The Memo - Special edition - Integrated AI: Palantir and our altitude - Mar/2026
A handful of human operators now wield AI agents to execute the targeting work that once required thousands of intelligence officers.
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients…
From: Dr Alan D. Thompson <LifeArchitect.ai>
Sent: 17/Mar/2026
Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English
AGI: 97%
ASI: 0/50 (no expected movement until post-AGI)Thanks for your continued support of The Memo. This special edition is for full subscribers, some of whom have been with me since the very beginning with the GPT-3 Leta AI experiments! In our regular editions, I’ve demurred from providing my full context and opinions on the whole Anthropic/Pentagon situation, but it is all laid bare here in my latest 3,000-word report, for your reading pleasure…
Integrated AI: Palantir and our altitude
Alan D. Thompson
March 2026
In early 2023, an AI military planning tool demo landed on my desk. I had to watch it twice to believe what I was seeing. Within months, it was at the top of every question list from governments and defense organizations reaching out for context. A military operator was chatting with an AI assistant, asking it to show out-of-pattern ships and generate courses of action for a surveillance scenario in the Taiwan Strait. The interface was as familiar as ChatGPT, but the ‘playground’ had become a theatre of war.
Watch the video.
Around the same time, Palantir touted the AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform), with local models like Google FLAN-T5, EleutherAI GPT-NeoX-20B, and Databricks Dolly.
By March 2026, Palantir’s platform (by now, primarily running GPT-5-era models like Anthropic Claude) had struck 6,000 targets in Iran in a few weeks. Not quite three years stand between these two eras; in that brief window, the platform’s engine shifted from basic logic to frontier intelligence with reasoning.
Bringing a decade of research into human intelligence with organizations like Mensa, I’ve now spent more than five years tracking what smarts go into the world’s largest AI models and what comes out the other side. My independent analyses of training data, model architecture, and LLM details have been used in major projects by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, referenced in policy work by the G7, the Council of Europe, and UNESCO, and used to advise national governments across the Pacific, Europe, and North America on AI strategy. I maintain the Models Table, a living document of 10,000+ data points covering every major frontier model, and my What’s in my AI? series of reports are widely cited by those who want the inside track on large language models.
In 2024, I delivered the opening keynote (covering both Palantir AIP and Scale Donovan) to one of the largest defense organizations in the United States, attended by senior military leadership including a three-star general who nodded sternly from the front row. I mention this transparency only because it provides the necessary context for the gravity of what follows.