The US military is looking for coders in its ranks: Palantir CEO Shyam Sankar reveals his role as a lieutenant colonel | Today’s news
Palantir CEO Shyam Sankar said the US military is trying to identify and employ skilled coders within its ranks, including personnel whose technical skills may not fit into its traditional career structure. Sankar, who joined the US Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2025, said he was tasked with helping the military identify, retain and deploy such talent.
In an interview with CBS News about his duties in the military, Sankar said his primary job was to work on human resource strategies within the military’s G-1 department, with a particular focus on finding soldiers with exceptional coding skills.
“My main role is to help with Army Human Resources in the G-1 department here. So the strategy, as we, you know, the military is drowning in talent, what we would call green suits, who can actually code, and they’re — they — they’re exceptional. How do we employ them? You know, they don’t fit into the kind of industrial era code model,” Napoleon told CBSrank. News.
He added, “You can have an E-4 who is an exceptionally good coder. There’s no obvious career path for them in the Army. The Army doesn’t know how to handle that talent. So how do we find out who these exceptional people are? How do we protect them? How do we engage them in projects that take full advantage of their abilities and turn them into valuable assets for the Army?”
Palantir’s CTO accuses China of exploiting the work of US AI firms
Sankar argued that China has built a new generation of AI models using the work of Silicon Valley AI developers without permission, posing a potential economic challenge to the United States.
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“These Chinese open source models are really the result of distillation attacks,” Sankar said during a July interview with Bloomberg Television on the sidelines of a defense innovation conference in Pennsylvania. “Most of it is just stolen American IP from border labs,” he said.
Sankar’s remarks reflect growing concerns among leading US artificial intelligence companies that Chinese competitors are using a technique called distillation to develop competing models.
The process involves training one AI system using the output generated by another, allowing developers to replicate similar capabilities at a significantly lower cost. This can help newer models gain the capabilities of more advanced systems without having to undergo the same level of expensive training.
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Sankar urged major US AI labs to strengthen their intellectual property protections, arguing that protecting their technology was also in their own financial interest. He said such measures are necessary to prevent competitors from unfairly benefiting from their investments in AI development.
Who is Shyam Sankar?
Shyam Sankar serves as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Executive Officer of Palantir Technologies. The son of Indian immigrants who ran a gift shop in Orlando became a billionaire and a key figure in one of the world’s most influential artificial intelligence companies.
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Born in Mumbai and raised in Orlando, Florida, Sankar’s background reflects the journey of an immigrant family that built a life in the United States. His father, who grew up in a mud hut in Tamil Nadu, was the first member of the family to pursue higher education. After spending some time in Nigeria, the family moved to the US where they ran gift shops and dry cleaning. Their dry cleaning business eventually went bankrupt.
In 2024, Sankar wrote a widely discussed paper advocating the removal of the dominance enjoyed by major military contractors. He noted that creating space for smaller, more agile and technologically advanced companies could help transform the defense industry.
He became part of the US Army Reserve’s Executive Innovation Corps, an initiative to bring private sector expertise to military and national security operations. The program seeks to make the armed forces “leaner, smarter and more lethal”.
