From “technocracy.news”
The claims that “the company was never ideological”, as it spans across Administrations, is a sure sign that it is marching to the drumbeat of Technocracy. Technocracy has a death wish for capitalism and the constitutional republic, and it is encircling the federal government with a web of surveillance. In the meantime, our politicians remain clueless.
Both co-founders of Palantir, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, are on the steering committee of the Bilderberg group. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Elon Musk has left government, but another Silicon Valley player is making its mark in President Donald Trump’s Washington: Palantir.
The software and data analytics company has garnered at least $300 million in new and expanded business since Trump took office for his second term, helping to make it the S&P’s top performing stock of 2025. That includes contracts at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as Fannie Mae, according to federal records.
Beyond that, the company is potentially set to earn an order of magnitude more in federal funds. In May, Pentagon leaders allocated up to $795 million more to the military’s core artificial intelligence software program, the Palantir-built Maven Smart System, to expand its deployment to all U.S. forces around the world. And late Thursday the Army issued Palantir the company’s biggest contract — an agreement to consolidate the military’s software procurement over the next decade — at a cost of up to $10 billion.
At the State Department, a Palantir-designed AI system is now helping to write some diplomatic cables in a new pilot program, according to an internal State Department email obtained by The Washington Post. At the Department of Homeland Security, immigration officials reversed earlier plans to ditch some of the company’s services when their superiors awarded Palantir a $3o million contract this spring to track immigration enforcement. And at the Internal Revenue Service, an official with Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service tapped Palantir to expand an internal project to modernize the agency’s data. The contracts were confirmed by five people familiar with processes at the federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Government work was always core to Palantir’s identity. Investor Peter Thiel, along with CEO Alex Karp, co-founded the company with an explicitly patriotic mission in the wake of 9/11. Though Karp is a progressive who has largely supported Democrats, Palantir’s striking success over the last six months is a case study in how a changing ethos in Washington — toward cutting costs, embracing AI and empowering the private sector — is benefiting a particular company.
Even as Musk has decamped for his own business enterprises in Texas,a technology-friendly attitude and a newfound openness toward AI experimentation still permeate the administration. This approach, along with Palantir’s long history of working with the government and its web of informal connections to the administration and to DOGE, places the software company in a sweet spot, according topeople familiar with its Washington expansion.
“They were positioned in the right way at the right time, and they had already built the technology that had the capability to do what the administration is trying to do,” said Matt Pearl, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and former director of emerging technologies at the National Security Council.
Unlike other Silicon Valley companies in Trump’s orbit, Palantir never eschewed government business. The firm has been awarded nearly $3 billion in federal funds since 2008, amounting to over 300 contracts spanning Republican and Democratic administrations. Its software aided the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden and helped organize logistics during the 2021 evacuation of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. CEO Karp recently published a book calling for technology companies to work closely with the state.
That history afforded the software firm a foothold ripe for expansion when Trump and Musk came to Washington under the banner of radical cost-cutting.Long before Musk declared his engineering-first crusade against waste, fraud and abuse in government, Palantir marketed its software for exactly that purpose, one it trumpetedon posters in its corporate offices.
The company also has boosted its connections to the Trump administration. This year it hired Ballard Partners and Miller Strategies, two Trump-connected lobbying firms. Co-founder Thiel is a longtime mentor to Vice President JD Vance. One of DOGE’s early strategists was another co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, a friend of Musk who has long championed the private sector as an efficient antidote to government excess and who recruited DOGE staff from Palantir’s alumni network. One of the company’s senior counselors is a former Trump official with close ties to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and who leadsa think tank project that seeks to dismantle the administrative state and replaceits functions with automation technology.
“Palantir is an exceptional American company,” a senior State Department official said, adding that the department was “proud to partner with them to modernize how we carry out America’s diplomacy.” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said agencies partnering with Palantir reflected the Trump administration’s “high standard when spending Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
Palantir’s growth spurt in government work
Since 2008, Palantir has been paid just under $3 billion through federal contracts — most of that in recent years. Last year the company received more than $615 million.
At least six people who worked with DOGE are former Palantirians: Two — Gregory Barbaccia and Clark Minor — are now chief information officers at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, respectively. Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar was named a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve alongside three other tech leaders whose firms have more recently embraced the defense sector. The appointment was granted the day of Trump’s June military parade, of which Palantir was a corporate sponsor.
“We are proud to support the U.S. government, especially our warfighters, and our growth reflects growing government AI adoption,” company spokeswoman Lisa Gordon said. She noted that Palantir’s government business has been steadily growing for six consecutive quarters, not just since Trump retook the White House, and that it “still lags significantly behind our U.S. commercial business.”
Yet some federal employees, in interviews with The Post, have suggestedthe company is getting preferential treatment from Trump officials. Palantir’s recent surge in government business has prompted unease among some employees and triggered scattered protests at company offices. Palantir’s new ICE contract for tracking immigration violations and deportations has sparked impassioned discussions among company alumni, a dozen of whom wrote an open letter deeming that work a violation of the company’s long-standing civil liberties principles. And at least one employee has quit over the company’s growing role in implementing the Trump administration’s policies.
Palantir rejects the accusation that it is getting any preferential treatment, saying its success is a result of its track record and expertise. The company also says its government activities are in line with its foundational principles, including protecting privacy and civil liberties.
Some Palantir employees have said they feel torn, because the company’s growing success is wrapped up in what they see as controversial policies and harsh treatment of government workers whom they have worked alongside. “Economically [the new environment] is good” for the company’s business, said a person who works closely with Palantir on government projects, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “But some folks internally are grappling with the question of ‘at what cost.’”
An AI transformation at the Pentagon
Nowhere has Palantir’s reach into the government been more extensive than at the Pentagon, which is doubling down on AI and its engagement with commercial companies. In addition to raising the contract ceiling for Maven Smart System this spring, the Pentagon also issued a memo ordering greater reliance on commercial companies — a move likely to help Palantir, along with a newer crop of Silicon Valley upstarts.
Palantir’s work building data management systems for the military began in 2011 under President Barack Obama, when its software was deployed in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province to help the Marines in heavy fighting with the Taliban.
By 2017, the Pentagon had created it first AI effort, Project Maven, and its leaders became interested in advances emerging from Silicon Valley.They were particularly drawn to ImageNet, an open-source repository of labeled imagery,including plants, cats and other everyday objects that early AI software algorithms had identified on their own. Military officials traveled to California and met with executives at Google, self-driving companies and other start-ups to discuss military applications of these technologies. “Instead of, it’s a plant … can we say, it’s a weapon or a tank or a male or a woman or a child?” said retired Col. Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer, recalling the period. “Can we detect attacks?”
Maven’s leaders recruited hundreds of workers to pore through the military’s vast troves of collected imagery and painstakingly label tanks, airplanes, infantry and weapons. Then they solicited proposals from several tech companies to build algorithms that would enable computers to visually identify and geolocate those assets.
Google originally won the contract, but internal protests against working with the military — typifying Silicon Valley’s attitude toward the defense sector at the time — prompted the software giant to pull out in 2018. Palantir was the next option, Cukor said.
When Palantir startedbuilding the software, its accuracy was still very low, Cukor said. “There were times when I was identifying cows as humans. I was identifying clouds as tanks,” he said. “These were hard days.”
An early version of the Palantir-built Maven tech was used operationally for the first time in 2017 in East Africa by Special Forces pursuing the Islamist group al-Shabab. Then the project was expanded to the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. For years, the head of that unit, Col. Joseph O’Callaghan, kept a framed photograph in his office of a rocket blasting a tank in a demo exercise in 2020, the division’s first AI-enabled strike. The AI worked then, as it does now, by suggesting a target to human minders, who confirm the selection and then send a rocket launcher to fire on the mark, he said.
By 2021, Maven’s accuracy had improved, but its deployment was still limited. That changed when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Though the military doesn’t publicly acknowledge specific uses of Maven in the battlefield, officials and news reports have referred to the use of the AI program in the Ukraine conflict, as well as recent fighting in Yemen and Iran.
By early this year, the Army was already embarking on a massive expansion of the military program that Palantir’s software is part of. Over 20,000 personnel are already using it, and the expanded contract is meant to facilitate its rollout to U.S. military units everywhere and to enhance the “reasoning skills” of the AI. “We’ve entered into an ‘unchained phase’ by implementing a whole-of-agency approach to AI transformation,” Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said in a speech in May. “And we see that action paying off across the board.”
Conversations about raising the contract ceiling for the Palantir software began late last year, as the Biden administration was winding down, said a Defense Department official familiar with the discussions within the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Use of Maven was revving up significantly and the department was running out of Palantir software licenses, the person said, but no action was taken until Trump took office, and he has installed his own leaders at the Pentagon. Biden appointees within CDAO had held back AI development because of safety and reliability concerns, said another person familiar with the debates around AI adoption, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to relay internal matters.
The new administration, by contrast, is turbocharging the use of AI across the military at a moment when the U.S. faces a growing number of global threats.
“The stark contrast [between the administrations] doesn’t indicate any wildness or disregard for safety,” one of the people said. “What it does show is their willingness to experiment and move faster.”