Palantir Technologies Inc

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 and Support for 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.”

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 January 2024, Palantir reported “seeing high demand from Israel for new tools” and entered into a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to help the “war effort.” This was announced during a special meeting the company’s board of directors had in Tel Aviv. During that visit, CEO Karp held a publicized meeting with Israel’s President Herzog and a secret meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

During the Gaza genocide, Israel deployed multiple AI systems to generate targets at unprecedented scale with minimal human intervention. Known examples include The Gospel, Lavender, and Where's Daddy. Palantir has publicly denied involvement in Lavender and The Gospel, but stated it is “proud to support Israeli defense and national security missions in other programs and contexts.” This leaves open the possibility that Palantir powers Where’s Daddy, a system that Israel used to track in real time thousands of Gazans it wanted to kill, identify when they enter their homes, and then bomb them with their families and neighbors, a practice that significantly increases the number of civilian casualties in the genocide.

CEO Alex Karp publicly admitted his company is involved in killing Palestinians, “mostly terrorists” as he put it. According to his biography, Palantir “software was used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza in which hostages were freed.”

According to the same source, 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 no imminent threat at the time. The laws of war strictly forbid the use of booby-traps.

As of February 2024, the Palantir products used by the Israeli military and intelligence agencies include, according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar:

• 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.”

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. Through the U.S. military’s Project Maven, Palantir also supported the efforts to protect Israel from Iranian missiles in October 2024 and June 2025.

Before 2023, some Israeli agencies used Palantir products, but on a much smaller scale. Palantir started providing its tools to Israel as early as 2014. According to one source, the Israeli Mossad has been using Palantir’s Gotham system for “nearly a decade” before October 2023. The same source claims that the Israeli military intelligence piloted Gotham in 2014 but opted to use an internal system instead.

Another source linked Palantir to the predictive policing tools that Israel used during 2014-2017 to identify and arrest hundreds of Palestinians under suspicion that they might commit violent acts. See more about Palantir’s predictive policing tools in the Controversial Policing section below.

US Deportations

Palantir is one of ICE’s biggest contractors. Between 2011 and June 2026, ICE awarded Palantir contracts worth a combined $435 million. ICE has used Palantir’s tools to conduct workplace raids, deportations, and family separations.

Demonstrating how valuable the company is to ICE operations, Palantir’s technology has increased ICE’s rate of successfully locating a target from around 27 percent to just under 80 percent, according to Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE.

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.

Palantir’s military drone footage analysis system, Project Maven (see more under the U.S. Military Contracts section below), was also reportedly used to detect people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In September 2025, a U.S. official confirmed that Maven has supported Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the U.S. Coast Guard in its operations.  

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, New Orleans, and San Diego.

Outside the U.S., Palantir is used by police forces in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, as well as Calgary and Ontario, Canada.

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 June 2026, the DOD awarded the company contracts worth over $2.67 billion.

In April 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.

By mid-2019, Palantir’s Maven system was, “providing an operations picture in every war zone where the U.S. was fighting.” More than 130 sites throughout Europe, Africa, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Special Operations Command, and Space Command used the Maven system between 2023 and 2025.

Maven has been specifically implicated in multiple incidents, some of which involve the killing of civilians.

• Attacks on Iran – March 2026 – 175 civilians, including dozens of elementary-school-aged children were killed in the US bombing of their school, likely chosen through Palantir’s Maven system. Pentagon staff used Maven extensively to identify the targets for the U.S. attacks on Iran.
• Civilians killed during Al-Baghdadi raid – October 2019 – Two agricultural workers were killed after the system reportedly identified a van near the U.S. military operation to kill ISIS founder Al-Baghdadi, which the commander ordered to be bombed. The van was carrying three Syrian agricultural workers, only one of which survived the airstrike.
• Abduction of Venezuelan Pres. Nicolás Maduro – January 2026 – Pentagon staff used Palantir’s software to bomb targets during the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, which caused the deaths of at least two civilians according to international monitors. 19 UN experts condemned the attack as an unprovoked use of armed force on a sovereign territory that violated the UN Charter.
• Assassination of Qasem Soleimani – January 2020 – Maven was reportedly used to track Iranian general Qasem Soleimani before the U.S. killed him. The assassination was deemed to violate international law by Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Maven has sped up the pace of war fivefold according to a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) official, the DOD agency responsible for the Maven system. It can identify five thousand targets each day, which is up from one thousand targets per day with an older model, and up from double digits each day without AI. Vice Admiral Whitworth of the NGA has said that 20 military personnel using Maven matched and exceeded the abilities of the 2,000 targeting analysts working during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As an example, the 18th Airborne Corps, a U.S. military division which has used Maven extensively, reported being able to identify about ten targets per day in Iraq in 2017. In contrast, during the Russia-Ukraine war it managed to generate 70 targets per day with Maven.

Maven also significantly reduced the human element in combat decision-making, delegating much of the process to AI. Before Maven, “a human would decide when and how to shoot at a target, assess the operational approach, assess the data collected, decide to act, communicate the decision, execute fire, and communicate what happened.” The 18th Airborne Corps has used Maven to reduce the human role “in the loop” to two out these six steps: “the decision to act and the action itself.”

Maven integrates data feeds from land, sea, space, and cyber sensors in addition to the drone footage it analyzes. U.S. Central Command, responsible for U.S. military actions across the Middle East, reportedly had 179 different live data feeds integrated into the Maven system as of 2024.

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.”

The U.S. Army opened an enterprise agreement with Palantir worth up to nearly $10 billion between 2025 and 2035. This agreement combines 75 new Palantir contracts for Maven, as well as software for supply chains, logistics, and consolidated histories of each soldier’s personal information. Marking the first time a Silicon Valley company was selected over a traditional defense contractor, the company was contracted in 2018 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.

In addition to the DOD, some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers also partner with Palantir or use its software. Lockheed Martin has partnered with Palantir to develop software for U.S. Navy ships. Similarly, Northrop Grumman has partnered with the company to design armored vehicles for the U.S. Army. Airbus, Anduril, L3Harris, and Northrop Grumman use Palantir’s supply chain management software for weapons production.

Special Relationship with the Trump Administration

Palantir has been a politically oriented company since its inception and has allied itself closely with the Trump administration. 

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an early supporter and funder of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Palantir and other Thiel-led projects have at least 16 current and former employees working under the Trump Administration. This includes Vice-President JD Vance who was a mentee of Thiel’s and received $15 million from Thiel for his Ohio Senate race. CEO Alex Karp has donated $3.8 million to federal candidates between 2006 and February 2026, including a $1 million donation to Trump’s political action committee MAGA Inc after Trump’s 2025 presidential victory. Palantir also reportedly donated to the construction of Trump’s ballroom project in October 2025.

After Palantir stock dropped 14% during the U.S. attacks on Iran in April 2026, President Trump posted, “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” The Watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have said that this comment listing the company’s stock ticker could be, “an attempt to help the stock price of a major backer that has struggled over the last six months.” 

The company also maintains an advisory board with former military generals, former high ranking DOD officials, former elected Representatives, and former government health officials. There were also at least eleven former Pentagon or State Department officials working at Palantir as of February 2025. Palantir also employs well connected former government officials in its operations abroad, namely United Kingdom and Israel. 

Non-Government Work

Palantir’s non-government clients represented 46% of the company’s revenue in 2025. Its corporate customers include networks of hospitals, fossil fuel companies, major banks, as well as aerospace and weapons manufacturers.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the healthcare industry a major growth opportunity for Palantir. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded Palantir a $25 million contract to track COVID-19 data, with other governments following. The U.K. National Health Service (NHS) began a contract with Palantir to inform its COVID-19 response in December 2020. This led to Palantir winning a controversial £330 million NHS contract in November 2023 for the “Federal Data Platform” that joins different patient data into a single platform. Healthcare workers across the U.K. have organized against this contract extensively, citing human rights, privacy, and quality concerns.

Palantir executives have claimed that its system manages 21% of the hospital beds in the United States. It contracts with at least four major national hospital systems and four significant regional hospital networks, together covering 46 states. Hospitals largely have used Palantir’s AI tools to automate tasks like patient bed placement, staff scheduling, communicating with insurance companies, and analyzing patient data. HCA Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., is using Palantir to automate nurse scheduling and create nurse reports using patient data. National Nurses United, the largest U.S. nurses’ union, says that Palantir’s staffing software “creates unsustainable and faulty schedules that ultimately perpetuate the national short-staffing crisis.”

The company maintains a presence in a wide field of other industries, including Californian utilities with companies like PG&E and SoCal Edison for analyzing data related to wildfire risk. In the financial sector, Citi Bank employs Palantir’s software to automate onboarding new clients. Other high-profile Palantir clients include AT&T, Stellantis (the parent company owning Jeep, Ram, Dodge, and other car brands), Ferrari, Heineken, Walgreens, Wendy’s, the oil company BP, amongst many others.

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.