A militarized high-tech data analytics firm that enables Israeli war crimes, US deportations and military operations, and controversial policing tactics
Palantir Technologies develops artificial intelligence (AI) software that supports large-scale data analytics and decision-making processes for organizations, primarily military and other government agencies. A major military contractor, its CEO Alex Karp said in February 2026: “our weapons software is in every combat situation I'm aware of."
The company has been a politically oriented company since its inception. It was founded in 2003 by Karp and right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel using $2 million in investment rounds from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. Fast forward to 2025, Karp told investors that Palantir is “the first company to be completely anti-woke.”
Palantir relocated from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, deliberately distancing itself from the U.S. tech sector, which Karp frequently accuses of being too progressive. The same year, it became publicly traded and issued an unorthodox political statement in its official registration filing: “We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.”
Gaza Genocide
Shortly after Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Palantir entered into a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to help the “war effort.” The Israeli military reportedly used Palantir tools during multiple raids in the Gaza Strip.
Israel also relied on Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon using exploding electronic pagers and radio devices, which killed dozens and wounded thousands of people. While most casualties were members of the armed group Hezbollah, at least a dozen unarmed civilians were also killed. The attacks were condemned by United Nations experts as a “terrifying violation of international law” because of its indiscriminate nature and because their targets posed on imminent threat at the time. The laws of war strictly forbid the use of booby-traps.
While Palantir started providing its tools to Israeli security agencies as early as 2014, its presence in Israel has seen a “rapid growth” since the Gaza genocide. In January 2024, it reported “seeing high demand from Israel for new tools.” Since then, Palantir has been providing the Israeli military and intelligence agencies with at least four of its main products:
- Gotham: Palantir's flagship product for military, intelligence, and law enforcement applications. It ingests, integrates, and organizes large amounts of data from many sources to detect patterns and insights. Gotham can also integrate with sensors and autonomous systems like drones and give them tasks.
- Foundry: A complementary product that was developed primarily for civilian and commercial uses. A military could use Foundry for big-picture planning and logistics, like predicting equipment failures, analyzing and optimizing complex supply chains, etc.
- GAIA: Palantir's geospatial platform, which integrates with its other products and visualizes their data on a real-time map.
- Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP): Palantir's large language model, which integrates into its other products and allows users to query them and give them commands with natural language.
Wherever Palantir works, its employees work closely with its clients to customize Palantir's systems for their needs. As the head of Palantir's operations in Israel clarified, its clients in Israel primarily include the military and security sector: “Palantir is here in Israel to work with the Israeli security system – if we manage to generate commercial business that’s great – but our focus was and remains creating collaborations with security companies and supporting Israel.”
The company has gone through great lengths to express public support for Israel during the Gaza genocide, more than any other non-Israeli company. In October 2023, it took out a full-page ad in the New York Times reading “Palantir stands with Israel,” and in January 2024 it held a full company board meeting in Tel Aviv. Palantir CEO Alex Karp had repeatedly and vocally expressed support for Israel, stating for example: "I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every way we can." He later acknowledged that he is not bothered by employees leaving the company over its work with Israel.
In October 2024, Norway's largest asset manager Storebrand divested its Palantir shares, worth $24 million, because of concerns that the company's "work for Israel might put the asset manager at risk of violating international humanitarian law and human rights."
In addition to its work with the Israeli military, Palantir also powers the Gaza Civil-Military Coordination Center, the U.S. military compound in Kiryat Gat that was set up in October 2025 to execute the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza.
US Deportations
Palantir is one of ICE’s biggest contractors. During 2011-2025, ICE awarded Palantir contracts worth a combined $287 million. ICE has used Palantir’s tools to conduct workplace raids, deportations, and family separations.
Palantir’s flagship deportation-support system is ICE's Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. Described by ICE as “mission-critical,” ICM gives every ICE agent access to “a network of federally and privately owned databases of people’s information.” It profiles people and makes them easily searchable by combining many data points, including a person’s immigration history, employment history, biometric identification, family relationships, license plate readers, social media profiles, and other sources.
In 2025, as part of the ICM contract, and responding to “new sense of urgency” by the Trump administration’s desire to increase the number of ICE arrests and deportations, Palantir accelerated its support for ICE by enhancing ICM and designing a suite of apps that optimizes its use.
One of these ICM enhancements was the result of Palantir’s participation in an ICE three-week sprint to improve its surveillance tools. In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to enhance ICM with “additional capabilities” and create ImmigrationOS (Immigration Lifecycle Operating System). The new capabilities include identifying people who have overstayed their visa to “streamline” arrest operations “based on ICE enforcement priorities,” providing “near real-time” tracking of “self-deportations,” and overall increasing “efficiency in deportation logistics.”
Another ICM-app is called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement), which Palantir designed for ICE in September 2025. ELITE “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address.” People’s addresses are collected from many sources, including the Department of Health and Human Services. This tool helped ICE plan Operation Black Rose in Oregon in October 2025. Over 30 people were arrested, a significant increase in ICE arrests in the state.
In May 2025, ICE started using AI-Enhanced ICE Tip Processing by Palantir. This tool uses a large language model (LLM) to summarize and prioritize tips submitted to ICE by the public to make ICE’s work more efficient and less labor-intensive.
While Palantir introduced these new tools for the 2nd Trump administration, it initially developed the ICM system for the 1st Trump administration. ICM was instrumental for ICE operations at the height of its "zero-tolerance policy," which resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their families. Palantir’s system was specifically used to target and arrest family members who came to inquire about their children who crossed the border unaccompanied. ICE arrested hundreds of people in this way, resulting in children being jailed for longer periods of time.
ICE awarded Palantir the initial ICM contract in 2014. The current ICM contract, worth $139.3 million, was awarded in 2022. It is set to expire in April 2026 and is slated to be renewed as ICE cannot find another company that makes a comparable system.
Another key system that Palantir developed for ICE is called FALCON. It ingests massive amounts of data from ICM and other ICE systems and provides analysis that ICE agents use to target people and to plan raids. ICE briefly replaced FALCON with an in-house system but returned to Palantir’s software in late 2024 after the replacement failed. Despite Palantir’s claims that it had not assisted ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations with deportations during the 1st Trump administration, FALCON has been a key tool used by ICE to power workplace raids, including high-profile raids in 2016, 2018, and 2019.
Controversial Policing
Palantir has provided its Gotham data management platform and predictive policing technologies to international and U.S. police agencies. These databases contain personal information provided by data brokers and shared by other law enforcement offices and agencies on the local, national, and international level.
Unlike in their other operations, law enforcement agencies do not need warrants to access these data, which is available to them through “fusion centers,” state-level resource hubs run by the Department of Homeland Security. The California fusion center, for example, shares information collected by police agencies in 30 cities and allows them to access this database through the Palantir system. Press has reported on U.S. police using Palantir systems in Salt Lake City, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New Orleans, and San Diego.
Outside the U.S., Palantir is used by police forces in Germany, France, and Denmark.
The Palantir system incorporates information about individuals and their associations and relationships, including license plate data, credit card and bank statements, educational records, mental health diagnoses, business partnerships, arrest records, family relationships, prison visitations, and more.
The Palantir predictive policing tool analyzes patterns in people’s routines, associations, and activities, highlighting suspicious patterns that potentially resemble those of people associated with crime or gang activity, even if there are no indications of actual criminal involvement. This allows police to criminalize people and communities based on patterns of associations, leading to disproportionately negative effects on criminalized communities; privacy concerns; and a lack of transparency.
US Military Contracts
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is by far Palantir’s largest client within the U.S. federal government, and likely Palantir's largest client altogether. Between 2008 and February 2026, the DOD awarded the company contracts worth over $2.1 billion.
In 2018, Palantir replaced Google as the contractor for Project Maven, a DOD program to build an AI-powered surveillance platform for unmanned drones that can track vehicles and people. The system supports target prioritization and attack planning and has helped the U.S. military locate rocket launchers in Yemen, target boats in the Red Sea, and bomb targets in Iraq and Syria, as a few examples. Palantir executive Shyam Sankar described the project as “this generation’s Manhattan project,” referring to the development of the first nuclear weapons during World War II.
Google abandoned this project in 2018 following employee backlash that included an employee-written letter stating that, should Google be involved “in the business of war,” it would join the ranks of “Palantir, Raytheon, and General Dynamics,” and struggle “to keep the public’s trust.”
Palantir also develops and tests AI and machine learning capabilities using its Gotham and Foundry platforms. In 2020, for instance, the U.S. Army awarded Palantir a $91 million contract to test AI for “defense use cases.” The company was contracted to upgrade the U.S. Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A), a platform that obtains data from over 700 sources and shares and stores intelligence for military outposts all over the world. This award is part of a larger contract worth $823 million in which Palantir and BAE Systems will compete to develop parts of DCGS-A until 2027.
Undermining US Democracy – Past Activities
Until they were stopped, Palantir software engineers surveilled WikiLeaks journalists to showcase how the company’s tools can be effective in targeting journalists. The hacker collective Anonymous leaked emails and a presentation given to Bank of America by Palantir, HBGary, and Berico Technologies. Palantir publicly apologized, placed the software engineer responsible on temporary leave, and severed ties with HBGary.
Palantir was also involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, Palantir engineers helped Cambridge Analytica, at the time run by Trump-ally Steve Bannon, to expand its unauthorized collection of Facebook user data. Cambridge Analytica harvested the Facebook data of 50 million U.S. voters to send them targeted political ads, aiding Trump’s first presidential victory.
- February 2026 - U.S. Representative from New York Pat Ryan pledged to donate the over $93,000 in campaign contributions he had received from Palantir leadership. Colorado U.S. Rep. Jason Crow and John Hickenlooper also announced they would donate tens of thousands of dollars to immigrant rights groups to offset the campaign contributions they had received from Palantir leadership.
- December 2025 - U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois donated to immigrant rights groups the $29,300 in campaign contributions he had received from Palantir leadership.
- June 2025 - the British Medical Association, the labor union representing nearly 200,000 medical professionals in the UK, passed a resolution condemning Palantir's involvement in managing the country's medical data, calling this partnership "unacceptable" because of, among other things, Palantir's "track record of creating discriminatory policing software."
- May 2025 - University of San Francisco announced plans to divest from Palantir and three other companies, as part of overhauling its investment portfolio in response to student demands. These four companies have been specifically targeted by student activists because of the university's direct investment in them, which amounted to 0.5% of its total $566 million endowment.
- October 2024 - Norway's largest asset manager Storebrand divested its Palantir shares, worth $24 million, because of concerns that the company's "work for Israel might put the asset manager at risk of violating international humanitarian law and human rights."
- August 2024 - San Francisco State University divested from Palantir and three other companies after adopting a new “human rights-based investment strategy, including divesting from direct investments in weapons manufacturers and limiting other such indirect investments.”
- March 2021 - Soros Fund Management revealed that it had sold its entire stake in Palantir, at the time worth approximately $500 million. In November 2020, the Fund had announced plans to divest from Palantir because the Fund "does not agree with Palantir's business practices."
- November 2020 - Soros Fund Management sold all its shares in Palantir because of Palantir's business practices regarding the "negative social consequences of big data."
- September 2020 - U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote a letter to the SEC asking the agency to investigate Palantir before their public offering, citing concerns about the company's lack of transparency.
- September 2019 - over 1,200 students from 17 U.S. universities signed a pledge that they would not work with Palantir because of its relationship with ICE.
- August, 2019 - the largest conference for women in computing, the Grace Hopper Celebration, dropped Palantir as a sponsor after a petition with 200 signatures was submitted citing its relationship with ICE.
- August 2019 - 60 Palantir employees signed a petition calling for an end to its contracts and relationship with ICE, including its role in family separations.
- August 2019 - the LGBTQ tech organization, Lesbians Who Tech, removed Palantir from its annual job fair because of public dissent to Palantir’s role in ICE workplace raids.
- June 2019 - the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at the University of California at Berkeley dropped Palantir as a sponsor after 140 academics signed a letter citing its questionable relationship with ICE.