending like any country’s been perfect or there’s not injustice, at the margin, would you want a world where America is stronger, healthy and more powerful, or not?”
In 2019, demonstrators protested the role of Palantir Technologies in aiding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Credit…Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Asked about the impending TikTok ban, he said he’s “very in favor.”
“I do not think you should allow an adversary to control an algorithm that is specifically designed to make us slower, more divided and arguably less cognitively fit,” he said.
He considered the anti-Israel demonstrations such “an infection inside society,” reflecting “a pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination and intolerance, and violence,” that he offered 180 jobs to students who were fearful of staying in college because of a spike in antisemitism on campuses.
“Palantir is a much better diploma,” he told me. “Honestly, it’s helping us, because there are very talented people at the Ivy League, and they’re like, ‘Get me out of here!’”
Mr. Karp sometimes gets emotional in his defense of Palantir. In June, when he received an award named in honor of Dwight Eisenhower at a D.C. gala for national security executives, he teared up. He said that when he lived in Germany, he often thought about the young men from Iowa and Kansas who risked their lives “to free people like me” during World War II. He said he was honored to receive an award named after the president who had integrated schools by force.
Claiming that his products “changed the course of history by stopping terror attacks,” Mr. Karp said that Palantir had also “protected our men and women on the battlefield” and “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of.”
He told the gala audience about being “yelled at” by people who “call themselves progressives.”
“I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
He added that “we in the corporate world” have “to grow a spine” on issues like the Ivy League protesters: “If we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert basic norms and the basic, obvious idea that America is a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we are blessed to be part of, we will have a much, much worse world for all of us.”
How It Started
Mr. Karp practicing tai chi at his home in New Hampshire.Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
The wild origin story of Palantir plays like a spy satire.
After graduating from Haverford College, Mr. Karp went to Stanford Law School, which he called “the worst three years of my adult life.”
He wasn’t interested in his classmates’ obsession with landing prestigious jobs at top law firms. “I learned at law school that I cannot do something I do not believe in,” he said, “even if it’s just turning a wrench.”
He met Mr. Thiel, a fellow student, and they immediately hit it off, trash-talking law school and, over beers, debating socialism vs. capitalism. “We argued like feral animals,” Mr. Karp told Michael Steinberger in a New York Times Magazine piece.
The liberal Heidegger fan and the conservative René Girard fan made strange bedfellows, but that’s probably what drew them together.
“I think we bonded on this intellectual level where he was this crazy leftist and I was this crazy right-wing person,” Mr. Thiel told me, “but we somehow talked to each other.”
“Alex did the Ph.D. thing,“ he continued, “which was, in some ways, a very, very insane thing to do after law school, but I was positive on it, because it sounded more interesting than working at a law firm.”
Mr. Karp received his doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. He reconnected with Mr. Thiel in 2002, while working at the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership in San Francisco. The two began doing “vague brainstorming,” as Mr. Thiel put it, about a business they could start.
Mr. Thiel thought he could figure out how to find terrorists by using some of the paradigms developed at PayPal, which he helped found, to uncover patterns of fraud.
“I was just always super annoyed when, every time you go to the airport, you had to take off a shoe or you had to go through all this security theater, which was both somewhat taxing but probably had very little to do with actual security,” Mr. Thiel said.
They brought in some software engineers.
“It was two and a half years after 9/11, and you’re starting a software company with people who know nothing about the C.I.A. or any of these organizations,” Mr. Thiel recalled.
It was all very cloak-and-dagger, in an Inspector Clouseau way. They decided to seek out John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was dubbed the godfather of modern surveillance; Admiral Poindexter had been forced to resign as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. After 9/11, he worked at the Pentagon on a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness.
During the meeting, Mr. Thiel said he felt he was in the presence of a medal-festooned, Machiavelli-loving member of the military brass out of “Dr. Strangelove,” with “a LARPing vibe.”
“We had a hunch that there was a room marked ‘Super-Duper Computer,’ and if you went inside, it was just an empty room,” Mr. Thiel said. They feared their budding algorithm “would end up in a broom closet in the Pentagon,” so they moved on.
In 2005, Mr. Thiel asked Mr. Karp to be the frontman of a company with few employees, no contracts, no investors, no office and no functional tech. “It charitably could have been described as a work in progress,” Mr. Thiel said.
Palantir’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Mr. Karp and his motley crew got a bunch of desks and explained to clients that they were unmanned because the (fictional) engineers were coming in later.
“God knows why Peter picked me as co-founder,” said Mr. Karp, who had to learn about coding on the job. “It was, in all modesty, a very good choice.”
Mr. Thiel explained: “In some ways, Alex doesn’t look like a salesperson from central casting you would send to the C.I.A. The formulation I always have is that if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, the basic paradox is you have to be just like them, so they can trust you — but you have to be very different from them so that they think you have something they don’t have.”
He said that Mr. Karp would not be suited to running Airbnb or Uber “or some mass consumer product.” But Palantir, he said, “is connected with this great set of geopolitical questions about the Western world versus the rising authoritarian powers. So if we can get our governments to function somewhat better, it’s a way to rebalance things in the direction of the West.”
“Normally,” Mr. Thiel continued, “these are bad ideas to have as a company. They’re too abstract, too idealistic. But I think something like this was necessary in the Palantir case. If you didn’t get some energy from thinking about these things, man, we would’ve sold the company after three years.”
Mr. Karp could not have been more of an outsider, to Silicon Valley and to Washington. He and his engineers had to buy suits for their visits to the capital. “We had no believers,” he said. “I kept telling Palantirians to call me Alex, and they kept calling me Dr. Karp. Then I realized the only thing they could believe in was that I had a Ph.D.”
The first few years, when tech investors were more interested in programs that let you play games on your phone, were rough. “We were like pariahs,” Mr. Karp said. “We couldn’t get meetings. If they did, it was a favor to Peter.”
With administrators in Washington, Mr. Karp recalled: “It was like, What is this Frankenstein monster doing in my office, making these wild claims that he can do better on things I have a huge budget for? How can it be that a freak-show motley crew of 12-year-old-looking mostly dudes, led by a pretty unique figure, from their perspective, would be able to do something with 1 percent of the money that we can’t do with billions and billions of dollars?”
“There’s nothing that we did at Palantir in building our software company that’s in any M.B.A.-made playbook,” Mr. Karp said. “Not one. That’s why we have been doing so well.”
He said that “the single most valuable education I had for business was sitting at the Sigmund Freud Institute, because I spent all my time with analysts.” When he worked at the institute in Frankfurt while getting his doctorate, Mr. Karp said, he would smoke cigars and think about “the conscious subconscious.”
“You’d be surprised how much analysts talk about their patients,” he said. “It’s disconcerting, actually. You just learn so much about how humans actually think.” This knowledge helps him motivate his engineers, he said.
How It’s Going
Mr. Karp said he likes to think of Palantir’s workers as part of an artists’ colony or a family; he doesn’t use the word “staff.” He enjoys interviewing prospective employees personally and prides himself on making hires in under two minutes. (He likes to have a few people around who can talk philosophy and literature with him, in German and French.)
“A lot of my populist-left politics actually bleed into my hiring stuff,” he said. “If you ask the question that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has answered a thousand times, all you’re learning is that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has learned to play the game.”
Even if he gets a good answer from a “privileged” candidate and a bad answer from “the child of a mechanic,” he might prefer the latter if “I have that feeling like I’m in the presence of talent.”
He views Palantirians like the Goonies, underdogs winning in the end. “Most people at Palantir didn’t get to do a lot of winning in high school,” Mr. Karp said at a company gathering in Palo Alto, to laughter from the audience.
He thinks the United States is “very likely” to end up in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. So, he argues, we have to keep going full-tilt on autonomous weapons systems, because our adversaries will — and they don’t have the same moral considerations that we do.
“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he said. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”
“In fact,” he added, “given that we have parity technologically but we don’t have parity morally, they have a huge advantage.”
Mr. Karp, who said he supports Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, described his politics as “populist-left.”Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
Mr. Karp said that we are “very close” to terminator robots and at the threshold of “somewhat autonomous drones and devices like this being the most important instruments of war. You already see this in Ukraine.”
Palantir has learned from some early setbacks.
In 2011, the hacker group Anonymous showed that Palantir employees were involved in a proposed misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and smear some of its supporters, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. (Mr. Karp apologized to Mr. Greenwald.) Then, at least one Palantir employee helped Cambridge Analytica collect the Facebook data that the Trump campaign used ahead of the 2016 election.
A pro bono contract with the New Orleans Police Department starting in 2012 was dropped after six years amid criticism that its “predictive policing” eroded privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color.
“We reduced the rates of Black-on-Black death in New Orleans,” Mr. Karp said, “and we have these critics who are like, ‘Palantir is racist.’ I don’t know. The hundreds of people that are alive now don’t think we’re racist.”
Mr. Carville, a New Orleans pooh-bah, asserted that the partnership ended because of “left-wing conspiracy theories.”
Palantir’s rough start in Silicon Valley came about, in part, because many objected to its work with the Department of Defense.
In 2017, Google won a Pentagon contract, Project Maven, to help the military use the company’s A.I. to analyze footage from drones. Employees protested, sending a letter to the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai: “Google should not be in the business of war,” it read. Soon after, Google backed away from the project.
In response, Palantir shaded Google in a tweet that quoted Mr. Karp: “Silicon Valley is telling the average American ‘I will not support your defense needs’ while selling products that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position.” Palantir picked up the contract in 2019.
That same year, Mr. Thiel said that Google had a “treasonous” relationship with China. When Google opened an A.I. lab in 2017 in China, where there’s little distinction between the civilian and the military, he argued, it was de facto helping China while refusing to help America. (That lab closed in 2019, but Google still does business with China, as does Apple.)
“When you have people working at consumer internet companies protesting us because we help the Navy SEALs and the U.S. military and were pro-border — and you’re becoming incredibly, mind-bogglingly rich, in part because America protects your right to export — to me, you’ve lost the sheet of music,” Mr. Karp said. “I don’t think that’s good for America.”
Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University and an authority on tech companies, agrees that many Silicon Valley C.E.O.s have been virtue-signaling and pretending to care about the progressive political views of employees, but really would sell “their mother for a nickel.”
“They’re not there to save the whales,” Mr. Galloway said. “They’re there to make money.”
He added: “Some of these big tech companies seem to be engaged in raising a generation of business leaders that just don’t like America, who are very focused on everything that’s wrong with America.
“Alex Karp is like, ‘No, we’ll cash the Pentagon’s check and we’ll collect data on our enemies.’ He’s gone the entirely opposite way, and I think it was a smart move.”
Palantir’s “spooky connotations,” as one executive put it, dissipated quite a bit when the company went public in 2020 and took on more commercial business; its clients include Airbus, J.P. Morgan, IBM and Amazon.
Mr. Thiel said that while Palantir had a brief stint working on a pilot program for the National Security Agency, the company would not want to do any more work there: “The N.S.A., it hoovers up all the data in the world. As far as I can tell, there are incredible civil liberties violations where they’re spying on everybody outside the U.S., basically. Then they’re fortunately too incompetent to do much with the data.”
The company has started turning a profit, and the stock has climbed. After a triumphant earnings report this month, Palantir’s stock price jumped again.
“The share price gives us more street cred,” Mr. Karp said.
In 2020, after 17 years in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp moved Palantir’s headquarters to Denver. “I was fleeing Silicon Valley because of what I viewed as the regressive side of progressive politics,” he said.
He thinks that the valley has intensified class divisions in America.
“I don’t believe you would have a Trump phenomenon without the excesses of Silicon Valley,” he said. “Very, very wealthy people who support policies where they don’t have to absorb the cost at all. Just also the general feeling that these people are not tethered to our society, and simultaneously are becoming billionaires.“
“Not supporting the U.S. military,” he said, in a tone of wonder. “I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multibillionaire and you won’t supply your product to the D.O.D. It’s jarringly corrosive. That’s before you get to all the corrosive, divisive things that are on these platforms.”
Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect, agreed on their Silicon Valley critics: “You live in the liberal democratic West because of reasons, and those reasons don’t come for free. They act like it doesn’t have to be fought for or defended rigorously.”
Mr. Karp’s workout room.Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesA few of his favorite things.Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
Mr. Karp said things had evolved. “I think there’s a different perception of us now a little bit. A lot of that was tied to Trump, ICE work. It built up and we were definitely outsiders. We’re still outsiders, but I feel less resistance for sure. And people have a better idea of what we do, maybe.” He added, “Defense tech is a big part of Silicon Valley now.”
The A.I. revolution, he said, will come with a knotty question: “How do you make sure the society’s fair when the means of production have become means that only 1 percent of the population actually knows how to navigate?”
I asked if he agrees with Elon Musk that A.I. is eventually going to take everyone’s jobs.
“I think what’s actually dangerous,” Mr. Karp replied, “is that people who understand how to use this are going to capture a lot of the value of the market and everyone else is going to feel left behind.”
Mr. Karp’s iconoclastic style and ironclad beliefs have inspired memes and attracted a flock of online acolytes — some call him Papa Karp or Daddy Karp. He has no social media presence, but his online fans treat him like a mystic, obsessing over the tight white T-shirts he wears for earnings reports, his Norwegian ski outfits, his corkscrew hair, his Italian jeans and sunglasses and his extreme candor. (In a recent earnings report, Mr. Karp dismissed his rivals as “self-pleasuring” and engaging in “self-flagellation.”)
He is not, as one colleague puts it, “a wife, kids and dog person.”
“I tend to have long-term relationships,” he told me. “And I tend to end up with very high IQ women,” including some who tell him he’s talking nonsense.
He prefers what he calls a German attitude toward relationships, where “you have a much greater degree of privacy,” he said, with separate bedrooms and “your own world, your own thoughts, and you get to be alone a lot.” There is much less requirement to “micro-lie” about where you were or whom you were with.
I asked Mr. Karp about his 2013 quote to Forbes that “the only time I’m not thinking about Palantir is when I’m swimming, practicing qigong or during sexual activity.”
He frowned, noting: “It should be tai chi. I don’t know why people always conflate tai chi with qigong. Yes, that was in my early days, when we were a pre-public company and I was allowed to admit I had sexual activity.”
So it’s true that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives him hives?
“There’s some truth in that,” he said. “This is how I like to live. See, I’m sitting here doing my freedom thing. I train. I do distance shooting.” He reads. “Who else has a Len Deighton spy novel next to a book on Confucian philosophy?”
Many of the doyennes of Washington society would love to snag the eligible Mr. Karp for a dinner party. He told me he has “a great social life.” But when I asked him what that is, he replied, “First of all, I’m a cross-country skier, so then I do all this training.”
He continued, “To have an elite VO2 max, an elite level of strength, it’s just consistency and the Norwegian-style training method.”
Some who know Mr. Karp said that the happiest they had ever seen him was last year when Mike Allen reported for Axios that the C.E.O.’s body fat was an impressive 7 percent.
Mr. Karp may be able to do more than 20 miles of cross-country skiing without being out of breath, but there are some sports at which, he admitted, he’s “a complete zero. For example, ball sports. I really suck at them.”
Unlike Mr. Musk and other tech lords, Mr. Karp is not into micro-dosing ketamine or any other drug. “My drug is athletics,” he said. “I love drinking, but now I’ve moved to drinking very little because what I’ve noticed is if you’re traveling all the time, the alcohol, it really affects your brain.” He’s on the road about 240 days a year.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Karp at the forum on A.I. in Washington last year.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mr. Karp said of his dyslexia: “I think this is not getting less, it’s likely getting more. In 40 years, I’ll be unable to read.”
In New Hampshire, we had a lunch of lobster pasta — he kept his panic button on the table — and then went shooting on his property. He expertly hit targets with a 9-millimeter pistol from 264 yards. When an aide suggested that a photographer not shoot Mr. Karp in the act of shooting, he overruled the idea.
“Actually, honestly, guns would be much better regulated if you had someone who knows guns,” he said. “I’m not a hunter. I’m an artist with a gun.”
(Later, Mr. Karp pointed out that he had been shooting at targets that were about twice as far from him as Mr. Trump was from his would-be assassin. “There’s something really wrong with security for our future president, or maybe not future president,” he said. “All these people need a different level of security.”)
Mr. Karp believes the Democrats need to project more strength: “Are we tough enough to scare our adversaries so we don’t go to war? Do the Chinese, Russians and Persians think we’re strong? The president needs to tell them if you cross these lines, this is what we’re going to do, and you have to then enforce it.”
He thinks that in America and in Europe, the inability or unwillingness to secure borders fuels authoritarianism.
“I see it as pretty simple: You have an open border, you get the far right,” he said. “And once you get them, you can’t get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit, we see it with Le Pen in France, you see it across Europe. Now you see it in Germany.”
“They should be much stricter,” he continued. That, he said, “is the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason. When people tell you we need an open border, then they should also tell you why they’re electing right-wing politicians, because they are.”
“The biggest mistake — and it’s not one politician, it’s a generation — was believing there was something bigoted about having a border, and there are just a lot of people who believe that,” he said.
Weeks later, we were back in the Washington office, which is dubbed Rivendell, after a valley in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and is filled with tech goodies like a Ping-Pong table, a pool table and a towering replica of Chewbacca.
We picked up our conversation about politics, talking about the swap of President Biden and Vice President Harris, the rise of JD Vance, the assassination attempt and the changed political landscape.
Mr. Karp concurred with his friend Mr. Carville on the problem of drawing men to the Democratic Party, saying, “If this is going to be a party complaining about guys and to guys all the time, it’s not going to succeed.”
At the shooting range on his property in New Hampshire. “I’m an artist with a gun,” Mr. Karp said.Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
He continued: “The biggest problem with hard political correctness is it makes it impossible to deal with unfortunate facts. The unfortunate fact here is that this election is really going to turn on ‘What percentage of males can the Democrats still get?’”
Describing himself as “progressive but not woke,” he said, “We are so unwilling to talk to the actual constituents that are voting for the Democratic Party who would probably strongly prefer policies that are more moderate.”
Given Mr. Karp’s blended racial identity, I wondered how he felt about Mr. Trump’s attack on the vice president’s heritage.
“I think people are most fascinated by the fact of this whole Black-Jewish thing,” he said. “I tend to be less fascinated by that.”
He added: “I think that people always expect me somehow to see the world in one way or another, and I don’t really understand what that means. I see the world the way I see it. I think, at the end of the day, if people want to choose what their identity is, then they choose it, and that’s their definition.”
I note that he recently made an elite list of Black billionaires.
He shrugged. “Some Black people think I’m Black, some don’t,” he said. “I view me as me. And I’m very honored to be honored by all groups that will have me.”
He added: “I do not believe racism is the most important issue in this country. I think class is determinate, and I’m mystified by how often we talk about race. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m not saying people don’t have biases. Of course, we all do, but the primary thing that’s bad for you in this culture is to be born poor of any color.”
He said he would support class-based affirmative action and declared himself “pro draft.”
“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” he said.
Since I had last seen him, Mr. Karp had gotten caught between two of the battling billionaires of Silicon Valley, lords of the cloud vituperously fighting in public over the possible restoration of Donald Trump.
According to an account in Puck, Mr. Karp was onstage with the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at a conference last month in Sun Valley, Idaho, sponsored by the investment bank Allen & Company, when Mr. Hoffman called Mr. Thiel’s support for Mr. Trump “a moral issue.” Speaking up from his seat in the audience, Mr. Thiel sarcastically thanked Mr. Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Mr. Trump, which allowed the candidate to claim that he is “a martyr.”
Mr. Hoffman snapped back, “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr” — an unfortunate comment given what would later happen in Butler, Pa.
I asked Mr. Karp whether the encounter was as uncomfortable as it seemed.
“Well, I’m used to being uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m going to stick with my friends. I just feel the same way I always feel when Peter is under attack, which is: ‘This is my friend. I feel that my friend is being attacked, and I will defend him.’”
The fancy digital clock behind Mr. Karp’s desk, which tells time in German, had gone from “Es ist zehn nach drei” to “Es ist halb vier.”
It was time to go.
Mr. Karp said that while working at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, he learned things that were helpful to him later as a business leader.Credit…Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
Confirm or Deny
Maureen Dowd: You run the Twitter account Alex Karp’s Hair.
Alex Karp: I wish.
Your favorite movie is the classic kung fu flick “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.”
One of my favorite movies.
You have 10 houses around the world, from Alaska to Vermont, from Norway to New Hampshire.
You have to reframe that as I have 10 cross-country ski huts.
You love the idea of Peter Thiel backing Olympic-style games where the athletes will dope out in the open.
Deny. I want the best cross-country skiers to win without doping.
You love to watch spy shows and German movies, and one of your favorite filmmakers is Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Confirm.
You have 20 identical pairs of swim goggles in your office.
No longer. I used to. I gave up swimming. There’s an emptiness to it.
You commissioned a French comic book, “Palantir: L’Indépendance,” with yourself as the protagonist.
Oui!
You starred in a movie by Hanna Laura Klar in 1998, “I Have Two Faces,” where you looked like a young Woody Allen.
I look better than Woody Allen.
Your dissertation is about how people transmit aggression subconsciously in language, presaging the rise of the right in America and Europe.
Often, the more charismatic ideologies were, the more irrational they were.
The dissertation touched on expressing taboo wishes. Do you want to share some of those?
I would love to express taboo wishes with you, but not to your audience.
In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.
We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.
It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.
With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.
Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.
This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
In three words: deep learning worked.
In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.
There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.
AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.
Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.
If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.
We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.
I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.
Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.
As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.
Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.
Apple is launching its first stand-alone password manager app in iOS 18. Here’s what you need to know.
Apple’s latest iPhone software update, iOS 18, arrives today and includes a new app: Passwords. For the first time, Apple is taking your phone’s ability to save login details and putting them in a standalone app. It could help improve millions of people’s terrible passwords.
After years of being told you should create unique, strong passwords for every website and app you use, you probably fall into one of two camps: people that are fully signed up to the password manager life, or those still using “123456” for every other website.
Apple’s new encrypted Passwords app is automatically included with iOS 18, and is a public-facing evolution of its Keychain and password-saving capabilities. The Keychain, which has existed for more than a decade, no longer has as prominent a home in the iPhone’s settings, and details previously saved there are being moved to the new app.
The launch of the password manager app, which will also be available on macOS Sequoia and iPadOS 18, may help improve people’s relationships with their passwords but also could, to varying degrees, challenge existing password managers.
“This move makes the app more visible to lay users and informs them about this secure method to store and manage passwords,” says Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk from security company Mysk. “You have a default password manager preinstalled on your device [that] provides end-to-end encryption when syncing data across devices.”
New Passwords
The Passwords app has a pretty barebones design. Six different tiles are presented when you open the app on an iPhone: All, Passkeys, Codes, Wi-Fi, Security, and Deleted. These are essentially the main functions of the app, allowing you to save each type of data within their relevant sections. The security section includes check-ups allowing weak and exposed passwords to be identified.
“This will definitely boost the adoption of this preinstalled app and bolster user security,” Bakry and Mysk say. They add that it presents the saved data “in a more organized way than the Settings app.”
Apple says the Passwords app uses end-to-end encryption to save your details, meaning nobody, not even Apple, knows what you have saved. Within the app, you can search for login details to your entries and set up groups to share passwords with other people.
Your saved login details are synced across Apple devices using iCloud, meaning the encrypted data is shared with Apple’s cloud servers and available on all of your Apple devices. Within Apple’s settings, you can turn off syncing passwords on a specific device. The app is locked using Face ID.
When using the Passwords app, any details you have previously saved in Keychain or AutoFill will be moved to the new location. This includes if you have used the Sign in with Apple login system on any websites or apps. It is unclear why Apple has decided to spin its Keychain system into a fully fledged password manager now, although the company has been building out the individual features over a number of years. (Apple has not responded to WIRED’s request for comment at the time of writing.)For many people, having a standalone password manager app from Apple could encourage better password practices. Siamak Shahandashti, a senior lecturer in the University of York’s cybersecurity and privacy research group, says the move from Apple may be a usability decision. Making Passwords visible could encourage people to take their passwords seriously.
“We need to design authentication systems for human beings,” Shahandashti says. “We cannot expect users to maintain a hundred accounts, for each of them [to] use a strong password. It’s actually the fault of the designers because these systems have not been designed for users considering the capability of an average human being.”
Death of the Password
Passwords are slowly dying. Enter the passkey. For the past couple of years, websites, apps, and phone manufacturers have been in the process of rolling out passkeys—a technology that replaces passwords, is more secure, and doesn’t require you to remember any complex login details. (Although passkeys still have some teething problems.)
Leona Lassak, a research assistant at Ruhr-University Bochum who has studied passkey adoption, says greater “visibility” of the Passwords app can help get the sign-in technology to a broader audience, one which might not use a password manager otherwise. Apple’s Passwords app could help with the perception and transition to passkeys, Lassak says. “There has been discussion about the need for passkey managers, because once we actually use them on websites, there’s probably going to be multiple for each website,” she says.
The app is also, at least subtly, encouraging the adoption of passkeys. Within Passwords’ settings, accessed through Apple’s System preferences, there’s the option to turn on “automatic” passkey upgrades, which will allow existing accounts to use passkeys when they are available.
Lock In
Password managers have existed for years and there are plenty of options you can use, from open source apps to browser-based management systems. Each comes with their own particular set of pros and cons.
Apple wading into the password management market by including a new app on millions of iPhones, Macs, and iPads could also impact the wider ecosystem. “There’s no question that Apple’s Passwords app would ‘sherlock’ third-party password managers—or make them less attractive,” say Bakry and Mysk, highlighting that people need to use iCloud to sync passwords in Apple’s system, and that those who are privacy conscious may not want this to happen automatically.
There’s also the risk of locking people into Apple’s password manager—at launch, there appear to be no options to export the saved data and use it in a commercial alternative. One competitor password manager has stressed that their software works on products “beyond” the “Apple ecosystem.” (People using Apple’s password management software on Windows devices can access saved details through iCloud for Windows.)
Ultimately, what password manager you use should reflect what type of software you want to support and the individual threats you may face. For many, Apple’s new app is probably better than not using a password manager at all.
TheIdea – The Innovation Agency 