Palantir Technologies built its empire on post-9/11 fears. Data software to hunt terrorists. CIA backing from the start. Now, workers wonder if they’ve become the villains.
Founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the company promised to safeguard civil liberties amid national security demands. That narrative cracks under Donald Trump’s second term. Contracts with ICE swell. Tools track immigrants for deportation. Military systems like Maven guide strikes. Employees speak out in Slack channels. WIRED captured the unrest.
A former employee put it bluntly. “The broad story of Palantir as told to itself and to employees was that coming out of 9/11 we knew that there was going to be this big push for safety, and we were worried that that safety might infringe on civil liberties. And now the threat’s coming from within. We seem to be enabling them.” Identity crisis. Full-blown.
Fall 2025. Trump’s return ignites debates. January 2026. Federal agents kill nurse Alex Pretti during Minneapolis protests against ICE. Slack erupts. Workers demand contract details. February 28. U.S. missile hits an Iranian school. Over 120 children dead. Powered by Palantir’s Maven. Questions flood internal chats: “Were we involved, and are doing anything to stop a repeat if we were?”
March brings a company-posted manifesto. Summary of Karp’s book The Technological Republic. Critics inside call it fascist. One employee wrote, “Wether [sic] we acknowledge it or not, this impacts us all personally. I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” Another: “Yeah it turns out that short-form summaries of the book’s long-form ideas are easy to misrepresent. It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs.” Sales suffer. Especially abroad.
Contracts Fuel the Fire
ICE deals exploded. A $30 million pact in April 2025 births ImmigrationOS. Real-time tracking. Targeting for arrests. Self-deportation nudges. Federal spending on Palantir jumps: $541 million in 2024, nearly $1 billion in 2025. AOL tracked the surge.
Israel ties deepen too. January 2024 strategic partnership with the Defense Ministry. AI platforms like Lavender, Gospel, Where’s Daddy. UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese cites “reasonable grounds” for complicity in Gaza operations. Truthout detailed the tech’s role in targeting. Civilian deaths mount. Protests hit Palantir offices from Palo Alto to New York. “Purge Palantir,” they chant. Democracy Now!
Overseas backlash grows. UK NHS staff refuse Palantir tools over Gaza and ICE links. The Times and The Sunday Times. Australian data access sparks fears. Pensions divested. New Jersey lawmakers urge funds to dump shares. Rep. Menendez letter.
But Palantir pushes on. Deals with DOGE consolidate IRS data with health, education records. Privacy evaporates. WIRED again.
Leadership’s Response—and the Pushback
CTO Shyam Sankar holds AMAs. Privacy team updates wikis. They claim tech reduces risks in ICE work. A privacy worker admits in a leaked AMA: “This was very rogue.” On malicious clients: “a sufficiently malicious customer is, like, basically impossible to prevent at the moment.” Karp offers NDAs for details. Spokesperson insists: “Palantir is no monolith of belief, nor should we be. We all pride ourselves on a culture of fierce internal dialogue.” Proud of military support across administrations.
Current employee sees limits. “It’s never been really that people are afraid of speaking up against Karp. It’s more a question of what it would do, if anything.” Slack messages delete after seven days. Leaks wary. Non-disparagement for ex-staff.
Exits mount. Some over Israel. Others ICE. Juan Sebastián Pinto, former engineer, warns of authoritarian databases. “I simply cannot live in a world where my grandchildren have to be processed through a database where their everyday activities… are tracked.” NPR.
Karp shrugs. In a WIRED interview, he defends ICE work from Obama era. “The small island of Silicon Valley… should not also decide who lives in a country.” Controversy proves relevance. “If you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it’s not a position.”
Protests rage. Employees divided. Contracts boom. Palantir’s path clear: power through data. Workers? They’re left asking if the software they build now hunts the vulnerable. Not terrorists abroad. Citizens at home.
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