Palantir, a Denver-based software company that holds extensive contracts with the U.S. government, is using its software to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement compile data to track down undocumented immigrants and deport them, The Washington Post reported.
Here’s what to know about the data management firm.
What does Palantir do?
Palantir specializes in tools that sort through massive amounts of data to pull out what is useful. Customers include nonprofits, corporations and government agencies. That data can include material as mundane as a restaurant’s orders and inventory, a manufacturer’s employee schedules or a treatment plant’s electricity usage. It can also include drone and satellite footage obtained by a military.
Its Gotham tool, for instance, when used by law enforcement agencies, “transforms historically static records — think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages — into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance,” Nicole M. Bennett, assistant director at the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University, wrote in the Conversation.
Users can build intelligence profiles and search for people based on characteristics such as a tattoo or immigration status, trawling through material at a speed that dramatically outpaces human capabilities, she added.
After going public five years ago, the company rose to become one of the top-performing stocks on the S&P 500 so far this year. It pulled in $2.87 billion in revenue last year and about $1.2 billion in the third quarter of this year alone, with the largest share coming from U.S. government contracts. It expects to make more than $4 billion in revenue this year, according to a recent quarterly filing.
Who runs Palantir?
Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings and Stephen Cohen, who remains its president. Its seed funding included $2 million from a CIA incubator, and it was founded with the mission of advancing U.S. national security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The word “palantir” refers to the black orbs with the power to see events across time and space in the fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings.”
Thiel, who remains Palantir’s board chairman, is a billionaire tech investor who co-founded PayPal and was an early backer of Facebook. Known for his outspoken libertarian and right-wing ideology, Thiel has funded like-minded politicians such as JD Vance, when the vice president was first running as a senator during the Biden administration. He also gave money to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Karp has been the company’s CEO since 2005. A longtime Democrat, he was critical of Trump during his first administration and has previously said that he wants the company to be involved in “supporting progressive values.” He also said he has turned down contracts that targeted minorities or that he found otherwise unethical, The Post reported.
More recently, however, he has called Palantir “completely anti-woke” and has praised Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, drawing closer to Republicans partly because of their support for Israel, The Post reported. In a letter to shareholders last month, he called for a “return to a shared national experience — an embrace of common identity that by definition puts forward certain ideas, values, culture, and ways of living at the exclusion of others.”
Palantir’s investors include White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who holds between $100,001 and $250,000 in Palantir stock, according to his financial disclosure report.
How is Palantir connected to the U.S. government?
The largest share of Palantir’s revenue from government contracts comes from the Defense Department, which has paid it about $1.6 billion since 2008, according to a Washington Post analysis of spending data. The Pentagon pays it for technology that includes its Maven Smart System, which uses artificial intelligence in targeting, logistics planning and predictions. Palantir’s work building data management systems for the military began in 2011 under President Barack Obama.
Along with the Defense Department, the company has contracts with several other branches of the federal government, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS. It has drawn criticism for its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where its product, Immigration OS, is used to identify, track and deport suspected noncitizens, according to the American Immigration Council, which has called for more oversight of its AI-based tools when they are used in immigration and raised concerns about potential impacts on civil liberties.
This year, Karp and another Palantir executive, Nicholas W. Zamiska, published a book arguing for Silicon Valley to embrace working with the U.S. government and, in particular, the Pentagon. In an opinion piece last year in The Post, the authors wrote that developing advanced weaponry and ensuring “the supremacy of U.S. military power” was critical to safeguarding peace. “This is the software century; wars of the future will be driven by artificial intelligence,” they wrote.
What else is Palantir connected to?
Palantir also has contracts with private companies and other governments. In the third quarter this year, its revenue was split into $397 million in U.S. commercial contracts, $486 million in U.S. government contracts, $151 million in non-U.S. commercial contracts and $147 million in non-U.S. government contracts.
Its partnerships have included governments such as the United Kingdom, Israel and Ukraine, according to government and company statements, and more than 700 commercial customers, according to its most recent investor presentation. Its website lists the World Food Program, AT&T and Walgreens among its commercial clients.
Eva Dou contributed to this report.
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