It’s a chilly March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir’s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they’d assumed the previous day’s mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between open-air pavilions, it looks like they were pulled from shipwrecks. Nonetheless, spirits are high. To this self-selecting crowd, Palantir is delivering on its promises. The company’s stock price is soaring. The gathering is infused with the giddy groupthink of a multilevel marketing event. After securing an invite to the conference—a task made challenging by Palantir’s disapproval of WIRED’s recent coverage—I was eager to get an inside glimpse of the mysterious company. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and his then obscure former Stanford classmate Alex Karp, the company has become part of the Pentagon’s AI-based combat transformation. In the past few years, though, its biggest growth has been in the commercial sector. “The commercial business is growing at 120 percent …