Beware Palantir
Origins of Palantir
On 25 November 2025, The Guardian published an article, written by columnist Arwa Mahdawi, entitled ‘JD Vance might want to run in 2028 – but does he have a Palantir-shaped problem?’. The article explained that United States Vice-President JD Vance, with aspirations to run for President in 2028, may find himself compromised in his bid for power by his long-standing and extensive connections to Palantir, a $450bn corporate behemoth and its co-founder, Peter Thiel.
Ask most people what their opinions are of Palantir and they would in all likelihood answer ‘What is a Palantir?’ Some may even identify the name Palantir as a reference to the seeing stones of the same name which featured in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. The stones’ name derived from the words ‘far’ and ‘watch over’ in the fictional Elvish language from the book.
But Palantir is certainly a name becoming more readily recognised after being discussed by popular content creators like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson; Rogan interviewed Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, in August 2024, but has also referenced an article (‘Trump administration silently employs Palantir to gather personal data of each American, raising privacy, data misuse concerns: Report’) written by Namrata Sen and published on financial website Benzinga on 3 June 2025. The article detailed the data-gathering activities of the US government, in league with Palantir Technologies and their ‘Foundry’ platform. Meanwhile Carlson has said that the rise of Palantir and other tech giants and their progressive intermingling with the US state apparatus could be used to “enslave the population”.
Who is Peter Thiel?
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, was born in West Germany in 1967 and emigrated to the USA with his parents when he was one year old. For the period from 1971 to 1977, Thiel’s family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (now known as Namibia). His father worked in the mining industry, while Thiel and his younger brother attended various elementary schools, where the wearing of uniform was strictly enforced and corporal punishment was frequently deployed. Thiel has said that it was this distasteful experience which influenced his support for libertarianism. Thiel also defended the then-existing apartheid system in South Africa when he was a schoolboy, stating that it was “a sound economic system”.
Thiel’s family returned to the USA in 1977. After graduating from Stanford, he worked in a number of jobs including as a speechwriter before becoming a trader at now-defunct bank Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital in 1996 and, two years later, co-founded payment platform PayPal, which four years later was sold to eBay for $1.5bn. Thiel then founded Clarium Capital, a hedge fund, before he launched Palantir Technologies in 2003 as a ‘data analysis’ company.
While Thiel’s views on apartheid as a schoolboy are a matter of public record, his political views as an adult have also come under scrutiny. In 2009, he wrote an article in which he stated that he no longer believed “that freedom and democracy are compatible” and, with the limits of politics laid bare by the 2008 stock market crash, technological advancements in fields including cyberspace, outer space and sea exploration would allow libertarians like himself to “escape from politics in all its forms” (‘Education of a Libertarian’, Cato Unbound, 13 April 2009).
What is Palantir?
Palantir Technologies is an American software firm founded in 2003 with its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. Employing almost 4,000 people, it specialises in software platforms which manage data and has huge contracts with US state agencies and private companies. It also has a strong presence in Britain, boasting clients in the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and the National Health Service, where it holds a major contract to build the NHS Federated Data Platform, on which more later.
While what Palantir does as a company is difficult to define in general terms, the nature of its work is much easier to understand by examining the contracts that it holds with state bodies. Palantir’s tentacles have every pillar of the US state in its grip. Its enormous consolidated contract with the Department of Defense is just one of a raft of contracts it holds in various US government departments.
This contract consolidated and renewed 75 separate procurement contracts into a single $10bn deal. This enormous contract means that key military activity, including the monitoring of troop movements, intelligence analysis and, critically, targeting decisions are handed over to sophisticated Artificial Intelligence platforms which are essentially owned by shareholders and are run by boards whose first and last obligation is to those shareholders. It also means that key military decisions and activities are being taken out of the hands of human beings and carried out by algorithms. It is perhaps inevitable that this relinquishment of military decisions from men to machines will remind readers of ‘Skynet’; the fictitious super-intelligence entity from the 1984 James Cameron film The Terminator, which becomes self-aware and launches an all-out war (including nuclear) to destroy its perceived enemy – mankind!
The now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), once briefly led by the Trump ally turned sworn enemy Elon Musk, used Palantir’s ‘Foundry’ platform to automate a whole raft of activities, including federal budgeting, healthcare payments and war veteran payments. In 2022, Palantir was awarded a $443m consolidation contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which includes providing ‘disease surveillance and outbreak response’ (see Dave Nyczepir,‘CDC awards Palantir consolidated disease surveillance contract worth $443M’, Fedscoop, 7 December 2022).
The US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, has paid Palantir $30 million to create “near real-time visibility” to the agency with its ‘ImmigrationOS’ platform on people self-deporting from the United States. According to an article on the Wired website, the software would help the agency choose which people to deport and can highlight ‘visa overstays’ (see Caroline Haskins , ‘ICE is paying Palantir $30 million to build ‘ImmigrationOS’surveillance platform’, Wired, 10 April 2025).
Palantir was commissioned by the Department for Health & Human Services (HHS) in 2020 to build the Tiberius software platform, which tracks data on Covid vaccine production, distribution and administration. The use of this platform was expanded beyond this original scope to include ‘therapeutics distribution and supply chain resiliency’ (or “protect agencies against catastrophic supply chain disruptions”, according to Palantir itself) in a $5.3m contract which was announced by Palantir in 2022 (see Dave Nyczepir, ’CDC further expands use of Palantir’s Tiberius platform, Fedscoop, 22 February 2022).
In June 2025, Democrat representatives demanded that Palantir provide Congress with information regarding the company’s contracts with the US government after a report in The New York Times stated that Palantir was working with the IRS to develop a centralised database on American citizens that would be shareable across agencies. This followed an executive order signed by President Trump in March of this year (order 14243) committing the federal government and its agencies to data-sharing.
A bubble?
Palantir is one of many companies whose stock value has ballooned as the ‘AI bubble’ has expanded exponentially. Some readers will recall the growth and eventual bursting of the so-called ‘dot-com’ bubble, which ballooned in the late 1990s and was almost completely gone by the end of 2002. The crash caused many online shopping and communications companies to collapse and be bought out as their share prices slumped, put thousands of people out of work and their markets largely disappeared. There are many characteristics of the current ‘AI bubble’ which will undoubtedly ring bells in the minds of those who remember the bursting of the ‘dot com’ bubble.
Many AI companies, including OpenAI, are operating with substantial financial losses despite high revenue targets. Alarms have been raised over ‘circular flows’, where leading AI firms lend money to one another or invest in their own customers to prop up valuations and revenue. The Bank of England warned in December 2025 that the AI sector’s growth is being fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt, creating risks for financial stability if values fall much like they did in 2002 (see Archie Mitchell, ‘Bank of England warns of AI bubble risk’, BBC News, 2 December 2025).
In summary, Palantir holds contracts in every major department within the US state apparatus, has received millions of dollars in income and holds billions of dollars in assets. The company’s share price has risen in just twelve months from $66.39 to $168.45 at the time of writing, reaching its peak of $207.18 on 3 November 2025.
The American political class and Palantir
It is this rising share price which offers a clue as to how readily and comprehensively Palantir has been able to intertwine itself with the American state. Senior politicians of both major parties hold Palantir stock, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who on 22 November announced her resignation from Congress following a public fallout with President Trump. She disclosed owning Palantir stock in February 2025 and, as a member of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, questions were raised regarding a potential conflict of interest given the substantial contracts that the DHS had handed to Palantir.
Mr Cleo Fields, Democrat representative for Louisiana with an estimated net worth of $40m according to Quiverquant.com, has made at least six purchases of Palantir stock between June and October 2025 worth $615,000. His purchases are part of a whole raft of investments that Mr Fields has made over the last few months, including in Amazon (which owns Amazon Web Services, the company which essentially runs the internet) and Nvidia, which designs and manufactures computer chips.
United States Vice-President JD Vance (formerly known as James Donald Bowman, or James Daniel Hamel) has had a long relationship with Peter Thiel, going back to when Vance worked at Thiel’s investment company, Mithril Capital (Mithril being another The Lord of the Rings reference, this being the mythical Elvish armour which featured in the story) in 2016. Thiel invested approximately $15m in the investment company Narya Capital, which was co-founded by Vance in 2019 and made a major financial contribution, amounting to another $15m, to Vance’s campaign to run for governor of Ohio.
Other notable American politicians with financial interests in Palantir include James Comer, Republican Congressman for Kentucky, Gilbert Ray Cisneros Jr, Democratic representative for California and former Under Secretary during the term of President Joe Biden, Julie Johnson, Democratic representative for Texas, and Stephen Miller, the former White House deputy chief of staff under the Trump administration who was found to own between $100,000 and $250,000 in Palantir stock, held in a child’s account, while being a key figure in the administration’s immigration policies that utilised Palantir’s software for ICE.
The American ruling class, and its agents in the halls of political power, have a clear and vested interest in the continued proliferation of Artificial Intelligence in every facet of the US state. Palantir is just one of a number of companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and xAI who have developed sophisticated artificial intelligence platforms and are intent on selling them to the US state and governments across the world.
Palantir and Ukraine
Ukraine has served as a real-world test bed for its artificial intelligence military applications since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation in 2022. A Palantir team, which includes Ukrainian software engineers, has been using NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine to test and refine a number of its platforms and integrate AI for tasks including targeting, demining and intelligence analysis.
An article in The Times, published on 24 December 2022 (George Grylls, ‘Bank of England warns of AI bubble risk’), proudly archived on Palantir’s own website, claims that Ukraine’s use of artificial intelligence has given them a “technological edge” over Russia, with the accuracy and swiftness of artillery strikes increased by the use of software developed by Palantir. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was an early investor in the AI firm, so impressed was it by Palantir’s work in managing deployment of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company even opened an office in Ukraine.
The software supplied to Ukraine is being provided pro bono by Palantir, however the British Ministry of Defence was willing to stump up £75m to seal a three-year contract with Palantir to support the Ministry’s ‘digital transformation’, including providing secure data access to aid in faster decision making.
Three years on from this Times article’s publication and with Russian Ministry of Defence claiming that there have been almost 1,000,000 deaths and injuries suffered by Ukraine since the beginning of the SMO, the bold claims of Ukraine’s technological advantage made by the British imperialist media and Palantir ring more hollow than ever.
Palantir and Israel
Palantir is a key corporate supporter of the settler-colonial state of Israel, with Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer of the company, being a strong public supporter of Israel in both personal and professional capacities (see Ahmed ElDin, ‘Financed by Epstein, fueled by Thiel, killing in Gaza and spying on you‘, Out Loud, 6 June 2025). In October 2023, shortly after the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attacks, Karp commissioned a near full-page advert in The New York Times bearing the message “Palantir stand with Israel’. In November 2023, Karp made a public statement where he made clear that: Palantir:
“Palantir is the first major company to, in my view, have said from the beginning… supplies its products to Western allies. We’ve never supplied our products to our enemies, we proudly support the US Government, I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every we way we can”.
Palantir has what in common parlance is known as a ‘strategic partnership’ with Israel’s Ministry of Defence, providing AI and data analysis for use in combat conditions, including in the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s ill-fated military incursion in Lebanon in October 2024 and their invasion of south western Syria after the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
One strand of Palantir’s extensive and extremely lucrative corporate relationship with Israel’s military is to supply advanced targeting AI hardware and software. When three clearly-marked and approved vehicles belonging to World Central Kitchen were destroyed by Israel Defence Forces on 1 April 2024, killing seven aid workers and destroying the food that they were transporting to starving Gazans, an IDF ‘investigation’ determined that it was a ‘mistake’ and sacked two Israeli officers.
However, given that the missiles, which destroyed these vehicles along with their cargo and killed their occupants, hit their targets which extraordinary precision (specifically hitting the rooftop logos on each truck), it could be argued that these strikes were coldly calculated and not some sort of error. Given that IDF officers have conducted similar strikes and attacks on aid workers assisting the victims of Israel’s blood-soaked military excursions, including during the genocide in Gaza, then it could be stated with a great degree of certainty that Palantir’s technology is integral to Israel’s war crimes.
Palantir and Britain
Palantir’s associations with the state of Israel, and their war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, has led to protests against the company across the Western world, with Britain being no exception. Palantir UK is headed by Louis Mosley whose father, Max Mosley, was from 1993 to 2009 the president of Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body for world motorsport including Formula 1. Max Mosley came to the broader attention of the British public in 2008, when he successfully sued the News of the World for invading his privacy after they reported on an allegedly Nazi-themed sex act involving five women. He then began a years-long legal crusade against the British press, including giving financial support to victims of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
However, it will be Louis Mosley’s grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, whose name will resonate with readers. Oswald Mosley was a former Member of Parliament (at different times a Conservative, an independent, and Labour MP for Smethwick) before he founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932, inspired by the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mosley was, arguably most famously, run out of the East London district of Shadwell in 1936 in the Battle of Cable Street, where anti-fascist protestors, local working class people, trade unionists and communists clashed with the police, Mosley and the Blackshirts (Mosley’s fascist stooges) when they attempted to march in an area with a sizeable Jewish community to mark the Union’s anniversary.
Palantir’s key contracts in Britain include one made with the Ministry of Defence, where Palantir supplies, much like to the IDF and the US Army, targeting and decision support. According to Palantir itself, the contract “…will enable the MOD to exploit data at scale and speed to make faster, better decisions across Defence”. But it is Palantir’s attempts to integrate itself into the National Health Service which is giving most cause for concern.
The NHS began the roll-out of its Federated Data Platform (FDS) in April 2024. The system claims to help manage hospital resources, like beds, waiting lists and supplies, under a £330m contract that the NHS signed with Palantir. The details of the contract have been withheld by the British government after campaign group Democracy for Sale attempted to gain the details via a Freedom of Information request and was stalled by the Department for Health and Social Care, who claimed that they needed more time to process the request. To date, this information is still not forthcoming (See Lucas Amin and Peter Geoghegan, ‘UK government withholding details of Palantir contract’, Democracy for Sale, 24 May 2025).
Meanwhile, the government has invested £8m of public money (i.e. our money) to management consultancy firm KPMG to encourage NHS trusts to adopt the platform, despite reports that the software doesn’t work and that some hospitals have stopped using it (see Lucas Amin and Peter Geoghegan, ‘Palantir’s NHS data platform rejected by most hospitals’, Democracy for Sale, 13 May 2025).
Some NHS trusts have said that they will not use the platform at all and ‘No Palantir in Our NHS’, a campaign group, coordinates actions to highlight the crimes of Palantir and to pressure NHS trusts to reject the company and its platform. Campaigners have pointed out that a company which has assisted in meting out death and destruction to women, children and aid workers in Gaza and has been pivotal in Donald Trump’s deportations of migrants in the United States should be nowhere near our National Health Service, particularly if it has access to extremely sensitive and private data.
Conclusion
Palantir is not alone in its attempts to interweave itself into the very fabric of states across the world – companies including Microsoft, SpaceX (owned by Elon Musk) and GovCloud (owned by Amazon) are making similar and equally sinister inroads. But Palantir, dominated at its highest levels by defenders of ‘western civilisation’, the settler-colonial state that is Israel and descendants of fascists, will concern observers the most. Our bankrupt political class, seeking self-enrichment above any and all other considerations, are not only handing our already curtailed and wretched bourgeois democracy over to huge, faceless and wholly malevolent organisations, but are apparently also handing over every single private detail of each and every one of us as well.
The ruling classes of nations across the Western world are looking to artificial intelligence, and the investment bubble that they are a part of, to restore to profit their moribund economies – which have been on their knees since the major crisis of over-production in 2008. But the system over which they preside is in a deep and irredeemable crisis: a crisis born of the tendency of profit to decline, which is an economic law of capitalism that imposes itself regardless of the will (real or artificial) of man. Like so many of capitalism’s innovations, artificial intelligence can and should be a powerful tool in the hands of the working class: It can be an aid to learning and research, can carry out dangerous work in place of human beings and can make critical decisions, obviating the risk of human error. In the hands of the capitalist class however, it is being deployed to devastating effect; targeting civilians for death, monitoring innocent people’s movements in public and online and destroying jobs. In the hands of the capitalists and warmongers, artificial intelligence is a clear and present threat to humanity.
This will remain the case until the working class rises to power, seizes for its own ends the means of production and sweeps away, once and for all, the unceasing exploitation of human being by human being and of country by country and establishes communism, not only here but across the world.