Its technology has been used in wars and in hospitals, its services have helped with killings and life-saving treatments, and its bosses are – according to who you ask – either helping to dismantle Western democracy or save it.
Welcome to the paradoxical world of Palantir Technologies, an American data analytics company whose clients include some of the most secretive organisations on the planet, as well as some of the most beloved.
If you’re reading this and wondering what Palantir is and what it does, well, that’s how the Denver-based firm seems to like it. Descriptions of Palantir in the press often use terms such as ‘mysterious’, ‘shadowy’ and ‘secretive’.
It’s no surprise really, since the aura of intrigue around the company has been “meticulously cultivated” by its management, according to Michael Steinberger in The Philosopher in the Valley, a biography of Palantir and its chief executive Alex Karp.
Yet that’s beginning to change. Karp is becoming more vocal about Palantir’s achievements, arguing that the company deserves more recognition for its work. But Palantir’s critics have become more vocal, too.
In the US, the company is facing growing criticism for its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under President Donald Trump’s administration.
In the UK, the firm’s £330m deal with the National Health Service (NHS) is worrying both privacy advocates and some doctors.
And in the Middle East, the use of its tools by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has angered some of Palantir’s employees and investors.
So, what does Palantir do and why has it become so important on the world stage?
Foundry and Gotham
Palantir specialises in software that can sort through the huge quantities of data its clients may hold and detect patterns or connections that could take human analysts weeks or months to discover.
The process is useful for everything from enabling the Ukrainian military to find and target Russian artillery via satellite imagery and social media posts, to helping the United Nation’s World Food Programme sift through its warehouse and shipping data to determine where there are bottlenecks in the delivery of supplies.
Palantir serves two types of clients. The first is enterprise, which includes big household names such as British Petroleum, Airbus and Coca-Cola, and civil government sectors, such as the UK’s NHS, America’s Inland Revenue Service.
The second – and more controversial – type of client is military, defence and intelligence services. Palantir was founded in 2003 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who believed better data analysis and sharing between intelligence agencies could have prevented 9/11.
The company’s founding mission was based on “defending the West”, and it even received seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, in 2005.
This willingness to work with such groups has meant that Palantir’s customers have included all six branches of the US Military, the UK’s Ministry of Defence, the Ukrainian Army and IDF, as well as intelligence services such as the CIA, FBI and Europol, and policing outfits such as the LAPD.
It’s not always clear what sort of activities Palantir helps these clients with, but it’s work that often has lethal consequences. “Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people,” Karp said in an interview with news website Axios in 2020.
Palantir’s main software platform is called Foundry and is used by both types of clients, while Gotham is a package of applications specially made for intelligence and policing that sits on top.
Gotham is designed to connect people, places and events of interest.
Depending on what the client has lawful access to, Gotham can act like a digital detective board, weaving and linking together previously siloed information such as someone’s arrest report, automatic licence-plate images, immigration status, financial details and physical characteristics, such as tattoos and eye colour.
“Every one of our clients gets their own completely separate instance of our software,” says Nicolas Prettejohn, UK head of AI for Palantir.
“It’s more like sort of getting Microsoft Excel, as opposed to, say, Facebook. It’s not: all of the data goes into the one database. It’s: you get your own instance of that database to use yourself and we have no control or agency over the data that’s within it.”
While the ability to sift through data and find patterns may sound increasingly commonplace in today’s world of AI, Palantir’s selling point is that its software can do it regardless of what format the information is stored in.
“It’s incumbent upon us to make sure our platform can handle any format of data, any modality of data, whether it’s acoustic, video, satellite imagery, regular databases, old databases, new databases,” Prettejohn adds. “We really pride ourselves on that.”
Once a client’s information is amalgamated by Palantir, it can be presented in almost any way, such as graphs, interactive maps or text. The software can also run simulations based on the data.
This enabled the NHS to run surprisingly accurate forecasts of which hospitals across the UK were likely to run out of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic and take pre-emptive action.
“In terms of any individual function, Palantir isn’t further ahead of anyone else, but where it has really invested a lot of time is that it has all these things in one platform,” says a former Palantir engineer, who asked to remain anonymous.
“Once you get the data into the platform, you just have all of it available; you don’t have to connect up to some other system that has some different requirement.”
Palantir will also send its employees to work inside a client’s organisation for a while to help them determine what they want from their data and how to customise Palantir’s tools. These are called ‘forward-deployed engineers’, a title inspired by the military term forward-deployed troops.
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Stepping out of the shadows
For a long time, Palantir was most closely associated in the press with its co-founder, the Trump-supporting, self-described libertarian and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It was Thiel who came up with the idea for the company and its name.
He called it Palantir after the Elvish seeing stones in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the ‘palantiri’, which can be used to see into the future.
But the real driving force behind Palantir is its chief executive, Karp (Thiel is its chairman), known for his tendency to go off on unfiltered tangents during TV interviews and investor calls.
After years of mostly being known within business and tech circles only, Karp has begun to more loudly proclaim Palantir’s achievements on the world stage.
He has called Palantir “the most important software company in America and therefore in the world” and was so outspoken about its work helping Ukraine target Russian forces that the Pentagon, according to Steinberger’s book, asked him to “dial it back”.
He has also begun to speak out against identity politics, saying in an earnings call in November 2025 that Palantir is “completely anti-woke”.
Karp has little time for critics who say its tools help to create a surveillance state, arguing instead that the company’s technology has been instrumental in stopping several terror attacks in Europe.
“I believe that Western civilisation has rested on our somewhat small shoulders a couple of times in the last 15 years,” he told Steinberger. (BBC Science Focus approached Palantir for comment on the claims made in Steinberger’s book, but the company declined to respond.)
Karp insisted Palantir build guardrails into its software to ensure civil liberties and personal privacy are protected. In principle, users can only see information they’re authorised to view and the system records every search so that audits are possible if abuses occur.
But as the former Palantir engineer explains, those protections aren’t automatic. “It’s good the software can do these things,” they say. “But the emphasis is on ‘can’; it doesn’t automatically do these things.
You, as the client, have to decide who should have access to what and who looks at the logs – it doesn’t do it for you. So just because you have these features, it doesn’t mean that they’re being used.”
Mired in controversy
In May 2025, 13 former employees of the company signed a letter saying Palantir was “normalising authoritarianism” by supporting President Trump’s administration and his “dangerous expansions of executive power”.
It wasn’t the first time Palantir had been the source of scrutiny.
During the Cambridge Analytica scandal ‒ in which the political consulting firm secretly harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users to build psychological profiles for targeted political advertising ‒ it was alleged that a London-based Palantir employee had helped the firm scrape and organise that data for use in the Trump campaign.
Palantir later said that the individual was acting as a rogue employee and was dismissed.
The company has also faced controversy over its policing contracts: its work with police in LA and New Orleans also generated complaints of racial profiling, a claim Palantir strenuously denies.
It’s under Trump’s administration that Palantir has come under the most scrutiny in the US, however. Palantir already had connections with the US President via Thiel, who was the first major tech donor during Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
But criticism of Palantir amped up during Trump’s second term due to its contract with ICE.
In April 2025, Palantir signed a $30m (£22.4m) deal with ICE to provide a platform called ImmigrationOS that aims to “streamline” the identification and deportation of immigrants.
The human rights campaign group Amnesty International said systems like ImmigrationOS “play a key role in the US administration’s ability to carry out its repressive tactics, facilitating rapid automated decisions that have led to mass deportations”.
Palantir rejects that characterisation, saying the platform is only being used to integrate data sources to which ICE already has access – either as internal systems or “through scoped, lawful, limited data sharing agreements.”
But the company’s role in both military intelligence and domestic policing continues to unsettle some observers, including former employees who worry about technologies developed for conflict zones being repurposed on home soil.
“I think this is one of the most consequential things of our time: we’re using warfare targeting technologies to sell to US agencies like ICE to find people and take away their rights,” says Juan Sebastián Pinto, a former Content Strategist for Palantir.
“The knowledge and the tactics used in Ukraine and other places could eventually come back here. It’s truly tragic to me.”
Palantir, for its part, says it doesn’t collect, store or sell data, including packaging data from different clients together to then sell on.
“We never facilitate the movement of data between clients, except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other,” it says on its website.
Meanwhile, in the UK, doctors and privacy campaigners have protested Palantir’s contract with the NHS. Under a £330m ($442m) deal, Palantir will help organise all the data held by NHS hospital trusts – currently in separate databases – into a single platform.
The British Medical Association (BMA), a trade body for UK doctors, voted to oppose the rollout, saying such a deal “threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data systems due to a lack of transparency in how the data will be stored and processed”.
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s executive vice-president, disputed that claim when questioned by British MPs on the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee.
Mosley ‒ who is the grandson of the British fascist Oswald Mosley ‒ said claims that Palantir was opaque or secretive about the NHS deal were inaccurate. “I think that BMA has, if I may be frank, chosen ideology over patient interest,” he told the committee.
Palantir’s steadfast support for Israel and its work with the IDF following the 7 October pogrom has also caused division both within and outside the company.
Karp has been vocal in his defence of Israel, sending extra Palantir teams over from London to help the IDF and intelligence services use its tools following the attack, and saying those protesting the war in Gaza are in thrall to a “cancerous, corrosive ideology”.
That led the Nordic investor Storebrand Asset Management to sell off its shares in Palantir in October, over concerns that the firm’s work for Israel might put the company at risk of violating human rights.
Storebrand said its analysis indicated that Palantir provides services “including AI-based predictive policing systems” that support Israeli surveillance of Palestinians.
“It was regrettable that Storebrand took this decision as the information that it was based on – that we supported predictive policing – is categorically false,” a spokesperson for the company says.
“We’re not involved in any predictive policing work anywhere in the world, as a matter of company policy.”
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Palantir in years to come
Despite the controversies, most investors are betting that Palantir will continue to only get bigger. In July 2025, the company signed a 10-year contract worth up to $10bn (£7.5bn) with the US Army.
Dan Ives, a senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities who focuses on the tech sector, argues that Palantir has no clear rival.
“Palantir’s technology is unique compared to anything else out there,” he says. “They’re playing another game to everyone else and that’s why their technology has been used by basically every Western government.”
The company has also ridden the explosive rise of generative AI. In 2023, Palantir introduced its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which embeds large language models alongside its existing machine learning capabilities.
This has led to a surge in business – with 150 US companies signing up in the first year of its release – as the models made Palantir’s tools much easier to use and to automate tasks.
This, combined with the broader ‘AI bubble’, has sent Palantir’s valuation far beyond its earnings. Its market cap now sits at around £323bn ($433bn) – a 25-fold rise since 2020, placing it among the world’s most valuable companies.
But Karp is insistent that Palantir is only getting started. “My firm belief is Palantir will be 10 times bigger in the future,” he said in a CNBC interview in 2025.
He went further in his letter to shareholders back in February 2025: “We’re still in the earliest stages, the beginning of the first act, of a revolution that will play out over years and decades.”
Timeline of major Palantir events
2003
Palantir founded in San Francisco by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, alongside Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings.
2004
Alex Karp becomes chief executive, having joined the company only a few months previously. Palantir moves offices to Palo Alto, California, home of Silicon Valley.
2005
Palantir receives $1.25m (almost £926,000) in seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, in exchange for equity. The CIA helps Palantir refine Gotham, its first software product, and becomes its first significant customer.
2009
Palantir builds a software for commercial clients, called Metropolis. It starts to have large commercial customers such as Thomson Reuters, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan.
2010-2011
Palantir employees tour US Army bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, showcasing the company’s technology in a bid to win the Pentagon’s approval. The US Marine Corps becomes a Palantir client.
2011
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hires Palantir to track down a Mexican drug cartel that had killed one of its agents. ICE remains a client of Palantir thereafter.
2012
The Finish, a book by journalist Mark Bowden about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, cites Palantir as a company whose technology was helping the US military find such targets, without explicitly saying the firm was connected with the killing.
It boosts Palantir’s public profile, despite the connection never being proved.
2014
Palantir releases Foundry, a new software program, and scraps Metropolis. Foundry becomes the main program Palantir sells to all its clients.
2015
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie claims a London-based Palantir employee helped the firm harvest Facebook data that was then used on behalf of the Trump campaign. Palantir says this was the work of a rogue employee who was fired.
2016
Palantir sues the US Army for not considering the company when taking bids for a better version of its own data analysis software. It wins the case and later earns an $867m (over £600m) contract alongside defence contractor Raytheon.
2018
Google pulls out of Project Maven, the Pentagon’s AI program, after facing resistance from some employees. Karp calls it a betrayal of the US military. Palantir later works on Maven.
2020
Palantir goes public in September, opening at $10 a share, making Karp a billionaire. The company also announces it is moving its headquarters to Denver, Colorado.
2020-2021
Palantir helps the US, UK and 11 other nations track the COVID-19 pandemic, providing forecasts for issues such as PPE shortages. It charges the NHS £1 for this work, but later wins a £330m (over $440m) contract.
2022
Palantir helps Ukraine in the war against Russia free of charge, with its software helping to pinpoint enemy targets. Karp visits Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.
2022
Palantir reports its first profitable quarter. Every quarter since then has been profitable.
2023
The company launches its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which embeds large language models alongside its existing machine learning capabilities.
This led to a surge in business from commercial clients, with hundreds of companies signing up in the first year of its release.
2023
Palantir provides its services to Israel’s intelligence services and Israel Defense Forces, following the 7 October pogrom by Hamas. Palantir and Karp’s public support for Israel causes division among its own employees and investors.
2024
Karp distances himself from the Democrats, his former party, and donates $1m (around £740,000) to Trump’s inauguration.
2025
A group of former Palantir employees write an open letter criticising the company for “normalising authoritarianism” by working with ICE and supporting President Trump’s administration and his “dangerous expansions of executive power”.
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