In a front-page article published earlier this month, Time magazine reviews Western tech corporations’ most notable contributions to Ukraine’s high-tech defense effort, and their far-reaching local and global implications.
Time reporter Vara Bergengruen cites in detail the example of Palantir, whose CEO Alex Karp went to Kyiv just three months after the Russian invasion started, and met Volodymyr Zelensky in a fortified bunker.
“Karp told Zelensky that he was ready to open an office in Kyiv and deploy Palantir’s data and artificial-intelligence software to support Ukraine’s defense. Karp believed they could team up in ways that allow David to beat a modern-day Goliath,” Time reports.
Since then, Palantir “has embedded itself in the day-to-day work” of the Ukrainian government, with “more than half a dozen” Ukrainian government bodies using the company’s products. These include an AI-driven software solution which, “by analyze satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground,” is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” Time quotes Karp as saying.
The Ukrainians also use Palantir’s data analytics for such other purposes as “collecting evidence of war crimes, clearing land mines, resettling displaced refugees, and rooting out corruption.”
Palantir says it provided its solutions to Ukraine free of charge as a way to support the country while showcasing its capabilities.
Other US tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Starlink have also supported Ukraine’s defense effort — from countering Russian cyberattacks, to migrating critical government data to the cloud, to ensuring continued connection, notes Bergengruen.
She also cites the example of Clearview AI, a controversial U.S. facial-recognition company. Its tools have been used by some “1,500 Ukrainian officials” to “identify more than 230,000 Russians on their soil as well as Ukrainian collaborators.”
The ramifications of these international collaborations in the field of defense tech should not be underestimated. For Ukraine, global tech giants’ contributions could have a an impact beyond addressing the country’s immediate military needs.
“At first, [Ukraine’s need for support] was driven by desperation. But soon, government officials realized they had a chance to develop the country’s own tech sector,” Time quotes as saying Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation. Thus Ukrainian officials “began marketing the battlefields of Ukraine as laboratories for the latest military technologies [on a mission] to make Ukraine the world’s tech R&D lab.”
Tested and deployed on Ukrainian soil, novel defense technologies could also fall into undesired hands. “The prospects for proliferation are crazy. Most companies operating in Ukraine right now say they align with U.S. national-security goals—but what happens when they don’t?” asks Rita Konaev of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
