Could artificial intelligence be the key to reshoring American manufacturing?
That’s what Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, believes. His new book, “Mobilize,” asserts that America can prevent World War III by rebuilding its industrial base with AI-powered workers who can outcompete China’s automated factories.
“If you can make the American worker 50 times more productive than any other worker, you can change the math equation and underwrite the business case to re-industrializing at scale,” Sankar told me.
“Mobilize” is a remarkably optimistic book that counters the narrative that AI is going to destroy all our jobs (and maybe humanity as a whole). Instead, it argues AI will bring production back to the US, restoring our manufacturing capabilities and that sector’s jobs, while making our nation more secure.
“AI is leading to more jobs — and I’m not talking about ephemeral jobs building data centers,” Sankar said, rebutting the prevailing doom-and-gloom narrative around artificial intelligence. “I’m talking about persistent jobs … on the factory floor.”
Sankar applauds what he calls the “heretics” who built our country — innovators like Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whom higher-ups initially dismissed, placing his office in a converted bathroom until he proved himself. He’s a big believer in rule-breakers who eschew bureaucracy, and that’s exactly why he thinks America will win.
The 44-year-old is uniquely positioned to make this argument. He’s one of a handful of voices in Silicon Valley with both deep technical expertise when it comes to government systems — he’s spent over a decade ironing out deals with the Pentagon — and a strong sense of patriotism.
The book’s publication comes at a fortuitous moment. War is on everyone’s mind with the conflict in Iran (not to mention the recent intervention in Venezuela and Cuba possibly next). Reshoring has become bipartisan policy, with the CHIPS Act pouring $39 billion into domestic manufacturing, and AI anxiety dominates headlines.
“For a long time I feel like I’ve been screaming into the wind — I’m glad to see that there’s momentum around this,” Sankar said. “It’s a book about our national interest … we’ve survived for 250 years. How will we continue to thrive for the next 250 years?”
He believes the AI race has given America an edge to dominate what could have been a Chinese century, given the Asian superpower’s vast resources and manufacturing capabilities. It’s the kind of game-changing advantage that will help America reshore in record time — and he wants America to grab it by the horns.
He’s already seen Palantir customers adopting the technology. One submarine parts manufacturer used AI to cut planning time from two weeks to 10 minutes and hired a third shift as a result.
“That’s AI in the hands of the American worker,” Sankar enthused.
These aren’t isolated anecdotes. Defense companies like Anduril, Hadrian, and Divergent are scaling their manufacturing operations in the US, betting on AI-enhanced American workers over overseas alternatives. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz have launched funds like American Dynamism exclusively focused on American innovation.
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Palantir works extensively with both the Pentagon, building data analysis and AI systems for intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security. While critics see this as the tech industry cozying up to the military-industrial complex, Sankar wants to see more companies embrace helping the military.
In fact, he points to some of the primes — huge defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin — as part of the problem
“Consolidation bred conformity … it was more financial engineering than real engineering,” he said. “Competition, not coziness, drives progress.”
But Sankar’s larger point is that production and innovation are inseparable — cede one, and you’ll eventually lose the other.
“The central lie of globalization is, ‘Hey, we’ll do the innovation over there, they’ll do the production,’” he explained. “Well, guess what? If you do the production for long enough, that’s all the stimulus you need to figure out how to innovate … We cannot cede production.”
A key component of Sankar’s plan is returning to the World War II model: companies that can pivot from manufacturing consumer goods to weapons when needed. When General Motors and Ford famously retooled for war production, they succeeded because they already had mass manufacturing capabilities in place, so they could rapidly switch what they were building.
That adaptability, not simply stockpiles of weapons, is what actually deters conflicts, Sankar argues.
“The lesson of Ukraine that I just can’t unsee is that the stockpile is not the deterrent. That has been our core strategy since the end of the Cold War,” he said. “[In Ukraine], we went through 10 years of production in 10 weeks of fighting. That should have been a five-alarm fire where we fired up the forges, started rebuilding the arsenal of freedom.”
His vision demands a complete reimagining of American manufacturing capacity. “I want more than 10 times more of the equipment that we have,” he said. “That’s going to force you to reimagine all your constraints.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher, and it’s not just about the defense sector.
“Eighty percent of our generic drugs come from China,” Sankar noted. “In a [potential war] with China, where the average American has to choose between their 5-year-old dying of an ear infection because we no longer have generic antibiotics … and having the national will to fight, what do you think is going to happen?”
It’s this dependency crisis that drives Sankar’s sense of urgency. America faces a stark choice, he said: “We can fade away to irrelevance and subjugation, or we can actually mobilize.”
