Palantir's Shyam Sankar says ‘every day we’re making progress’ as AI supercharges American workers

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said he’s seen significant progress since his Fox News op-ed imploring America to take advantage of both AI and the American worker, while sharing some observations on China’s use of AI.

"China treats AI as industrial policy," Sankar wrote on X in July. "Our labs treat it as theology, a race to birth a machine god. Beijing's play: commoditize the complement. All that frontier lab market cap gets transmuted into demand signal to scale the stack below the models: power, chips, minerals, etc. Americans can and must win the full stack."

Yet, Sankar acknowledged that even if America's not thinking about how to scale AI in all these other industries like China, it will happen naturally in the U.S. as the technology develops.

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"The only threat to AI generating prosperity for America is suicide and homicide," Sankar told Fox News Digital at Palantir's American Builder Summit in July. "I'm not really worried about what is China going to do per se. I'm more worried about bans on data centers and kind of unfettered and unwarranted fears curtailing our ability to actually generate wage growth for the American worker."

"And so, I think really having a strong narrative that is told not by any companies, but actually by the people themselves is important for us to get excited and motivated and get lined up behind that opportunity," he added.

In February, Sankar wrote an op-ed for Fox News Digital noting that in order to catch up to China, the U.S. would have to harness the tools at its disposal: the American worker and AI.

"AI development and deployment should prioritize American workers and American industry," he wrote. "The goal is not efficiency in the abstract — it is American prosperity in the concrete."

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"China's manufacturing productivity grows at 6% per year. Ours grows at 0.4%. If we don't invest in AI and automation, we'll lose. The American worker with AI superpowers erodes China's competitive advantage."

Sankar believes the U.S. has made significant progress since the piece's publication.

"Yeah, I think every day we're making progress," Sankar told Fox News Digital. "I always love the — I have a very small submarine parts manufacturer, and it used to take them two weeks to do their production plan. During that period of time, the line was down, they weren't making any parts. So with AI, they've been able to take that down to less than an hour. 

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"So now they actually have more parts to make than they had people. They only had two shifts before, they hired a third shift," he continued. "There is no one on that shift who thinks, 'Hey, I got my job because of AI, but that's actually what happened. In a fundamentally supply-constrained economy, which we are, if you can get rid of the deadweight loss, you can unleash productivity. And I think every company is kind of leaning into and taking advantage of that."

Palantir's American Builders Summit in late July celebrated the efforts of their American Tech Fellowship grads. The alumni shared their stories and showed how they’re using AI to amplify their trade craft and advance their professions.