There’s a simple logic behind Palantir’s controversial rise in Washington

In 2003 Palo Alto, California, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and cohorts founded a software company called Palantir. Now, these 20-odd years later, with stock prices reaching escape velocity and government and commercial contracts secured from Huntsville to Huntington, Palantir seems to have arrived in the pole position of the AI race.

With adamantine ties to the Trump administration and deep history with U.S. intelligence and military entities to boot, Palantir has emerged as a decisive force in the design and management of our immediate technological, domestic, and geopolitical futures.

Curious, then, that so many, including New York Times reporters, seem to believe that Palantir is merely another souped-up data hoarding and selling company like Google or Adobe.

The next-level efficiency, one imagines, will have radical implications for our rather inefficient lives.

It’s somewhat understandable, but the scales and scopes in play are unprecedented. To get a grasp on the scope of Palantir’s project, consider that every two days now humanity churns out the same amount of information that was accrued over the previous 5,000 years of civilization.

As then-Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard put it more than a decade ago, “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”

Palantir spent the last 20 years building that analytics combustion engine. It arrives as a suite of AI products tailored to various markets and end users. The promise, as the era of Palantir proceeds and as AI-centered business and governance takes hold, is that decisions will be made with a near-complete grasp on the totality of real-time global information.

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The tech stack

Famously seeded with CIA In-Q-Tel cash, Palantir started by addressing intelligence agency needs. In 2008, the Gotham software product, described as a tool for intelligence agencies to analyze complex datasets, went live. Gotham is said to integrate and analyze disparate datasets in real time to enable pattern recognition and threat detection. Joining the CIA, FBI, and presumably most other intelligence agencies in deploying Gotham are the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Defense.

Next up in the suite is Foundry, which is, again, an AI-based software solution but geared toward industry. It purportedly serves to centralize previously siloed data sources to effect maximum efficiency. Health care, finance, and manufacturing all took note and were quick to integrate Foundry. PG&E, Southern California, and Edison are all satisfied clients. So is the Wendy’s burger empire.

The next in line of these products, which we’ll see are integrated and reciprocal in their application to client needs, is Apollo, which is, according the Palantir website, “used to upgrade, monitor, and manage every instance of Palantir’s product in the cloud and at some of the world’s most regulated and controlled environments.” Among others, Morgan Stanley, Merck, Wejo, and Cisco are reportedly all using Apollo.

If none of this was impressive enough, if the near-total penetration into both business and government (U.S., at least) at foundational levels isn’t evident yet, consider the crown jewel of the Palantir catalog, which integrates all the others: Ontology.

“Ontology is an operational layer for the organization,” Palantir explains. “The Ontology sits on top of the digital assets integrated into the Palantir platform (datasets and models) and connects them to their real-world counterparts, ranging from physical assets like plants, equipment, and products to concepts like customer orders or financial transactions.”

Every aspect native to a company or organization — every minute of employee time, any expense, item of inventory, and conceptual guideline — is identified, located, and cross-linked wherever and however appropriate to maximize efficiency.

The next-level efficiency, one imagines, will have radical implications for our rather inefficient lives. Consider the DMV, the wait list, the tax prep: Anything that can be processed (assuming enough energy inputs for the computation) can be — ahead of schedule.

The C-suite

No backgrounder is complete without some consideration of a company’s founders. The intentions, implied or overt, from Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in particular are, in some ways, as ponderable as the company’s ultra-grade software products and market dominance.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp stated in his triumphal 2024 letter to shareholders: “Our results are not and will never be the ultimate measure of the value, broadly defined, of our business. We have grander and more idiosyncratic aims.” Karp goes on to quote both Augustine and Houellebecq as he addresses the company’s commitment first to America.

This doesn’t sound quite like the digital panopticon or the one-dimensionally malevolent elite mindset we were threatened with for the last 20 years. Despite their outsized roles and reputations, Thiel companies tend toward the relatively modest goals of reducing overall harm or risk. Reflecting the influence of Rene Girard’s theory that people rapidly spiral into hard-to-control and ultimately catastrophic one-upsmanship, the approach reflects a considerably more sophisticated point of view than Karl Rove’s infamously dismissive claim to be “history’s actors.”

“Initially, the rise of the digital security state was a neoconservative project,” Blaze Media editor at large James Poulos remarked on the dynamic. “But instead of overturning this Bush-era regime, the embedded Obama-Biden elite completed the neocon system. That’s how we got the Cheneys endorsing Kamala.”

In a series of explanatory posts on X made via the company's Privacy and Ethics account and reposted on its webpage, Palantir elaborated: “We were the first company to establish a dedicated Privacy & Civil Liberties Engineering Team over a decade ago, and we have a longstanding Council of Advisors on Privacy & Civil Liberties comprised of leading experts and advocates. These functions sit at the heart of the company and help us to embody Palantir’s values both through providing rights-protective technologies and fostering a culture of responsibility around their development and use.”

It's a far cry from early 2000s rhetoric and corporate policy, and so the issue becomes one of evaluation. Under pressure from the immensity of the data, the ongoing domestic and geopolitical instability manifesting in myriad forms, and particularly the bizarre love-hate interlocking economic mechanisms between the U.S. and China, many Americans are hungry to find a scapegoat.

Do we find ourselves, as Americans at least, with the advantage in this tense geopolitical moment? Or are we uncharacteristically behind in the contest for survival? An honest assessment of our shared responsibility for our national situation might lead away from scapegoating, toward a sense that we made our bed a while ago on technology and security and now we must lie in it.