Palantir is a data analytics company founded with CIA seed money, which employed former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and former CIA Director George Tenet as consultants.
Its AI software, which journalist James Bamford characterized as “the digital equivalent of weapons of mass destruction,” is used by the Israeli Air Force to strike targets in Gaza and by the Ukrainian military to track Russian troop movements and carry out drone and missile attacks.
Since Donald Trump has taken office, Palantir’s stock price has almost doubled from $70.90 a share to $133.17 (on June 3). This figure is in part the result of a $30 million contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time. [1]
Wired and CNN have reported that Palantir is being tapped by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to create a master immigration database to speed up deportations.[2]
Overall, Palantir has received close to a billion dollars since Trump’s inauguration, according to The New York Times. The new business has led Palantir’s stock market valuation to climb from $50 billion a year ago to approaching $300 billion today.[3]
A company that few outside tech and national security circles recognized a few years ago is now worth more than Verizon or Disney and nearly as much as Bank of America.
NPR described Palantir CEO Alex Karp as a “tousle-haired 57-year-old billionaire, holding a doctorate in neoclassical social theory, who could be found in his off-hours Nordic skiing or practicing tai chi.”[4]
The son of hippies who spent a lot of time as a kid at political protests,[5] Karp is a longtime Democratic Party donor who gave $360,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign before backing Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election.[6]
Karp’s true neo-conservatism was apparent in a speech that he gave on a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum after October 7, 2023, when he criticized corporate America for its “abysmal failure at standing up to people who are anti-American, who are breathing the vapors of a thin new religion at elite schools.”[7]
Karp additionally praised Israel’s achievements in “building a nation from a desert,” which erases the history of Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba.[8]
NPR contrasted Karp’s support for the Democratic Party with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s embrace of the MAGA right.
Thiel is a billionaire who is one of President Trump’s long-time backers and a sugar daddy of J.D. Vance whom he met while Vance was a student at Yale Law School.[9]
Thiel’s connection to the CIA is apparent in the fact that he was an early investor in Facebook, the “CIA’s wet dream,” since Facebook users voluntarily put information about themselves online.[10]
According to NPR, where Karp and Thiel merge is around a shared devotion for “developing data-analyzing intelligence tools to,” as Karp has put it, “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority.”
These comments reflect on how one of the top Democratic Party influencers subscribes to a world view reminiscent of the era of social Darwinism, formal colonialism and eugenics.
Karp told a Time magazine reporter that he saw the opportunity to fulfill Palantir’s mission to “defend the West” and to “scare the f-ck out of our enemies.”
The Democratic Party—like the Republican Party—is now being financed and shaped by the CEO of a company that is a leading war profiteer and proponent of Western exceptionalism who is helping to create a surveillance state within the U.S. that would make George Orwell sick to his stomach.
A small number of former Palantir employees who rue the company’s close ties with the Trump administration are now speaking out.
They have publicized the fact that Karp has boasted about the company’s tools being used to kill enemies and that he once jokingly said that Wall Street analysts who tried to screw the company should be “sprayed with light fentanyl-laced urine,” according to NPR.
Prominent Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham accused Palantir of “building the infrastructure of the police state,” asking a Palantir executive on X to commit to not building products that could be used to help the U.S. government violate citizens’ constitutional rights.
In August 2024, Palantir hired noted China hawk Mike Gallagher, former Republican representative from Wisconsin who chaired McCarthy-style hearings that promoted alarmism and an aggressive military buildup directed against China.[11]
Gallagher, who has an intelligence background in the Marine Corps, stated that “in Palantir, you have a rare, leading technology company that is unapologetic in its defense of the West and its belief that America is a force for good in this world and worth defending against our enemies.”
Gallagher told Defense One that his priorities at Palantir would include building on the company’s recent string of contract awards—including the Army’s TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node) contract designed to help connect Army units to high-altitude and space sensors—and growing Palantir’s space portfolio.[12]
In May 2023, CovertAction Magazine ran an exposé detailing Palantir’s close ties to the CIA[13] and how it had recently extended its intrusive surveillance practices into Lithuania, a country on the front lines of the war in Ukraine with a right-wing government prone to arresting critical journalists and bloggers.
The article went into Palantir’s history of providing battlefield intelligence for the Pentagon and CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq and how Alex Karp had bragged that Palantir was responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine, where it had developed a system for managing aerial photographs from a huge network of satellites.[14]
In September 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging an investigation of Palantir before it went public.
One of the many concerns that they raised was incomplete information about investments from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm that partially funded Palantir when it was founded.
A 2008 filing showed that In-Q-Tel owned at least 10% of Palantir, though more information was not available.
Palantir’s skyrocketing wealth and growing political influence in the Trump era makes clear the urgent necessity of an investigation.
What is especially disturbing about the company is its specialization in AI and surveillance systems of such terrifying capabilities.
Trump’s first term was also a bonanza for Palantir. The New York Times Magazine reported that during those years, Palantir “won military contracts worth billions, including an $800 million Pentagon contract to build battlefield-intelligence system.” Palantir is now 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 license plates database for California. In 2012 New Orleans Police Department partnered with Palantir to create a predictive policing program that critics say has resulted in racial profiling. ↑
DOGE has even hired numerous former Palantir employees. During the pandemic, the Biden administration signed a contract with Palantir to manage the distribution of vaccines through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Palantir representatives have held talks with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education to use the company’s technology to organize the agencies’ data, according to two Palantir employees and officials in those agencies. ↑
Named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s’ Lord of the Rings, Palantir’s two primary software programs, Gotham and Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify patterns, connections and trends that might elude human analysts. ↑
A graduate of Haverford College, Karp holds a law degree from Stanford University where he became friendly with Peter Thiel and obtained his Ph.D. at the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt under the direction of the famed German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, a neo-Marxist. Karp claied to have moved Palantir to Denver to escape Silicon Valley’s “monoculture,” though he typically works out of a barn in New Hampshire when he’s not traveling. For a profile, see Michael Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much/” The New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2020. ↑
Karp describes himself as a “progressive warrior.” ↑
Harris’ close ties to Palantir go back to her tenure as California’s Attorney General when her office turned to Palantir for help to create a statewide law enforcement database. ↑
Palantir’s role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the importance of its AI systems in Ukraine is detailed in James Bamford, “How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza,” The Nation, April 12, 2024. See also Kit Klarenberg, “Trump’s Embrace of Dystopian Palantir Spying Tool Sends Stocks Soaring,” The Grayzone, June 4, 2025. ↑
This viewpoint is similar to people who used to claim that the North American colonists came upon an “empty wilderness”—a viewpoint that has no basis in historical reality. ↑
Thiel donated more than $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and escorted Vance to Mar-a-Lago to patch over his relations with Donald Trump after his former “Never Trump” stance. Thiel also introduced Vance to David Sacks, the Chief Operating Officer of PayPal, who donated $1 million to Vance’s Super PAC and hosted a fundraiser for him. ↑
Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, was recruited by the CIA at age 16 after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. ↑
See Eli Clifton, “Ex-Rep. Gallagher Psyched to Leverage Mu Network For Palantir,” Responsible Statecraft, August 22, 2024. Gallagher has also been a major supporter of U.S. military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. In the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Gallagher co-authored an article entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed,” which asserts that the U.S. needs to “put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.” In service of this latter goal, Gallagher and his co-author Matthew Pottinger advocate ratcheting up Pentagon spending to as much as 5% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which would push the Pentagon’s base budget to over $1.2 trillion. ↑
Gallagher was also intent on increasing Palantir’s involvement in AUKUS., a military partnership between the U.S., Australia and the UK. ↑
During the first five years of its existence, Palantir’s chief client was the CIA. Journalist Mark Bowden credited Palantir—whom he said fit the designation of a “killer app”—with perfecting the data collection and analysis that Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter had initiated with Total Information Awareness (TIA), a Pentagon surveillance system he helped to develop in the aftermath of 9/11 that the ACLU warned would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued.” ↑
Palantir’s important role in Ukraine, a testing ground for AI and other technologies being pioneered in Sillicon Valley, is documented in Vera Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned Ukraine Into an AI Lab,” Time, February 8, 2024. Palantir enabled the Ukrainians not just to gather extensive intelligence with the satellite photographs and to track intelligence targets, but also to respond to the intelligence quickly, in what is known as a very rapid “find, track, target, and prosecute” cycle. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
