Palantir's Shyam Sankar: US must use AI as 'slingshot' against China or face economic defeat

Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer and executive vice president of Palantir Technologies, told Fox News Digital in a new interview that the United States is in a competition with China when it comes to artificial intelligence and keeping American workers competitive.

"You see this, there's a wire manufacturer where you have a prior enlisted Navy man, no credentialed particular education, but he's the expert at running the factory," Sankar said.

"And AI has given them the ability to lever up their productivity," Sankar added. "They have improved yields 50%. They've reduced downtime on machines 20%. They're able to produce more. And if we think about the geopolitical context that we exist within, we're in a competition with China. We want to bring these jobs back to America. Giving the American worker the ability to be 50 times more productive, that superpower is how we're going to make it profitable and economical to bring back the work to America." 

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Sankar echoed that view in a Monday op-ed on Fox News Digital, where he wrote, "The job-loss narrative is a ploy to attract investors, drive media attention and consolidate political power. The real promise of AI in the enterprise is to make the American worker 50x more productive — to unleash his taste and agency."

Sankar told Fox News Digital he is concerned about a scenario in which the U.S. fails to harness AI and loses its competitive advantage.

"I don't even want to think about it," Sankar said of the scenario. "I mean, you know, it's like, if China's productivity is growing at 6%, if America's productivity's growing at roughly half a percent, this is our slingshot. This is our asymmetric advantage, you know. It is what is not in their long-range plan."

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Sankar said that AI could be similar to a wild card, something that China wasn’t anticipating, that, if harnessed well, could keep the U.S. ahead of the communist country. 

"China has been systematically over 50 years thinking about how to undermine American prosperity," Sankar said. "You know what wasn't in that plan? AI. Now, the challenge is up to us in terms of how do we use it? How do we use the twin strengths of America, which is the American worker, and AI to re-industrialize the country, to regain the advantage and productivity, to do that by giving the American worker superpowers and making it profitable to produce everything we need here in America." 

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