The US tech firm is fast becoming one of the most notorious corporations in the Western world. Why?

Why is Palantir in the news? 
Palantir Technologies Inc., a Miami-based company that specialises in data integration and analysis, is seldom out of the news. This is partly because it works in controversial sectors: its biggest client is the US military, and its software is used in conflicts from Israel to Ukraine. Clients also include the CIA and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); it was involved in Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). It has also expanded into healthcare: in Britain, its contracts include a £330 million deal with NHS England and a £240.6 million deal with the Ministry of Defence.

But its notoriety is in part because of its eccentric CEO, Alex Karp. Palantir recently posted a manifesto penned by Karp on X, which, among other things, declared that “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defence of the nation”; called for universal conscription; encouraged the development of AI weapons; and condemned the West’s “vacant and hollow pluralism”. One MP called it “the ramblings of a supervillain”. 

Where did Palantir come from? 
Founded in 2003 by a group of tech moguls headed by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a libertarian political activist, Palantir was named after the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings”. (Thiel is a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.) Originally, it applied PayPal’s fraud detection system, which successfully identified fraudulent activity on eBay, to US national security; early funding came from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that funds projects for the CIA. Palantir’s technology was taken up by the US defence establishment under President Obama – it is rumoured it was involved in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and it helped the US and UK governments with contact tracing and vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic. It now helps the Trump administration track undocumented immigrants and provides Israel’s military with “intelligence and surveillance services”. Palantir currently has a market capitalisation of some $350 billion. 

What does it actually do? 
One former employee likened Palantir’s work to “really extravagant plumbing with data”. Most big companies and government agencies have a lot of information they can’t easily use because it’s stored in a hodgepodge of different systems and databases. Palantir’s core products: Foundry – primarily for civilian use – and Gotham – for military and law enforcement – sit on top of those different systems and pull all the data together in an interface that’s easy to use (little coding is required). A big selling point is that Palantir doesn’t itself access or exploit the data, which stays with the customer; it just makes it easier to analyse. This is useful for all sorts of unobjectionable things, such as Covid testing and tracing. But it also allows ICE to collect large amounts of information to investigate individuals, and it helps the US military to plan bombing campaigns.

What is its military role? 
Palantir is the leading contractor for Project Maven, the US military’s (and Nato’s) targeting system. Maven draws together a mass of data from drones, satellites, signals and other sources to flag potential targets; it presents findings to human analysts in one clear user interface; and can relay their decisions to appropriate weapons systems. According to a new book, “Project Maven” by Katrina Manson, the entire “kill chain”, from target identification to target destruction, consists of four clicks. Maven allows hundreds of targets to be hit per day, and adding in AI tools to help interpret data means that number is capable of rising into the thousands. Similar Palantir technology is used in Ukraine, and since 7 October 2023, it has worked closely with the Israel Defence Forces, whose AI-assisted systems use algorithms to identify and assassinate suspected Hamas agents. 

What are the implications of this technology? 
Speeding up the steps between identifying a target and destroying it is fundamental to modern warfare, so it is immensely valuable. In Ukraine, Palantir’s tools have helped to fuse battlefield intelligence, track and destroy drones, even document war crimes. But such systems are not infallible, and accelerating the kill chain also minimises the role of human judgement: Maven was used to wrongly identify a primary school in Minab, Iran (in a building used years before by the Revolutionary Guard Corps), as a military target. US missiles killed some 168 people, mostly young girls. 

Where does the NHS come into this? 
Palantir has been involved in the NHS’s data-handling since 2020, during Covid. In 2023, it won a contract to develop the Federated Data Platform, designed to streamline tangled datasets across the NHS and help clear hospital backlogs. In some hospitals, for example, scheduling operations may require staff to consult separate systems for waiting lists, theatre bookings, staff rotas and equipment orders. But many critics dislike the idea of a US spytech firm, with links to the US and Israeli militaries, potentially gaining access to sensitive health data. Others question its value for money. 

How worried should we be? 
Palantir has become “a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance”, said Wired magazine. It is a cause célèbre on the British Left that has been taken up by the Greens’ Zack Polanski. Arguably, though, it is just a data analytics company with a militarised culture designed in part to give it a mystique: the company’s slogan is “We build software that dominates”; it uses military and intelligence jargon instead of more standard office terms. (Its data consultants are known as “forward deployment software engineers” or “deltas”.) But not least because of its close links to a US administration that is an unreliable ally at best, many policymakers in Western Europe are now reconsidering the wisdom of using Palantir’s services.

The world according to Karp 
Alex Karp, 58, the son of a Jewish doctor and an African-American artist from Philadelphia, was a left-wing student activist; he studied in Frankfurt under the socialist philosopher Jürgen Habermas and has no background in computing. He became friends with Peter Thiel at Stanford Law School and in 2003 helped co-found Palantir.

Karp has always been outspoken about the company’s values – Palantir has long refused to work with Chinese or Russian companies – but these have moved markedly to the right over the years, and today he often rails against “woke” thinking, describing it as “pagan”. Karp is a fan of martial arts and pistol shooting, and has a retinue of bodyguards drawn mostly from Norwegian special forces, apparently because they are able to keep up with his obsessive cross-country skiing. His net worth is estimated at over $15 billion.

Palantir’s “manifesto”, like Karp’s recent book “The Technological Republic”, seemed to argue for a merger between Silicon Valley and a nationalistic, militarised US state; but it also railed, idiosyncratically, against the iPhone and the “post-war neutering of Germany and Japan”. It was seen by some as an attempt to curry favour with the Trump White House, which has turned on tech firms deemed unsupportive, such as Anthropic.

“There’s no money in politics,” is something Nigel Farage has said often over the years. Yet it turns out that in his case, there is really quite a lot, said Anna Isaac in The Guardian. Last week, it emerged that shortly before announcing his plan to stand in the 2024 election – having previously repeatedly ruled it out – Farage pocketed £5 million from the crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne. The tycoon, who is based in Thailand, has since given Reform UK £12 million, making him one of the biggest political donors in UK history. The £5 million, though, was a gift to Farage himself. It was, he explained, to pay for his personal security, and he said he’d had no need to declare it, as it was given to him before he became an MP, and it was purely “personal”. 

It’s hard to square this with the rules, said The Observer. MPs are obliged to declare gifts they received in the year before they were elected, and in assessing the propriety of a gift, they must consider what a reasonable person would make of it. Even if Farage believed that a £5 million gift – unprecedented in British politics – would not influence him in his public duties, it surely failed this “appearance test”. Perhaps inevitably, he has been referred to the standards watchdog. 

Harborne says he expects nothing in return for his donations, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. And maybe he does not. But “it just so happens” that Farage is proposing a crypto “Big Bang” – the creation of a national bitcoin reserve; crypto-specific tax cuts; lighter regulation – that could massively benefit crypto firms. Harborne’s gifts to Reform are huge: two-thirds of its funding comes from him. And he is not the party’s only crypto donor. But in crypto world, these sums amount to “a bar tip”. It seems that the wall of money that has flooded US politics, handing millions to candidates who back crypto-friendly policies, is arriving in Britain. We have to wonder how many prospective Reform MPs have already accepted large “personal” gifts. The party poses as anti-establishment, but while promising “genuine hope” to voters who feel betrayed by the failures of the established parties, it is quietly “advancing the interests of its own patronage networks”. In other words, it is not smashing the elites: it is replacing them.

As a veteran producer of David Attenborough documentaries, Anthony Geffen has had some memorable days at work. But none more so than the 8th of May 2015, he told Damian Whitworth in The Times. Attenborough was due to be in Washington that day for a screening, and Geffen had got in touch with the White House to see if he might be able to meet Barack Obama to discuss climate change. Obama’s aides informed him that the president was actually a great admirer of the naturalist. “He grew up watching his programmes in Hawaii,” said Geffen. Obama didn’t just want to meet him: he wanted to interview him. 

And so on Attenborough’s 89th birthday, the two men sat down together in the Oval Office. It was an odd moment. “We were all out of our comfort zone,” said Geffen. “Obama was clearly fascinated that he was meeting somebody who genuinely meant a lot to him.” They spoke at length, “utterly engaged” in what the other was saying. “You could have heard a pin drop.” 

Afterwards, Obama asked “Atten-burrow” to sign a tatty copy of one of his early books. “It was like he had interviewed one of his heroes.” The Englishmen then retired to a bar to reflect on what Attenborough described as one of the most “extraordinary” days of his life. “I’ve got a photograph of us sitting there and we look like we can’t believe what just happened.”