A Palantir Primer: Tools for the Muscular State
- Thomas Neuburger
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
By Thomas Neuburger
“They need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.” —Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp, speaking of America’s enemies
“As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’ He continued: ‘Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.’” —Alex Karp, Letter to Investors, February 3, 2025
Why Care About Alex Karp?
I recently posted comments on comments made by Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp, in a piece that became one of the most widely read on this site. The short version is printed above (first quote). You can read Karp’s full remarks here. (As you do, you might ask yourself who those enemies are — foreign, or “homegrown” as well?)
Karp has also provocatively praised “organized violence” as the reason the West grew ascendant. An accurate statement, it nonetheless praises psychopathy — conscienceless killing, sadly the necessary bride to Western global expansion.
Why does one murderous man matter? Because of the company he controls, Palantir Technologies, a servant and would-be master of the secretive, muscular, American security state.
Below are just a few notes on what Palantir does, how deeply embedded it is in American and Israeli wars, its take on police surveillance, and promotion of tech that’s born in Orwellian dreams and nightmarishly real.
If you want to add information or have links to contribute, please do. The comments are open and I always read all of them.
Palantir Basics
Let’s start from the start, with basics about Palantir Tech. From Wikipedia (emphasis and paragraphing mine; footnotes at the source):
Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American publicly traded company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company has four main projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir AIP. Palantir Gotham is an intelligence and defense tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts. Its customers have included the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense. Their software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5) by the U.S. Department of Defense. Palantir Foundry has been used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Palantir Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments. Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve both international as well as state and local governments, and also to private companies. In 2025, Palantir was reported to be working closely with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] to enable mass deportation in support of the Trump administration.
That’s the origin story and business structure according to one “neutral” source. There’s a lot to contemplate in just those few paragraphs. Note especially the military (“counter-terrorism”) uses and its integration into ICE and the America’s mass deportation program. No mention of Israel here, and no mention of pro-Palestinian “terrorism,” but it’s a good place to start.
The Wikipedia article later mentions, tangentially, the company’s CIA connections, by referencing a 2018 Bloomberg piece, which contains these interesting bits:
• “Palantir has spent years modifying its predictive-policing software for inspectors at the Vienna-based IAEA”
• “The tool is at the analytical core of the agency’s new $50 million Mosaic platform, turning databases of classified information into maps that help inspectors visualize ties between the people, places and material”
• “Palantir, which [Peter] Thiel and his partners built with CIA funding”. Another Bloomberg piece confirms: “The CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, was a seed investor.”
Much to consider already. For more, read on.
Palantir and the CIA
The following is from Whitney Webb, whose main beat seems Epstein-related. I can’t judge any of that, but the following deserves attention. Note the date of Palantir’s founding: 2003. Emphasis below is mine.
Palantir is not just a military contractor, it was a company created to privatize and house the Bush-era, neocon-run surveillance program Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, housed previously at DARPA, and put it under increased CIA control (though the CIA was also intimately involved with TIA). TIA was shut down by Congress because it would have eradicted the constitutional right to privacy, but Palantir has accomplished that and gotten away with it because it is a private sector entity. Palantir's earliest funder besides Peter Thiel - The CIA Palantir's first client for its first several years as a company - The CIA Where did Palantir engineers [go] every 2 weeks for years for guidance in developing their products? - CIA HQ Palantir's originally intended clients per CEO Alex Karp - The CIA If there every was a CIA front company it's Palantir. (Though Peter Thiel has since quipped that the CIA is a front for Palantir)
Later in this thread, Webb talks about Palantir’s “pre-crime” software and a “war on domestic terror, that will target left and right leaning dissidents alike.”
Assertions, not proof, but intriguing. Does the company have grand (CIA-inspired) plans, or do they just want to make money?
And to echo Webb's final point: Who’s the tail and who’s the dog, Karp or the CIA? Or are they each both?
Palantir, AI and War
Palantir loves helping make war. From a 2023 Engadget article, we find this:
Palantir shows off an AI that can go to war The system aims to serve as an 'ethical' and 'legal' veneer for future military automation efforts. Palantir already sells its domestic surveillance services to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so it should come as no surprise that the company founded by billionaire Peter Thiel is working to make inroads into the Pentagon as well. On Tuesday, the company released a video demo of its latest offering, the Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). While the system itself is simply designed to integrate large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's BERT into privately-operated networks, the very first thing they did was apply it to the modern battlefield. … A “human in the loop” to prevent [unauthorized] actions does exist in Palantir's scenario, though from the video, the “operator: appears to do little more than nod along with whatever AIP suggests. The demo also did not elaborate on what steps are being taken to prevent the LLMs that the system relies on from "hallucinating" pertinent facts and details.
The video itself is here:
It’s included in a Vice article, which also adds this:
Palantir’s pitch is, of course, incredibly dangerous and weird. … Drone warfare has already abstracted warfare, making it easier for people to kill vast distances with the push of a button. The consequences of those systems are well documented. In Palantir’s vision of the military’s future, more systems would be automated and abstracted.
And this:
A funny quirk of the video is that it calls its users “operators,” a term that in a military context is shorthand for bearded special forces of groups like Seal TEAM Six. In Palantir’s world, America’s elite forces share the same nickname as the keyboard cowboys asking a robot what to do about a Russian tank at the border.
And this telling remark (emphasis mine):
What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. “LLMs and algorithms must be controlled in this highly regulated and sensitive context to ensure that they are used in a legal and ethical way,” the pitch said.
Outsourcing ethics is always a winning way to see no one is blamed.
Palantir and Israel
Palantir has strong ties to Israel and Israeli war. From the Washington Post in December 2024:
Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group. But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war’s breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or “the Gospel” — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets. The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF’s target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF’s intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel’s 14-month war in Gaza.
AI for killing; note the author’s Orwellian phrase “refill the target bank.” The piece is a horror show, and well worth a read. The Palantir reference is here:
As a “big data” boom got underway in Silicon Valley, Israeli engineers had begun to experiment with off-the-shelf data mining tools that could translate and analyze Arabic and Farsi. The unit’s leaders debated whether to contract with experts, such as the Silicon Valley data-mining firm Palantir, or build their own software. … The latter approach won out.
Believe it? I’m not that sure. Eleven months earlier, January 2024, Palantir itself announced this:
Thiel’s Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech • US company will provide services for ‘war-related missions’ • Agreement follows co-founders’ visit to Israel this week
And a Times of Israel article that touts this meeting notes Karp’s support for everything Israel (emphasis mine):
“We stand with Israel,” Palantir said in posts on X and LinkedIn. “The board of directors of Palantir will be gathering in Tel Aviv next week for its first meeting of the new year.”“Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue,”
And offers this surprise:
The Denver-based data-mining firm has been active in Israel for the past decade and has an office in Tel Aviv run by many former Israeli government officials.
Talk about embeds. This puts the “op” in “close cooperation.”
Palantir and Gaza
About Palantir’s involvement in Gaza, James Bamford, who’s steeped in this world, is less circumspect than others. He lays crimes like the World Central Kitchen massacre at Palantir’s feet:
Earlier this month [April 2024] saw a continuation of that effort, with the targeting of three well-marked and fully approved aid vehicles belonging to World Central Kitchen, killing their seven occupants and ensuring that the food would never reach those dying of starvation. The targeting was precise—placing missiles dead center in the aid agency’s rooftop logos. …As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s “work” was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.
Standing with Israel apparently comes with a price … for others.
Palantir, Surveillance and Pre-Crime: The LAPD
To close this out, let’s look at “pre-crime” mentioned above. Bloomberg covered that in a lengthy 2018 piece, “Palantir Knows Everything About You,” which carried the subhead: “Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens. The scary thing? Palantir is desperate for new customers.”
Overblown? Maybe. But consider a single example, the LAPD’s use of Palantir’s Gotham software to … well, you’ll figure it out (emphasis mine):
The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer’s own observations on the subject. The cards are digitized in the Palantir system, adding to a constantly expanding surveillance database that’s fully accessible without a warrant. Tomorrow’s data points are automatically linked to today’s, with the goal of generating investigative leads. Say a chronic offender is tagged as a passenger in a car that’s pulled over for a broken taillight. Two years later, that same car is spotted by an automatic license plate reader near a crime scene 200 miles across the state. As soon as the plate hits the system, Palantir alerts the officer who made the original stop that a car once linked to the chronic offender was spotted near a crime scene. The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brayne calls the secondary surveillance network: the web of who is related to, friends with, or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn’t suspected of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates, says Brayne, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big-data policing at Princeton University and who’s now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties,” she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she adds, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure, and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John’s International Inc. and Pizza Hut LLC.
That’s from 2018; nearly a century ago in AI years. What are they up to now?
Palantir shouldn’t escape your concern. Thiel is a man behind JD Vance’s career, and he’s involved in much of what Trump is trying to do. Or to put it more broadly, Palantir is involved in what the spook and war-making state has already done. And no president, certainly not Trump, plans to rein them in.