Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar gave a wide-ranging interview to CBS News' Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, aired on October 11, 2026. The conversation covered AI targeting in the Iran school strike, the Department of Defense dropping Anthropic, AI liability, effective altruism and more.
The Q&A matters because Palantir sits at the center of the debate over military AI, while Washington is still deciding how much to restrict the technology. Sankar pushed back hard on the idea that AI safety concerns should slow adoption.
Palantir CTO on AI targeting and the Iran school strike
Brennan opened by citing CBS polling showing 50% of respondents believe AI will create more problems than it solves, 29% say it will solve more, and 21% are unsure. She also noted that 45% of Americans want the government to restrict AI development.
Sankar said his position is not that there should be no guardrails. He argued the technology industry must prove AI delivers real benefits such as job growth and prosperity, not trivial conveniences. He also addressed the Iran school strike and AI targeting directly, framing the debate around how the technology is used rather than whether it should exist.
DOD dropping Anthropic: what Sankar said
The interview also touched on the Department of Defense dropping Anthropic, a decision that has fueled questions about which AI vendors the Pentagon will trust. Sankar did not dodge the topic, tying it to his broader argument that the industry must absorb the burden of engineering safe products instead of hand-waving around it.
He stressed that companies cannot abdicate responsibility for designing safe systems. The message: liability and safety are engineering problems, not philosophical ones, and vendors that cannot meet that bar will lose government contracts.
