Palantir employees have spent weeks asking company leadership for answers on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On Friday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp finally appeared to give in—sort of.
In an email sent to all Palantir employees, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, shared a pre-recorded nearly hourlong video conversation with Karp about Palantir’s involvement with ICE.
“On the back of recent events, internal conversations, and calls from many of you to better understand how executive leadership is wrestling with questions central to Palantir’s place in the world today, I sat down with Dr. Karp earlier for a longform discussion,” Bowman wrote in the email, viewed by WIRED. “To be clear, our objective in this exchange was not to cover each detail of every controversy that graces the liveliest of company Slack channels, nor to fully assuage every concern that each of you may carry … Most of all, Dr. Karp has made clear his commitment to reinvigorating his direct engagement with Hobbits and this discussion endeavors to model the form of rigorous dialogue that should be at the center of Palantir’s prized culture.” (Palantir leadership sometimes refers to employees as “hobbits,” after the fictional Lord of the Rings characters.)
The video did not answer specific questions about Palantir’s product capabilities, however, or how ICE was utilizing Palantir’s products. Instead, the video said workers could sign non-disclosure agreements if they wanted more detailed information.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For roughly the first 40 minutes of the conversation, Karp failed to address questions about the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that littered internal chats weeks before. Instead, Karp focused on Palantir’s role in building and maintaining Western power—a topic he frequently broaches in public-facing interviews and in his most recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
Towards the end of the video, Karp turns his attention broadly to immigration enforcement, saying that Palantir will not have a policy “that’s different depending on the president,” and that Democrats also prioritized these issues under prior administrations. Karp specifically cited former president Barack Obama, who said that the US is both a “nation of immigrants” and a “nation of laws” in a 2014 address. Karp also argued that institutions planning to break laws do not buy Palantir’s products, claiming that the products’ technical capabilities make it difficult to hide malfeasance.
While Karp declined to go into more detail on what the products Palantir provides to ICE enable, he offered workers the ability to sign NDAs in order to receive one-on-one briefings. At the end of the email linking out to this conversation, Bowman said that the video was just the beginning of the company becoming more forthcoming on its work with ICE. Bowman did not share what additional information workers could expect in the future, but said the Karp video was “a step forward, not a completion” of Palantir leadership’s discussions on its ICE work with staff.
The video came after weeks of internal pressure from workers. Soon after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti last month, workers flooded Palantir’s internal Slack questioning the company’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, how the products provided work in tandem with ICE’s goals, and whether the company should be involved with the agency at all. The pre-recorded conversation with Karp offered little insight to their questions.
In internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED in January, workers complained of a lack of transparency on how the product many of them sell and build enables ICE enforcement.
“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote one worker in a Slack channel dedicated to world news coverage. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping to do that?”
That same weekend, the privacy and civil liberties team released an updated internal wiki offering some information into the work. The update, posted January 24 and reported by WIRED, said that Palantir had recently finished a six-month pilot supporting ICE efforts to identify potential targets and track self-deportations. It also said that the company is beginning a new pilot with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to assist officials “in identifying fraudulent benefit submissions.” Since December, the Trump administration has used allegations of fraud to justify ICE presence in cities like Minneapolis.
“There is no history of Palantir where we’re 100 percent popular,” Karp told workers in the Friday video. “There is a history of Palantir where we’re unpopular and we do better internally. And yeah, we’re behind the curve internally.”
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