ChinAI #352: A 10,000-character treatise on China's Palantir?
An update to ChinAI issue #10, first published May 2018
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Feature Translation: A 10,000-character deconstruction of Palantir
CONTEXT: For the tenth issue of ChinAI, waaaaay back in May 2018, I delved into MiningLamp [明略数据], an AI unicorn known as “China’s Palantir” that was targeting public security departments as key customers.
Now, eight years later, this Leiphone longform essay (link to original Chinese) demonstrates that Chinese companies are still chasing Palantir — which has seen a stock increase of 15-fold since its IPO —and the gap is still very very wide.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: Why do so many Chinese AI firms see Palantir as a standard-bearer?
They want to emulate Palantir’s path from a government-facing business foundation (basically all of its initial clients were defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies) to a company that now derives 46% of its revenues from commercial businesses (To-B).
A key component of the Palantir model is the forward deployed engineer (FDE). From the article: “The FDE model also originated from Palantir’s early To-G operations: in military and government contexts—characterized by data silos and complex operational environments—conventional software development models proved ineffective. Consequently, Palantir was compelled to dispatch personnel to the front lines to gain a firsthand understanding of operational requirements, subsequently bringing those insights back to be distilled and abstracted into standardized products.”
The Palantir “craze has also rapidly swept through the domestic Chinese market, “ Jiamin Zhang, the Leiphone article author, reports. “Vendors such as 4Paradigm, MiningLamp, and Deepexi [滴普科技] have rushed to benchmark against the company…’
According to industry insiders, there are three groups of competitors seeking to become China’s Palantir:
The companies who mirror Palantir’s business approach (e.g., the aforementioned MiningLamp, 4Paradigm, etc.).
Companies that focus on the defense + AI vertical, including Jing'an Technology [靖安科技], Utenet [渊亭科技], and Stonehenge [中科世通亨奇].
Large tech giants such as Huawei and Baidu who may be the only candidates with resources to do what Palantir does — a “heavyweight” approach with those FDEs. According to Leiphone, “Reportedly, a team within a certain major Chinese tech giant is already actively benchmarking against Palantir to develop relevant products.”
Yet, these Palantir wannabes face many obstacles. There are many reasons why “China has yet to produce a software giant with global influence comparable to Palantir or Salesforce.” Chinese firms fight for scraps in China’s low-end software market, while global giants dominate the high-end.
AI doesn’t just magically solve diffusion challenges rooted in China’s lower rates of digitization. Menglin Li, VP at Mininglamp, tells Leiphone that Western firms have more eagerly embraced “cloud-nativeness”, which means their data infrastructure are more uniform and standardized than Chinese companies. The article continues, “Li reveals that on the very first day of providing on-site services to a domestic client, Mininglamp's team must first undertake the painstaking task of deciphering exactly how the client's legacy systems were originally constructed and what underlying technical architectures were employed.”
Zhang Chi, an industry expert with over 20 years of experience, points out that the Palantir model does not travel to China. Specifically, Chinese companies aren’t willing to pay the large-scale consulting contracts that involve deploying industry experts to client sites and then updating s1oftware products based on feedback. Zhang states, “No enterprise here would issue a $1 billion contract to a vendor, especially if the work consisted primarily of consulting, on-site deployment, and project delivery.”
The FDE approach is also difficult to implement in terms of civil-military integration. I think people just assume that because China has a Military-Civil Fusion strategy, it means there’s seamless integrations between the Mininglamps of the world and the PLA. That’s just not the case. Menglin Li, the previously quoted Mininglamp VP, states, “Palantir is willing to embed its own employees directly into the U.S. military, where they serve as commissioned officers—a concept that is almost unimaginable in China.”
FULL TRANSLATION: A 10,000-character deconstruction of Palantir
No ChinAI Links this week (March Madness got the best of me)
Thank you for reading and engaging.
*These are Jeff Ding’s (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
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This might be what Li is referencing (Palantir's CTO was named a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserves): https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/1255164460/1a-army-07-03-2025
Hey — I came across your writing and really liked how you think.
I’m exploring something similar from a different angle — writing about human behavior through a system design lens (like debugging internal patterns).
Just started publishing on Substack. If you ever get a moment to read, I’d genuinely value your perspective.
Also happy to support your work — feels like there’s an interesting overlap here.
[ChinAI #352](https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-352-a-10000-character-treatise) — The FDE model seems like it depends on civil-military integration that's structurally different in China — but is MiningLamp finding any workarounds for that? Like, does the public security vertical give them a "close enough" substitute for the PLA access Palantir has in the US?