Palantir Has Lots of Enemies. Do They Even Know What It Does?
It’s hard to explain something that can put chicken nuggets in Walmart and kill Osama bin Laden. Palantir can do both.
NOTE: In light of the current Iran hostilities, in which we are now seeing targeted U.S. drone strikes even on individual Basij agents and checkpoints in cities across the country, it seems appropriate to take a look at one of America’s most decisive advantages, Palantir. — RDM
by Maya Sulkin
March 13, 2026
“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me.
He was disarmingly blunt, pacing around his office swinging a tai chi saber over his head.
His question came in response to one I asked about the criticism his company attracts — criticism that has reached a fever pitch last year as Palantir signed a $10 billion deal with the U.S. Army and became one of 2025’s top-performing stocks.
So what’s the answer to Karp’s question? A bit of both.
The left’s critique of Palantir goes something like this: Palantir is a shadowy company with operations across the globe, working with governments and corporations that give Palantir access to private data, which it uses to achieve whatever its clients ask — ethical concerns be damned. In other words, these critics say, Palantir uses data collection and aggregation to do things like identify illegal immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or allegedly kill aid workers in Gaza with its advanced targeting software.
But it’s not just the political left. Figures on the so-called woke right — conspiracy-theorist entertainers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens — have lambasted the company for some of the same reasons, including Palantir’s connections to Israel.
And Republicans who want America to pull back from the world, like Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, have sounded the alarm about the danger of Palantir’s connections to the Deep State, pointing to secretive government contracts that they fear will lead to mass surveillance.
Some refuse to put their name next to their criticism, like this Republican aide who told Semafor: “These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality — and now they have all the data. Someone should do something.”
But do what, exactly?
Many of the critics can’t tell you. Part of the problem is that Palantir is impregnable and hard to understand, fueling the sense that it must be up to something nefarious. Which, in part, may explain why The New York Times, in an article in May, speculated that because Palantir works with multiple government agencies, President Donald Trump might soon be able to “compile a master list of personal information” about every American.
That’s not true, according to Palantir. One executive in its government division told me the accusation of data sharing would be “like saying if the IRS uses Microsoft Excel/Office 365 and the CDC uses Microsoft Excel/Office 365, all of a sudden I have one system and I can see everything in one Excel.”
But the mere possibility of that scenario deepens suspicion. Michael Steinberger, the author of a Karp biography published last year, said that “if you don’t think well of Donald Trump, if you don’t think well of the people around him, if you think that these are people who might abuse personal data, then you’re going to, by extension, be concerned about Palantir. But it’s not a Palantir issue.”
The first question I asked Palantir employees at their office in Washington, D.C., was simple: What do you do for a living?
The answers almost always came back as a metaphor.
One engineer told me to think of Palantir as capable of finding a moving needle in a haystack the size of a small country.
Others told me to imagine a series of tangled garden hoses in your backyard, with the hoses representing various pieces of data. If your organization is the U.S. Army, those hoses might represent ammunition sources, troop locations, medical supplies, intel from a spy on the ground, or the signals and behaviors of the enemy. Palantir’s software untangles the hoses and makes sure all of the water is going to and coming from the correct place, so that the general or colonel can make sense of the data as quickly as possible, and make the most informed decision.
Here is how I described Palantir to my mom, who doesn’t know what a large language model (LLM) is: It is a very advanced data-analysis company. Governments, the military, and big companies give Palantir their information — everything from Post-it notes to satellite images to spreadsheets. In disparate pieces, all that data is overwhelming and hard to make sense of, mostly because those pieces of data aren’t in conversation with each other. Palantir’s software organizes it, connects the dots, and highlights patterns that humans might miss.
In Karp’s words, Palantir’s software “analyzes data and finds hidden patterns.”
The people who work there — “Palantirians,” they call themselves — believe they are saving the world. And many of them believe they are the only people capable of doing so.
The engineers there described themselves to me as “some of the best coders in the world,” “real-world geniuses,” and “the most talented people you’ll ever meet in your life.” They also threw around phrases like “fail forward and leverage your spike” and “artist colony of entrepreneurs.” They call engineers “coding warriors.”
To some people, all that can sound cult-like and self-aggrandizing. To others who believe as Karp does that Palantir is defending the West, it sounds like a culture where people believe in what they are doing. The company’s onboarding program is called “Indoc” — short for indoctrination, though employees swear it’s just a “pretty corporate” orientation. Palantir’s leaders sign their emails with “save the Shire,” a reference to The Lord of the Rings, and they call each other “hobbits.” (Palantir itself is named for the seeing stones in the J.R.R. Tolkien novel.)
I met a Stanford University graduate in his early 20s with the title “Head of Jagged Failure.” His job, or part of it, is to assure his team of young employees that it’s okay to fail.
If all this seems over the top, consider the fact that it’s hard to explain the mechanics of software that can both help put chicken nuggets in Walmart and help kill Osama bin Laden. And Palantir can do both.
Palantir was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings, and Stephen Cohen. Karp and Thiel were law-school buddies who envisioned a company that could build powerful software to serve the West — especially its intelligence agencies and military. The idea was born in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when U.S. intelligence agencies were criticized for failing to “connect the dots” of the hijackings despite having data that could have — indeed, should have — revealed the plot.
