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Palantir Technologies
American software and services company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American publicly traded company specializing in software platforms for data mining.[3] Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel,[4] Stephen Cohen,[5] Joe Lonsdale,[6] and Alex Karp.[7]
The company has four main operating systems: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir AIP. Palantir Gotham is an intelligence tool used by police in many countries as a predictive policing system and by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts, including the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense.[8] Its software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5[9]) by the U.S. Department of Defense.[10][11] Palantir Foundry has been used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.[12] Palantir Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments.[13][14]
Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve both international, state, and local governments, and also private companies.[15][16]
The company has been criticized for its role in expanding government surveillance using artificial intelligence and facial recognition software.[17][18] Former employees and critics say the company's contracts under the second Trump Administration, which enable deportations and the aggregation of sensitive data on Americans across administrative agencies, are problematic.[19][20]
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2003–2008: Founding and early years
SEC filings show Palantir was incorporated on May 6 2003 by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, when the CIA Total Information Awareness program closed. Thiel named the startup after the "seeing stone" in Tolkien's legendarium.[15] Likewise, Palantir's office locations have names from Tolkien: The Shire (Palo Alto, California), Rivendell (McLean, Virginia), and Minas Tirith (Washington, D.C.).[21] In 2013, Thiel said Palantir was a "mission-oriented company" that could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties".[22] Asked what the secret of its success was, Karp said that he and Thiel pursued a "classic German approach" when founding the company, influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idea of overcoming opposites.[23]
In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. The same year, Thiel hired Alex Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law School, as chief executive officer.[24]
There are several versions of the story of the company's founding. According to Gilman Louie, head of In-Q-Tel (a venture capital corporation associated with the CIA and the intelligence community[25][26]), after Thiel recruited Karp, the two founders came to him with some ideas but no clear problem to solve. After hearing his suggestions, they did a mock-up in two weeks.[27] According to Anthony King, the FBI first recognized the success of PayPal's fraud detection system (named "Igor", after a Russian who was one of the company's most consistent abusers) and requested it for the agency's work in detecting financial crime. Palantir evolved from that software when Thiel proposed the company to Karp and Cohen.[28] According to Wired, in 2004, Thiel and Karp met John Poindexter, a Department of Defense official who recognized their "interesting idea" and helped them gather "a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government". They then tried to recruit investors, but no one in Silicon Valley wanted to back an "expensive software platform for large organizations", and "The government was unpopular in Silicon Valley". But an investor who turned them down recommended them to In-Q-Tel, which decided to invest the relatively small sum of £1.3 million but helped them get in touch with prospective users. The contact with In-Q-Tel also incidentally led to interest from another backer, Reed Elsevier (later REV).[29]
According to Karp, Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz doodled through an entire meeting, and a Kleiner Perkins executive lectured the founders about the company's inevitable failure.[30][31]
According to the Wall Street Journal, when Palantir was launched in 2004, other than Thiel and Karp, there were three investors, but little interest from venture capital firms, so Thiel and his venture fund largely bankrolled the initial $30 million cost. Later In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million.[10] According to Techcrunch, Palantir's $7.5 million Series A (June 2006) was led by Oakhouse Partners and its $10.5 million Series B (November 2006) was led by REV.[32]
According to the WSJ, in the span of two years, the company continuously revised its technology, based on the demands of analysts from the intelligence agencies, introduced to them by the In-Q-Tel.[10] A 2009 VentureBeat article says that most of the intelligence community knew about the company by word of mouth. In its early years its work included a sub-prime lender study for Center for Public Integrity and analyses of Somali piracy, Hezbollah, and the platform used to detect the Chinese GhostNet.[33] Palantir said computers alone using artificial intelligence could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Instead, it proposed using human analysts to explore data from many sources, called intelligence augmentation.[34]
2010–2012: Expansion
In April 2010, Palantir announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to sell the Palantir Metropolis product as "QA Studio" (a quantitative analysis tool).[35] On June 18, 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). Biden credited the success to the software, Palantir, being deployed by the federal government.[36] He announced that the capability would be deployed at other government agencies, starting with Medicare and Medicaid.[37][38][39][40]
Estimates were $250 million in revenues in 2011.[41]
2013–2016: Additional funding
| "[As of 2013] the U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir." |
| — TechCrunch in January 2015[42] |
A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least 12 groups in the U.S. government, including the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. At the time, the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool.[42] Also according to TechCrunch, U.S. spy agencies such as the CIA and FBI were linked for the first time with Palantir software, as their databases had previously been siloed.[42]
In September 2013, Palantir disclosed over $196 million in funding, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.[43][44] It was estimated that the company would likely sign almost $1 billion in contracts in 2014.[45] CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not pursue an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult."[46] In December 2013, the company began a round of financing, raising around $450 million from private funders. This raised the company's value to $9 billion, according to Forbes, with the magazine reporting that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley’s most valuable private technology companies."[46]
In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before. The report was based on research by VC Experts. If completed, Forbes said Palantir's funding could reach $1.2 billion.[46] As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA,[47] Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, a venture firm operated by Thiel.[46]
Palantir was valued at $15 billion in November 2014.[48] In June 2015, BuzzFeed reported the company was raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion.[49] By December, it had raised a further $880 million, while the company was still valued at $20 billion.[50] In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup that makes it easy to collect information from public-facing websites.[51]
In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk.[52]
In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that despite the reputation that connected Palantir to U.S. intelligence agencies (which Palantir deliberately crafted to help it win business), including the CIA, NSA, and FBI, the actual relationship was rocky for various reasons, with episodes of friction and recalcitrance. The NSA in particular had been resistant, because it had plenty of its own talent and focused more on SIGINT while Palantir's software worked better for HUMINT. Meanwhile, the CIA had been so frustrated by the publicity associating Palantir with it that it tried to cancel the Palantir contract. But, according to Karp, Palantir had a firm hold at the FBI, because "They'll have no choice".[53]
2020–present
Palantir was one of four large technology firms[54] to start working with the NHS on supporting COVID-19 efforts through the provision of software from Palantir Foundry,[55] and by April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track and contain the contagion.[56] Palantir also developed Tiberius, a software for vaccine allocation used in the United States.[57]
In August 2020, Palantir Technologies moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado, distancing itself from the "engineering elite of Silicon Valley [...] they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires".[58] In September it had its IPO on the NYSE,[59] advertising a goal of becoming the "default operating system across the US".[60] In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration awarded Palantir a $44.4 million contract, boosting its shares by about 21%.[61]
In November 2024, the Navy awarded Palantir a nearly $1 billion software contract.[62]
As of May 2025,[update] the second Trump administration had spent $113 million on existing and new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon plus a contract of $795 million with the DOD, while deliberating contracts for the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.[20]
Valuation
The company was valued at $9 billion in December 2013 after raising an additional $107.5 million in funding.[63] Forbes wrote that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies".[46] Palantir's valuation rose to $15 billion after a $50 million round of funding in November 2014,[64] and to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding.[65] In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion.[66]
On October 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir considered an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation.[67]
Before its IPO, Palantir had not made a profit. In July 2020, it filed for an IPO,[68] and on September 30, 2020, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct public offering under the ticker symbol "PLTR".[69]
On September 6, 2024, S&P Global announced that Palantir would be added to the S&P 500 index. Its share price rose 14% the next trading day.[70]
On November 14, 2024, Palantir announced transfer of its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market, effective November 26. The company's Class A Common Stock continued to trade under the symbol PLTR.[71]
In 2025, The Economist called Palantir possibly the most overvalued firm of all time, with a market value of $430 billion—over 600 times its 2024 earnings.[72]
Investments
As of 2021, the company had invested over $400 million into nearly two dozen special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) targets according to investment bank RBC Capital Markets, while bringing alongside those companies as customers.[73]
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Palantir Gotham
Released in 2008, Palantir Gotham is Palantir's defense and intelligence software. It is an evolution of Palantir's longstanding work in the United States Intelligence Community, and is used by intelligence and defense agencies. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis, and prediction. Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military.[74] Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, which has elicited some controversy over racism in their AI analytics.[75]
Palantir Foundry
Palantir Foundry is a software platform offered for use in commercial and civil government sectors. It was popularized for use in the health sector by its use within the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, a secure enclave of Electronic Health Records from across the United States that produced hundreds of scientific manuscripts and won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks Grand Prize. Foundry was also used by the Center NHS England in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in England to analyze the operation of the vaccination program. A campaign was started against the company in June 2021 by Foxglove, a tech-justice nonprofit, because "Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed." Clive Lewis MP, supporting the campaign, said Palantir had an "appalling track record."[76]
As of 2022,[update] Foundry was also used for the administration of the UK Homes for Ukraine program.[77] to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, some of which is supplied by the UK Home Office.
In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a 7-year contract for a federated data platform to access data from different systems through a single system, worth £330 million, criticized by the British Medical Association, Doctors Association UK and cybersecurity professionals.[78][79][80] In 2024, medical professionals picketed outside NHS England HQ, demanding cancellation of the deal.[81]
As of May 2025, Foundry was used by four US federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.[20]
Palantir Apollo
Palantir Apollo is a "continuous delivery system"[peacock prose] that manages and deploys Palantir Gotham and Foundry.[82] Apollo updates configurations and software in the Foundry and Gotham platforms using a micro-service architecture.[citation needed]
Other
The company has been involved in a number of business and consumer products, designing in part or in whole. For example, in 2014, it premiered Insightics, which according to the Wall Street Journal "extracts customer spending and demographic information from merchants’ credit-card records." It was created in tandem with credit processing company First Data.[83]
Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)
In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot.[84][85] Citing potential risks of generative artificial intelligence, Karp said the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, but would require human oversight.[86][87] Commercial companies have also used AIP across many domains. Applications include infrastructure planning, network analysis, and resource allocation.[88][89]
AIP lets users create LLMs called "agents" through a GUI interface. Agents can interact with a digital representation of a company’s business known as an ontology. This lets the models access an organization’s documents and other external resources. Users can define output schemas and test cases to validate AI-generated responses. AIP comes with a library of templates that can be extended by clients.[90] Palantir also offers five-day boot camps to onboard prospective customers.[91] Palantir hosts an annual AIPCon conference featuring demos from existing customers.[89]
TITAN
Palantir’s TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) is a truck that is advertised as a mobile ground station for AI applications. After being prototyped with IRAD funds, the project is now developed in partnership with Anduril Industries, Northrop Grumman, and other contractors. The company claims that TITAN can improve customers' ability to conduct long-range precision strikes.[92] Palantir is under contract to deliver 10 units to the U.S. Army.[93]
MetaConstellation
MetaConstellation is a satellite network that supports the deployment of AI models. Users can request information about specific locations, prompting the service to dispatch the necessary resources. MetaConstellation has been used by customers including the United States Northern Command.[94]
Skykit
Skykit is a portable toolbox that supports intelligence operations in adverse environments. Palantir offers “Skykit Backpack” and “Skykit Maritime” to be transported by individuals and boats respectively. Contents include battery packs, a ruggedized laptop with company software, and a quadcopter supporting computer vision applications. Skykit can also connect to the MetaConstellation satellite network.[95] In 2023, various sources reported that the Ukrainian military had begun receiving Skykit units.[96][97]
Palantir Metropolis
Palantir Metropolis (formerly known as Palantir Finance) was[98] software for data integration, information management, and quantitative analytics. The software connects to commercial, proprietary, and public data sets and discovers trends, relationships, and anomalies, including predictive analytics.[99] Aided by 120 "forward-deployed engineers" of Palantir in 2009, Peter Cavicchia III of JPMorgan used Metropolis to monitor employee communications[100] and alert the insider threat team when an employee showed signs of potential disgruntlement: the insider alert team would further scrutinize the employee and possibly conduct physical surveillance after hours with bank security personnel.[99][100] The Metropolis team used emails, download activity, browser histories, and GPS locations from JPMorgan-owned smartphones and their transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations to search, aggregate, sort, and analyze this information for specific keywords, phrases, and patterns of behavior.[99][100] In 2013, Cavicchia may have shared this information with Frank Bisignano, who had become CEO of First Data Corporation.[99] Palantir Metropolis was succeeded by Palantir Foundry.[101]
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Corporate use
Founded as a defense contractor, Palantir has since expanded to the private sector. These activities now provide a large proportion of the company’s revenue. Palantir had 55% year-over-year growth in the U.S. commercial market in Q2 2024, although it also serves foreign customers. Applications include telecommunications and infrastructure planning.[102]
Palantir Metropolis was used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.[10][11][104][105]
Palantir Foundry clients include Merck KGaA,[106] Airbus,[107] and Ferrari.[108]
Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network.[104][109][110]
U.S. civil entities
Palantir's software was used by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to detect and investigate fraud and abuse in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Specifically, the Recovery Operations Center (ROC) used Palantir to integrate transactional data with open-source and private data sets that describe the entities receiving stimulus funds.[clarification needed][39] Other clients as of 2019 included Polaris Project,[111] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,[42] the National Institutes of Health,[112] Team Rubicon,[113] and the United Nations World Food Programme.[114]
In October 2020, Palantir began helping the federal government set up a system that will track the manufacture, distribution and administration of COVID-19 vaccines across the country.[115]
U.S. military, intelligence, and police
Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor (responsible for the GhostNet and the Shadow Network investigation). Gotham was used by fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, a former US federal agency which operated from 2009 to 2015.
Other clients as of 2013 included DHS, NSA, FBI, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED Defeat Organization and Allies. However, at the time the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool.[42] Also, according to TechCrunch, "The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."[42]
U.S. military intelligence used the Palantir product to improve its ability to predict locations of improvised explosive devices in its war in Afghanistan. A small number of practitioners reported it was more useful than the United States Army's Program of Record, the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). Congressman Duncan D. Hunter complained of United States Department of Defense obstacles to its wider use in 2012.[116]
Palantir has also been reported to be working with various U.S. police departments, for example accepting a contract in 2013 to help the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center build a controversial license plates database for California.[117] In 2012 New Orleans Police Department partnered with Palantir to create a predictive policing program.[118]
In 2014, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded Palantir a $41 million contract to build and maintain a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM) to track personal and criminal records of legal and illegal immigrants. This application was originally conceived by ICE's office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), allowing its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by other federal and private law enforcement entities. The system reached its "final operation capacity" under the Trump administration in September 2017.[119]
Palantir took over the Pentagon's Project Maven contract in 2019 after Google decided not to continue developing AI unmanned drones used for bombings and intelligence.[120]
In 2024, Palantir emerged as a "Trump trade" for further enforcing the law on illegal immigrants and profiting on federal spending for national security and immigration.[121] Palantir has a $30 million contract with ICE to track the movement of migrants. The Department of Government Efficiency has asked Palantir to help it speed up deportation by creating a master database.[122]
National Health Service (England)
Palantir has contracts relating to patient data from England's National Health Service. In 2020, it was awarded an emergency non-competitive contract to mine COVID-19 patient data and consolidate government databases to help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic. The contract was valued at more than £23.5 million and extended for two more years. The awarding of the contract without competition was heavily criticised, prompting the NHS to pledge an open and transparent procurement process for any future data contract.[123][124][125]
Liam Fox encouraged the firm "to expand their software business" in Britain.[126] It was said to be "critical to the success of the vaccination and PPE programmes", but its involvement with the NHS was controversial among civil liberties groups.[127] Conservative MP David Davis called for a judicial review into the sharing of patient data with Palantir.[128]
The procurement of a £480m Federated Data Platform by NHS England, launched in January 2023, has been called a "must win" for Palantir.[129] The procurement has been called a "farce" by civil liberties campaigners who allege that Palantir has a competitive advantage as it "already has its feet under the table in NHS England" and benefits from a short procurement window.[130] In April 2023 it was revealed that a consortium of UK companies had unsuccessfully bid for the contract.[131]
In April 2023, Davis publicly expressed his concern over the procurement process, saying it could become a "battle royale". He was one of a dozen MPs pressing the government over privacy concerns with the use of data. Labour peer and former Health Minister Philip Hunt voiced his concern about Palantir's use of data, saying, "The current NHS and current government doesn't have a good track record of getting the details right, and the procurement shows no sign of going better."[132]
Also in April 2023, it was reported that eleven NHS trusts had paused or suspended use of Palantir Foundry software. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said this was due to "operational issues".[132]
In January 2023, Thiel called Britain's affection for the NHS "Stockholm Syndrome" during a speech to the Oxford Union, adding that the NHS "makes people sick". A Palantir spokesman said that Thiel was "speaking as a private individual" and his comments "do not in any way reflect the views of Palantir".[133]
In March 2023, it was revealed that NHS hospitals had been ordered to share patient data with Palantir, prompting renewed criticism from civil liberties groups, including for supporting genocide, privacy and security practices, and "buying way in".[79][134] Groups including the Doctors' Association UK, National Pensioners' Convention, and Just Treatment subsequently threatened legal action over NHS England's procurement of the FDP contract, citing concerns over the use of patient data.[135]
In 2022, Palantir recruited NHS England's former artificial intelligence chief, Indra Joshi. It said it was planning to increase its team in the UK by 250.[136] Palantir's UK head, Louis Mosley, grandson of the late British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley,[137] was quoted internally as saying that Palantir's strategy for entry into the British health industry was to "Buy our way in" by acquiring smaller rival companies with existing relationships with the NHS in order to "take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance".[138]
In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to create and manage the Federated Data Platform.[139]
In April 2024, medical professionals picketed at NHS England headquarters, demanding that it end its contract with Palantir over contracts with the IDF.[81]
Europol
Denmark
The Danish POL-INTEL predictive policing project has been operational since 2017 and is based on the Gotham system. According to the AP, the Danish system "uses a mapping system to build a so-called heat map identifying areas with higher crime rates."[75]
In 2025, when the Danish government was integrating Palantir into the country's military, police and intelligence services, a major argument put forth by opponents was that the Praxis project (backed by Thiel through Pronomos) was a threat to Greenland. Other arguments were concerned with Thiel's politics in the U.S., Palantir's association with American and other European intelligence services (Jacob Kaarsbo, a former chief analyst at Danish Defence Intelligence Service, could not name these intelligence services for reasons of confidentiality), and the security risk posed by giving Palantir citizens' data. The Danish National Police answered with a reference to a 2021 response to the Folketing, but otherwise, the Police, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard refused to comment on the matter.[140][141][142]
Norway
The Norwegian Customs is using Palantir Gotham to screen passengers and vehicles for control. Known inputs are prefiled freight documents, passenger lists, the national Currency Exchange database (tracks all cross-border currency exchanges), the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administrations employer- and employee-registry, the Norwegian stock holder registry and 30 public databases from InfoTorg. InfoTorg provides access to more than 30 databases, including the Norwegian National Citizen registry, European Business Register, the Norwegian DMV vehicle registry, various credit databases etc. These databases are supplemented by the Norwegian Customs Departments own intelligence reports, including results of previous controls. The system is also augmented by data from public sources such as social media.[143]
Germany
In 2023, German interior minister Nancy Faeser stopped the federal use of Palantir.[144] As of July 2025, German police departments in three of its 16 states—Bavaria, Hesse, and Nordrhein-Westfalen—have used Palantir for data mining. In March, Baden-Württemberg hurriedly entered a $25 million contract without even having the legal foundation to use the software.[145]
Ukraine
Karp claims to have been the first CEO of a large U.S. company to have visited Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion.[146] Palantir's technology has since been used close to the front lines.[147] It is used to shorten the "kill chain" in Russo-Ukrainian War.[148] According to a December 2022 report by The Times, Palantir's AI has allowed Ukraine to increase the accuracy, speed, and deadliness of its artillery strikes.[149] Ukraine's prosecutor general's office also plans to use Palantir's software to help document alleged Russian war crimes.[150]
Netherlands
In 2025, Justice minister David van Weel confirmed that Dutch police had used Palantir since 2011. Director-general of police (and later prime minister) Dick Schoof participated in the purchase of the software. Since then, researchers have requested transparency on the matter many times but the government repeatedly refused to accede. Documents were released only after lawsuits, but with 99% of the content redacted. They show that many contracts with Palantir were signed.[151]
Israel
Palantir's London office was the target of demonstrations by pro-Palestine protesters in December 2023 after it was awarded a large contract to manage NHS data. The protesters accused Palantir of being "complicit" in Israeli war crimes in the Gaza war because it provides the Israel Defence Force (IDF) with intelligence and surveillance services, including a form of predictive policing.[87] In January 2024, Palantir agreed to a strategic partnership with the IDF under which it would provide the IDF with services to assist its "war-related missions".[152] Karp has been emphatic in his public support for Israel. He has frequently criticized what he calls the inaction of other tech leaders. His position has prompted several employees to leave Palantir.[153]
In 2024, Irish politician and former Palantir employee Eoin Hayes was suspended by his party, the Social Democrats, for saying at a press conference that he had sold shares in Palantir before he entered politics, when he had sold the shares a month after being elected as a city councillor. Later that day, Hayes corrected the date in a statement.[154] He issued a further clarifying statement after his suspension that evening.[155] Hayes worked for Palantir between 2015 and 2017 but denied having any role relating to military contracts.[156] The Social Democrats have been some of the most vocal critics of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip and Hayes has been accused by a rival politician of "profiting from genocide".[157]
In May 2025, a pro-Palestinian protest was held in Denver against Congressman Jason Crow for repeatedly accepting campaign donations from Palantir.[158]
Other
Palantir Gotham was used by cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, a Canadian public-private venture which operated from 2003 to 2012.[citation needed]
Palantir was used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify if Iran was in compliance with the 2015 agreement.[47]
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Partnerships and contracts
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International Business Machines
On February 8, 2021, Palantir and IBM announced a new partnership that would use IBM's hybrid cloud data platform alongside Palantir's operations platform for building applications. The product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, is expected to simplify the process of building and deploying AI-integrated applications with IBM Watson. It will help businesses/users interpret and use large datasets without needing a strong technical background. Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data will be available for general use in March 2021.[159]
Amazon (AWS)
On March 5, 2021, Palantir announced its partnership with Amazon AWS. Palantir's ERP Suite was optimized to run on Amazon Web Services. The ERP suite was used by BP.[160]
Microsoft
On August 8, 2024, Palantir and Microsoft announced a partnership whereby Palantir will deploy its suite of products on Microsoft Azure Government clouds. Palantir stock jumped more than 10% for the day.[161][162]
Babylon Health
Palantir bought a stake in defunct Babylon Health in June 2021. Ali Parsa told the Financial Times that "nobody" has brought some of the tech that Palantir owns "into the realm of biology and health care".[76]
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Controversies
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Algorithm development
i2 Inc sued Palantir in Federal Court, alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement over Palantir's algorithm. Shyam Sankar, Palantir's director of business development, used a private eye company known as the cutout for obtaining i2's code. i2 settled out of court for $10 million in 2011.[99]
WikiLeaks proposals (2010)
In 2010, Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to "the WikiLeaks Threat." In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed that Palantir software would "serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts."[163] The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks.[164]
Palantir CEO Alex Karp ended all ties to HBGary and issued a statement apologizing to "progressive organizations ... and Greenwald ... for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." Palantir placed an employee on leave pending a review by a third-party law firm. The employee was later reinstated.[163]
Racial discrimination lawsuit (2016)
On September 26, 2016, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Palantir alleging that the company discriminated against Asian job applicants on the basis of their race.[165] According to the lawsuit, the company "routinely eliminated" Asian applicants during the hiring process, even when they were "as qualified as white applicants" for the same jobs.[166] Palantir settled the suit in April 2017 for $1.7 million while not admitting wrongdoing.[167]
British Parliament inquiry (2018)
During questioning in front of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Christopher Wylie, the former research director of Cambridge Analytica, said that several meetings had taken place between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, and that Alexander Nix, the chief executive of SCL, had facilitated their use of Aleksandr Kogan's data which had been obtained from his app "thisisyourdigitallife" by mining personal surveys. Kogan later established Global Science Research to share the data with Cambridge Analytica and others. Wylie confirmed that both employees from Cambridge Analytica and Palantir used Kogan's Global Science Research and harvested Facebook data together in the same offices.[168][169]
ICE partnership (since 2014)
Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Palantir responded in 2018 that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times,[170] the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. But documents obtained in 2017 by The Intercept[119] show that this is not true. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice,[171] National Immigration Project,[172] the Immigrant Defense Project,[173] the Tech Workers Coalition, and Mijente.[174] In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of children residing illegally.[175]
In September 2020, Amnesty International released a report criticizing Palantir's failure to conduct human rights due diligence for its contracts with ICE. Palantir's human rights record was being scrutinized for contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants.[176][177]
In 2025, Palantir was reported to be working closely with ICE to enable deportation in the second presidency of Donald Trump.[178]
"HHS Protect Now" and privacy concerns (2020)
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted tech companies to respond to growing demand for citizen information from governments in order to conduct contact tracing and to analyze patient data.[179] Consequently, data collection companies such as Palantir had been contracted to partake in pandemic data collection practices. Palantir's participation in "HHS Protect Now", a program launched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus, attracted criticism from US lawmakers.[180]
Palantir's participation in COVID-19 response projects reignited debates over its involvement in tracking illegal immigrants, especially its alleged effects on digital inequality and restrictions on online freedoms. Critics allege that confidential data acquired by HHS could be exploited by other federal agencies in unregulated and potentially harmful ways.[180] Alternative proposals request greater transparency in the process to determine whether any of the data aggregated would be shared with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to single out illegal immigrants.[180]
Project Maven (since 2018)
After employee protests in June 2018, Google chose not to renew its contract with the US Department of Defense to work on Project Maven, a program to develop artificial intelligence that can analyze video feeds from aerial drones; Palantir took over the project in December 2019.[120] Google employees were concerned that the technology could lead to lethal autonomous weapons that choose targets without human input.[120]
Second Trump administration (2025)
According to required financial disclosures, Stephen Miller—who as United States homeland security advisor has been actively involved in the second Trump administration deportation efforts—owns between $100,000 and $250,000 of Palantir stock; this has raised concern[who?] about a conflict of interest.[181] Similar financial disclosure requirements of U.S. government employees show that at least 10 other members of the Trump administration own shares of the company.[182]
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Corporate affairs
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Perspective
Leadership
Jamie Fly, former Radio Free Europe president and CEO, serves as senior counselor to the CEO.[183]
Matthew Turpin, former director for China at the White House National Security Council and senior advisor for China to the Secretary of Commerce during the first Trump administration, serves as senior advisor.[184][185]
Board of directors
As of December 2024,[update] the board of directors of Palantir includes:[186]
- Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir
- Alexander Moore, co-founder and former CEO of NodePrime
- Alexandra Schiff, former reporter of The Wall Street Journal
- Stephen Cohen, co-founder and president of Palantir
- Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund
- Lauren Friedman Stat, former Fractional Chief Administration Officer at Friendly Force
- Eric Woersching, former general partner at Initialized Capital
Ownership
The largest shareholders of Palantir in early 2024 were:[103]
Finances
For the fiscal year 2024, Palantir reported earnings of $462 million, with annual revenue of $2.9 billion, an increase of 28.8% over the previous fiscal cycle.
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Influence on other companies
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Perspective
Palantir's success has led a new wave of companies (mostly in the defense sector) to follow its business model, often connected to its personnel. The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider have described a "Palantir Mafia" that they compared to the Paypal Mafia. Those mentioned include founders of companies like Anduril, 8VC, Addepar, and Ironclad.[192][193] Joe Lonsdale also co-founded anti-drone tech startup Epirus.[194][195]
The German unicorn Helsing is built as a German or European answer to Palantir.[196][197] Thiel also had a role in Helsing's success, and it is considered part of the "Thiel ecosystem", though he does not directly invest in it.[198][199]
The French startup Comand AI, founded in 2023 by Antoine Chassang (ex-Snapchat) and Loïc Mougeolle (ex-Naval Group), aims to be a more adaptive alternative to Palantir. Its team was poached from Palantir, OpenAI, and Anduril.[200][201]
The British company Arondite was founded by Will Blyth (also CEO), a former British Army officer who had also worked for Palantir and Helsing.[202]
The Israeli startup Kela is founded by Hamutal Meridor (president; former officer in the Israeli army; former head of Palantir's operations in Israel), Alon Dror (CEO), Jason Manne, and Omer Bar Ilan. Kela works to become a company similar to Palantir: secretive and working for the state's benefit with similar methods. Israeli industry leaders also stress the need to focus on comprehensive solutions and not niche ones, so Israel can have companies like Palantir and Anduril.[203][204]
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See also
References
External links
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