Palantir and 8VC co-founder Joe Lonsdale at his home in Woodside, California.Christie Hemm Klok/The Washington Post/Getty
Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America’s AI-assisted warfare at a Reuters-hosted event late last week—and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he acknowledged—but, he argued, “It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”
“It could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and then one bad choice and it led to a horrible thing,” Lonsdale told Reuters Global Defense Editor Joe Brock on Friday, in a talk aimed at investors. He also argued that Iran might have deliberately lured the US military into the AI-assisted targeting of two Tomahawk missiles at an elementary school on the first day of the the Trump administration’s war in Iran. The attack killed more than 150 people, most of whom were children. Pentagon officials later told Bloomberg News that overreliance on Palantir technology contributed to the school strike.
Lonsdale’s narrative was different. Iran’s leaders “might have purposely disguised some of these things to make them look like targets, the same way the Palestinians and others do,” Lonsdale said.
“They’re getting global sympathy by getting us to hit things,” Lonsdale went on. “And so, it’s very unclear to me the facts of exactly what happened. Obviously, it’s terrible what happened to those children.” Last week, a UN committee report suggested that the US attack on the school could be classified as a war crime.
“It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”
At one point, Lonsdale was asked how technology companies should be held accountable “if things go wrong.”
“Maybe there should be some laws about companies that operate here and, like, what you’re allowed to do with them,” Lonsdale said.
But the billionaire colleague of Peter Thiel has some obvious financial reasons not to push harder to regulate or hold accountable defense and technology companies. He is managing partner of the venture capital firm 8VC, which has $6 billion invested in high-tech defense companies, Forbes reported. He’s also increasingly involved in lobbying on industry issues. His conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute, and its lobbying arm Cicero Action—best-known for being a major force behind the Trump administration’s push to criminalize homelessness—are also connected to hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense-lobby spending.
That lobbying, as Sludge reported, touches on companies in Lonsdale’s 8VC portfolio—and could be paying big dividends. “Palantir is seeing a surge in federal revenue under the Trump administration,” Sludge said in August, including an Army contract worth up to $10 billion. Anduril, a Thiel-funded company also backed by Lonsdale, “is similarly on the rise, including an Army deal awarded in March with a ceiling of $20 billion.”
Lobbying and war-profiteering aside, Lonsdale wrote on his blog in 2025 that it is apparently possible to be a “perfectly moral” person in the weapons business.
Society, he wrote, suffers from a “default assumption of evil by people who make weapons.” But, he argued, “If we didn’t have talented people willing to do the “dirty” work of defense, we’d be speaking German. Or Russian. Or Chinese. We’d have experienced many more 9/11’s. You get the idea.”
