Palantir is dragging a small independent Swiss investigative newspaper to court because they reported[1] about Palantir getting the door slammed in their face in by several Swiss government agencies including the military over the last years. No one wants this turd of a company.
Can someone explain why Palantir are seen as such a threat? My understanding is their product is a PowerBI++ and they don't host any user data themselves. Are people scared of backdoors?
1) It holds deeply sensitive data and does so in the US. In times of increased mistrust of the US, many (including myself) see that as a risky choice.
2) Speaking of mistrust in America and American corporations, have you heard their execs talk? It's absolute cuckoo-town:
> If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.
Well, you've convinced me. I'm scared of America, I'm scared of American companies and I'm scared of your company in particular.
Are you sure they hold sensitive data themselves though? My understanding was they integrate their tools with customers own data and don't have access to it themselves (at least in theory).
Of course I agree that quote is insane and you can dislike them for political reasons, but I want to understand the technological fears and see if any are unfounded.
The article mentions “while the underlying data may remain under the MoD’s control, any insights derived from that data do not. The implications of this, the insiders say, are far-reaching, especially because of the vast quantity of personal and other data the company has access to across UK government departments.”
The loudest people about this have no idea what they're talking about essentially.
It's not sufficient but the first thing you can filter by is anyone who comments on the name first (literally one of the most effective marketing strategies in government contracting history basically).
I’ve only had their platforms explained to me by them (palantir) at a conference but the mental model that stuck with me was more of an operating system than a single tool. Think AWS managed services + databricks + whatever library of ready made intelligence software they have already built for others.
They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup.
The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value.
And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).
Even if the software is mundane I don't think most people should want their country offloading sensitive spy stuff to a guy who's obsessed with the antichrist to the extent the Vatican itself is complaining he's going to Rome and giving secret speeches about it.
For a company that tries exclusively to sell to people that are very far removed from the use (government), yet have onerous reporting standards for all spending (government), there sure is very little independent reporting on the efficacy of whatever it is they are even selling. Even the contract with NHS was heavily censored. So frankly I oppose it on that ground alone.
Hence the Carney strategy up here in Canada. We can realize in hindsight that we were far too dependent on a single ally. We're diversifying - and even if America wants to become reliable again we've learned and will (hopefully) never be so dependent again.
In the post WW2 era most western countries grew lazy about sovereignty due to America's open-handed approach - this has been a wake up call and has severely lowered America's soft-power globally.
Obviously, just look at what the Palantir stones did to Saruman and Denethor. They're a corrupting force, both in the middle-earth case and in the our-earth case.
Thiel has made no secret of his intent to use technology to dispense with that pesky democracy problem that billionaires have, and Palantir is pretty obviously his attempt to do just that. It's a reductio-ad-absurdum argument against listening to your citizens:
You put it in the hands of a populist demagogue, the power to apply hyper-targeted pain to their enemies amplifies their darker tendencies, and when evil happens you say: "look, the people can't be trusted." Meanwhile, you use it to direct the pointy end of the state's stick towards people you don't like (because the demagogue is too lazy to actually use those hyper-targeting features themself) so you can interfere with democratic attempts to limit your power without bothering to pay for the pepper spray.
Nobody in their right mind would want their government anywhere near it.
I still don't understand why Theil and Karp decided to name their surveillance tech company after a device that is best known for being used by an evil dark lord to decieve and corrupt. It's like the Mitchell and Webb skit "are we the baddies" except they're the ones who designed the uniforms with skulls on them.
Thiel apparently gives talks about the Antichrist. He's actually a very thoughtful Christian, following the works of Rene Girard. I think he's just got a rather dark sense of humour.
I don't think you have to understand why they made that decision, you just have to understand who they are and what they believe in. Just have a look at what they talk about, and what they are quoted as saying.
Palantir isn't a good name. It's a disastrously bad one, if you ask me. It's a constant scandal as every five minutes somebody gets the bright idea that "ackshually the Palantir were a tool for evil made by a demon!!"
They're never able to live it down. It always comes up. And it makes them seem, in a way, careless.
Ackshually the Palantir were made by the Elves of Valinor, and weren't made as a tool for evil.
In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.
If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.
You're talking about it. Right now along with a solid dozen other people as the only comments on this thread.
People barely understand what the company does, but boy do they want to tell you all about the name.
It's marketing gold. Because rather then "who was that? Some firm named something corp" instead you're spending 5 minutes reinforcing how bad the name is..just building a ton of word association games for a name derived from a well known fiction work and really building up the message that the company is named Palantir and they sell products to the government.
Nah - that customer base would much rather a mean-nothing name like "Salesforce". The real evil people don't revel so much in their evilness they're much more in the "ends justify the means" camp where they can try and hide their evilness from their conscience. Nobody wants to wear a pin saying "I am, in fact, a terrible person that the world would be better without."
There's a bit of writing in that direction if you're curious. I like Benjamin quite a but and have gotten a lot out of his thinking. Here's the wiki-level entry to it:
They like purity. Purity of the body (fitness and lifestyle) and purity of society (regimentation, conformity, single race, single ideology, single sexuality, standardized architecture).
It's neurological. They feel emotional disgust if the regimentation isn't there.
We're not a serious country anymore. We build very little. We control very little. Three years ago the war in Ukraine broke out causing the energy price crisis and the short term solution was the government paying a portion of everyone's bills. Three years later we're in the same situation again thanks to the US and Israel's warmongering. Are we prepared? No. What's the solution? Freezing the price caps and paying a portion of peoples bills.
Christine Maxwell and Alan Wade found Chiliad, a database surveillance application that was used in the FBI. Then Alan Wade became CIO at the CIA. Then In-Q-Tel (CIA) co-founded Palantir with Thiel.
Karp, who was at Haverford college with Epstein's neighbor Lutnick, became the philosophical ideologue for Palantir.
With these overt and easily verifiable connections it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir. The governments do not even work any better with all that surveillance software, they work worse than 20 years ago. So even the "we need it" argument is a fallacy.
I see the UK government hasn't been on a good run lately. Google recently released the Cloud Threat Horizons H1 2026 report. A vulnerability in the OIDC trust policy can be exploited to gain admin access to AWS. The UK Government Digital Service was one of the affected organizations. Datadog found their IAM role misconfigured the same way.
You only need to buy one or two to get it on the agenda, then everybody votes along party lines, on stuff they don't understand. It's not even that expensive.
Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.
Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics, Palantir is a great UI for ontological expert systems. Technically you could do everything without it but organizations and especially government typically don’t cultivate that level of expertise in their staff.
In my view expert systems typically failed because the organizations would degrade bureaucratically faster than any expert system could accommodate. With AI there isn’t a pre-requisite need for organizational expertise so the tooling will still work in largely dysfunctional orgs which is a property that did not previously exist. With the help of AI people who don’t understand ontologies can still successfully build one.
Separately it is my opinion that Palantir is a CIA cut-out for the Peter Thiel faction. So paying Palantir is like paying tribute to that particular faction. Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.
> Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.
I have a feeling this is no longer a viable model. If "subscribers" get threatened every other day, they will be looking for alternatives.
So long as not subscribing is worse than subscribing countries will still do it. Even if it not in the interest of the country the decision makers can and do still get kickbacks / speaking engagements.
It’s interesting to read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had, though I think that speaks more to the relative cost effectiveness of tributes versus blackmail. These states don’t have the security apparatus to both blackmail US politicians and prevent others from blackmailing those same politicians. This second part is essential as it is what maintains the relative advantage.
I do think they will be less enthusiastic subscribers in the future, and perhaps even shop around for more cost effective approaches. Modi in India is intentionally creating an Indian diaspora as one example and I believe he is bribing politicians to help make this happen.
> read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had
The primary players in the Gulf - Saudi and the UAE - have been aligned with the ongoing Iran strikes.
KSA's Mohammad Bin Salman has been lobbying Trump to strike Iran [0], just like his predecessor King Abdullah was doing [1]. Similarly, the UAE has an ongoing land dispute with Iran [2].
2. The operationalization of the Iran-Central Asia-China railway in 2025 [0], which allows China to bypass Malacca
3. Iran's relative weakness following the collapse of the Assad regime, the death of much od Hezbollah's leadership, and the Houthis comparative weakness
4. Continued anger amongst policymakers in the Gulf, Israel, and the US that Iran-backed Hamas launched the 10/7 attack barely 3 weeks after the US+EU launched the IMEC project and were about to loop Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords [1]
I was hoping to hear the case made as to why Israel was not the primary reason but instead you seem to have chosen to elide it altogether. It seems to be a conspicuous omission especially when both the US and Israeli admin have repeatedly made the case that Israel was the primary reason.
Primary reason is because Israel and American zionists (mostly evangelical christians) lobby for it. The KSA and friends also lobbying for it is just icing on the cake for American politicians.
China also views the EU as a junior partner [0], is running an ongoing disinfo campaign against the industrial exports of an EU member state [1], and has doubled down on it's support for Russia [2] in Ukraine in return for Russia backing China's claim on Taiwan [3].
And the EU is uninterested in building domestic capacity for most critical technologies.
Heck, last week [4] the EU excluded AI, Quantum, Semiconductors, and other technologies from the Industrial Accelerator Act (aka the "Made in EU" act) in order to concentrate on automotive and "net-zero" technologies.
Given that Chinese technology imports are already under the radar in the EU due to the Ukraine war, this is basically the EU creating a carveout for the US.
Even the major European Telecom and Space companies like Eutelsat, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica bluntly stated that they view the EU's digital sovereignity strategy as dead in the water [5] in it's current form.
Edit: can't reply
> They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you
But as I clearly showed, the EU is doing otherwise.
And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.
All the rhetoric about digital sovereignity and domestic capacity has been just that - rhetoric.
> And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.
I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)).
I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.
> that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA
It is for the EU.
The EU dislikes the current deprioritization of the Ukraine Conflict by the US, but also recognizes that the PRC is directly providing material support and subsidizing Russia's military industrial complex [0]. That is the red line for much of the EU.
Similarly, for the PRC it's continued support of Russia in their war in Ukraine is also a non-negotiatable [1], and the CCP's foreign mouthpieces continue to reiterate that "the mainstay of EU foreign policy — supporting Ukraine in a conflict to defeat Russia — has turned into a quagmire of sunk costs with little hope of success" [2].
> I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone
We know. And we don't care.
As long as the EU views Ukraine's territorial integrity as non-negotiable and a large portion of EU states view Russia as the primary national security threat, the US will remain the less bad option than the PRC or Russia.
Both the US and China are aligned in that we view the EU as a junior party that can be pressured [3].
If the EU views Russia as a threat, it will have to accept American vassalage becuase the PRC will continue to back Russia [1].
If the EU views America as a threat, it will have to accept Chinese vassalage, give up Ukraine, and accept Russia as the primary European military power.
Based on the carveouts within the Industrial Acceleration Act, the EU has chosen American vassalage.
Very bold words. I am not even convinced the USA will stay relevant on the world stage, in the long run. Cutting ties hurts, but the process is underway. Also, "vassalage" is a bold word, if the US cannot make the EU give up Greenland or come running to help them in the Strait of Hormuz (there are also other examples). It is almost as if European politicians are playing it smart.
And my question is - are you fine sacrificing Ukraine in return for a Russian and Chinese military umbrella? This is the hard requirement for China to engage with the EU [0].
The answer in Poland, the Baltics, Czechia, and Finland is NO and that Russia is worse and that Ukraine must be supported, and will back the US no matter how transactional we become.
The answer in Hungary, Slovakia, and Belgium [1] is YES and that sacrificing Ukraine for Russia is acceptable.
They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you.
The UK NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world. It absolutely could choose to hire and cultivate that level of expertise but then how would senior management retire into Palantir sinecures?
(It actually has quite a few expert staff who are not delighted with the tools they have been given but they don't have the lobbying power of Palantir and the cluster of consulting firms around it)
Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money).
If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.
It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.
> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.
The people making purchasing decisions at this level aren't the ones using it and don't care one whit about UX.
That isn't to say that it isn't valuable, but it's basically a non-factor. The technology itself is a non-factor. Everything is about connections, buzz words and pretty slide decks.
They literally do, since the people making purchasing decisions are usually the ones that ranked up through a system they used and know the intricacies of, including all the pain points.
“Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”
They’re also missing the tidbit that, like any other consultancy, they provide a means for laundering a conclusion that middle management has already come to, confirmation bias be damned. Unsurprising that they’re also useful for parallel construction for LEOs.
The first half is true. They bring in their FDEs to clean and organize your data.
But the difference in what they leave behind is what separates them from classic consultancies and pure tech companies.
They don't leave behind "insights." They leave behind a suite of operational (ie have write capabilities not just dashboards) applications that are "custom" built to actually solve those insights. I put custom in quotes because while the applications are usually bespoke to your company, they are built in Palantir's app-building product Workshop, which significantly lowers the cost of building these custom apps.
So in the end, your company's processes are improved because your employees are using the apps that the FDE's built.
This is distinct from traditional consultancies because those will only leave behind the insights. Also distinct from most SaaS because those have a one-size-fits all approach, so you wind up having to change your company to fit the design of the application, where as Palantir builds its applications to fit your company.
> Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company. We do not sell personal data of any kind. We don’t provide data-mining as a service.
The commercial product, Foundry, is very well documented and an extensive Data Platform that allows to build data pipelines (similar to Databricks) and build low code / no code applications on top. If you master it, its incredibly powerful but complex
It's not rocket science. Those particular database schemas, together with those particular CRUD layers, do something useful, and neither building nor maintaining those applications is part of the core business for most companies, so buying prebuilt from somebody else, and letting them maintain it for you, makes perfect business sense.
I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.
To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.
And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.
It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.
Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.
It's true, literally no b2b sales companies existed before Salesforce. We must all continue to pay for Salesforce and support its workflows for now until the endless future, lest b2b sales vanish again.
Because it's hard for the government[1] to build computer systems.
Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.
The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.
However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.
Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.
[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.
Palantir’s product is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.
Counter to that I’ve seen a £37m contract for a form on gov uk with absolutely no change in process, just going from a letter received to a online form
GDS is amazing. However, unless we double/triple the GDS salary grades, it'll inevitably be hollowed out. From what I heard, that might've already happened.
Look for yourself, GDS is hiring a "Lead Technical Architect" for £67,126–£91,453 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/jobs/ . FAANG (and Palantir) pays up to triple that. How can GDS compete for talent?
Horseshit, mate ... basically just pumped up database software aided and abetted by "consultants" parachuted into the client org ... like the industry has been doing since the 80's ...
Edit: I found the following on Glassdoor and, while I don't know the poster personally, it pretty much sums it up:
"If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors."
Somebody needs to wrap up open source AI/ML and sell it to governments / defense, and do the integration... (e.g. open source Python face recognition libraries, openCV, YOLO object detection, etc. and more recently LLMs.)
It's 100% laziness on the side of procurement, aided by some good marketing and a complete lack of guardrails. Exactly the same mindset that has led to every European government now being tied to US big tech.
Why does Palantir specifically need to exist? To funnel those juicy government budgets into shareholders' pockets.
Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)
Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."
If Palantir wasn’t highly effective at aggregating data no one would care about the. They are considered a threat to privacy and freedom because they are a good product
That's part of it, but not the whole story. If Palantir were a book, explaining how to implement data aggregation systems effectively, people wouldn't be so wary of it. (Critics would still criticise that data aggregation was performed in the first place, of course, but there wouldn't be the additional "and it's Palantir".)
In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.
Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.
At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.
Note that "UK Security" and "safety of people in the UK" are very distinct things. But - exposure to whatever Palantir does is very likely bad for the second regardless of whether or not it's bad for the first.
> Note that "UK Security" and "safety of people in the UK" are very distinct things.
"Everything in the name of man, everything for the good of man!" — The 3rd Program of the CPSU, 1961. As the joke went, "and if you get to visit the Party Congress in Moscow, you will even get to see that very man!"
To an extent, but with caution and charity. A lot of exceptionally good people have come from bad families - one of the Borgias was a saint, for example. A lot of exceptionally nasty people seem to have perfectly nice families.
Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
You'd be surprised how often the beliefs of the father/grandfather are those of the son/grandson, not to mention how often they feel the need to avenge for the perceived injustices or slights done to their parents
Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off fully.
Seems like a crucial miscalculation on their part, as they lose all international revenue and will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
Not just an assumption, but a goal. If some semblance of democratic society returns they know they’ll be held accountable, so they’ll fight with every means available to prevent that from happening.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because shedding the sheepskin is the point. It's performative. A display of power.
It doesn't matter that Karp has destroyed his brain with cocaine, nor that he's a massive bigot. It's a signal. "We have won. You can't stop us".
> will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
The gamble and taunt being that they're stating that this will not happen. Thiel has won. US democracy is dead. The moment Trump croaks they try to seize the fed entirely.
The actual miscalculation is deeper. They may seize the US government. It won't save them, they'll only drag it down with them.
Globalism is not some evil ploy by which [we all know exactly who they're accusing] try to subvert the US. It is the foundational mechanism of the US' imperialism. And in trying to unmake globalism, they're unmaking the American Empire.
Similarly with democracy. Democracy is not some weakness forced upon the west. It is the winning system of government after all others have collapsed. Even the smartest god-king is useless if all his advisors are coked out nutjobs. Thiel's idea of disposing of democracy will doom not only the US, but himself personally as well.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because he's speaking to his investors aiming to keep the stock price up. He's not selling his products or himself to the world. His investors are rewarding him for the way he talks and acts.
Frankly the other cofounders are just as bad as Thiel but don't draw the headlines quite as much.
"Yesterday, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale agreed with an X post suggesting communists in the Western hemisphere should be blown up. “Exactly,” he wrote. “What did you think founding Palantir was supposed to be about?”" - https://responsiblestatecraft.org/defense-companies-maduro/
"In a CNBC interview Thursday, Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp opined that AI will undermine the influence of “highly educated, often female voters” and empower working class men instead. And anyone who doesn’t realize this political reality, he added, belongs in an “insane asylum.”" - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ceo-palantir-ai...
In Germany we have a term for entities headed by people who publicly say things Thiel and his gang say. It's verfassungsfeindliche Organisation. I really don't understand how they can still be considered government suppliers to purchase from. Just because they are on the stock exchange and not some secret conspiracy? (they are not on the stock exchange)
Right but if you read that page you quickly come to the quote "Parliament can make or unmake any law". Technically there is judicial review now, so there is some restrictions, but not like in a USA style constitution.
> US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff.
This sort of stuff might go down well with fundamentalists in america, but it has no place in the advanced world.
This sort of thing has been widespread in US fundamentalist Christian circles for a long time. He probably goes (or went) to a church surrounded by people who also believe that.
Normalization of deviance. They've shifted what is considered normal so far out of bounds that they can now pretend this is just fine. So no more fig-leafs. It brought down the Space Shuttle, and it will bring down society if left unchecked.
If this guy was some raving lunatic on a corner I wouldn't care. But he's got a country sized megaphone thanks to money and has also bought the government. So it does unfortunately matter that he's an insane christian cretin that wants to see the current form of government destroyed.
It is insanity that any country would give an iota of data, much less any sort of control, to an org like Palantir. Any government representative for countries outside of the US or Israel that recommends such a vile trojan horse needs to be outed as the traitorous plant that they are. Every element of their personal life needs to be scrutinized, because the only scenario where they would come to such a recommendation is corruption.
Quite aside from that fact that Palantir is basically an arm of the US government -- which has proven to be an enemy to the West and a thoroughly busted idiocracy -- just look at the sociopaths that lead that company. Alex Karp's public appearances are dystopian, and the guy comes across as a vile, self-involved crackhead that has no comprehension how reprehensible he is to 99% of the planet. Thiel is utterly deranged, and that goblin shouldn't come within a parsec of any influence or power.
“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”
Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?
The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure, but nobody does because they would quite rightly be called out as conspiracy theorists.
> Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?
Is there any reason to think they would not do something illegal? Or that they would be above exporting secret data?
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a very profitable company that has spent 20-ish years working with intelligence agencies from a bunch of different countries, I find it hard to believe they'd just casually commit some incredibly serious crime without evidence beyond "well, they theoretically could".
> very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems
They're hosted by the US. It would be illegal for them not to comply with orders to hand data over to US security services. This has been a concern since the Microsoft "safe harbour" GDPR case. It's now the same thing with much higher stakes.
Since this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr... , no US tech company can give a meaningful guarantee that they won't just turn off critical UK defence systems if ordered to by Trump. Such as if we tried to carry out actions against the invasion of Greenland. I admit that was a couple of months ago, so it now seems like ancient history, but the US picks a new invasion target every month.
They are _not_ hosting UK government data in the US. They offer on-premise and self-managed cloud offerings, which are often used where data sovereignty is important. Additionally, customers often manage access control - including for Palantir employees - themselves, so it would not be a simple "pull the power plug" if the US/UK relationship went awry.
Palantir is dragging a small independent Swiss investigative newspaper to court because they reported[1] about Palantir getting the door slammed in their face in by several Swiss government agencies including the military over the last years. No one wants this turd of a company.
[1] https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-...
Now with Golden Dome, Palantir is a global security threat not just a national one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Palantir has been integrated with global-scale ISR for several years, in the US.
Weak authoritarians who don't understand how to govern seem to adore palantir
Oracle 2.0.
Related meeting launching today about Palantir and the NHS - https://www.medact.org/event/briefing-launch-the-risks-of-pa...
Thiel - the dark data lord - tries to get his fingers in any data source imaginable.
Can someone explain why Palantir are seen as such a threat? My understanding is their product is a PowerBI++ and they don't host any user data themselves. Are people scared of backdoors?
Two Reasons:
1) It holds deeply sensitive data and does so in the US. In times of increased mistrust of the US, many (including myself) see that as a risky choice.
2) Speaking of mistrust in America and American corporations, have you heard their execs talk? It's absolute cuckoo-town:
> If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.
Well, you've convinced me. I'm scared of America, I'm scared of American companies and I'm scared of your company in particular.
Good job, I guess?
Are you sure they hold sensitive data themselves though? My understanding was they integrate their tools with customers own data and don't have access to it themselves (at least in theory).
Of course I agree that quote is insane and you can dislike them for political reasons, but I want to understand the technological fears and see if any are unfounded.
The article mentions “while the underlying data may remain under the MoD’s control, any insights derived from that data do not. The implications of this, the insiders say, are far-reaching, especially because of the vast quantity of personal and other data the company has access to across UK government departments.”
Part of the core offering is data washing.
they most definitely do not, and especially not on-prem, national security systems like are being discussed here. They sell software.
https://www.palantir.com/palantir-is-still-not-a-data-compan...
The loudest people about this have no idea what they're talking about essentially.
It's not sufficient but the first thing you can filter by is anyone who comments on the name first (literally one of the most effective marketing strategies in government contracting history basically).
I’ve only had their platforms explained to me by them (palantir) at a conference but the mental model that stuck with me was more of an operating system than a single tool. Think AWS managed services + databricks + whatever library of ready made intelligence software they have already built for others.
They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup.
The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value.
And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Distribution_of...
It’s just the latest implementation of a winning formula.
Even if the software is mundane I don't think most people should want their country offloading sensitive spy stuff to a guy who's obsessed with the antichrist to the extent the Vatican itself is complaining he's going to Rome and giving secret speeches about it.
For a company that tries exclusively to sell to people that are very far removed from the use (government), yet have onerous reporting standards for all spending (government), there sure is very little independent reporting on the efficacy of whatever it is they are even selling. Even the contract with NHS was heavily censored. So frankly I oppose it on that ground alone.
The United States is no longer a reliable ally.
That is the reality that the world is having to adapt to. Even when Trump is gone, it will take a long time to rebuild that trust.
You shouldn’t assume trust will naturally just regrow. This may be it, we may have passed peak USA.
Hence the Carney strategy up here in Canada. We can realize in hindsight that we were far too dependent on a single ally. We're diversifying - and even if America wants to become reliable again we've learned and will (hopefully) never be so dependent again.
In the post WW2 era most western countries grew lazy about sovereignty due to America's open-handed approach - this has been a wake up call and has severely lowered America's soft-power globally.
Would you trust Palantir if you're I'm the US?
Obviously, just look at what the Palantir stones did to Saruman and Denethor. They're a corrupting force, both in the middle-earth case and in the our-earth case.
Thiel has made no secret of his intent to use technology to dispense with that pesky democracy problem that billionaires have, and Palantir is pretty obviously his attempt to do just that. It's a reductio-ad-absurdum argument against listening to your citizens:
You put it in the hands of a populist demagogue, the power to apply hyper-targeted pain to their enemies amplifies their darker tendencies, and when evil happens you say: "look, the people can't be trusted." Meanwhile, you use it to direct the pointy end of the state's stick towards people you don't like (because the demagogue is too lazy to actually use those hyper-targeting features themself) so you can interfere with democratic attempts to limit your power without bothering to pay for the pepper spray.
Nobody in their right mind would want their government anywhere near it.
I still don't understand why Theil and Karp decided to name their surveillance tech company after a device that is best known for being used by an evil dark lord to decieve and corrupt. It's like the Mitchell and Webb skit "are we the baddies" except they're the ones who designed the uniforms with skulls on them.
Thiel apparently gives talks about the Antichrist. He's actually a very thoughtful Christian, following the works of Rene Girard. I think he's just got a rather dark sense of humour.
Sounds deranged to me. Like, seriously, has had a psychotic break from reality.
I think that's more about trying to attract christian rubes than it is reflective of his actual humor
I don't think you have to understand why they made that decision, you just have to understand who they are and what they believe in. Just have a look at what they talk about, and what they are quoted as saying.
Then it will start to make sense.
Because it's funny and they genuinely don't care whether or not they're bad guys
Well, it's not inherently any more evil than Fanta, is it?
I gathered from this article that Palantir apparently has complete transparency into - a "profile" of - every UK citizen.
This is glossed over and not really mentioned as an issue...
I feel like there’s a lesson to be learnt by reading Lord of the Rings and seeing what happens to Saruman and Denethor.
Yep, Palantir of NOTHANKS.
(Play on words of Palantir of Orthanc)
Why do the worst companies have the best names.
Palantir isn't a good name. It's a disastrously bad one, if you ask me. It's a constant scandal as every five minutes somebody gets the bright idea that "ackshually the Palantir were a tool for evil made by a demon!!"
They're never able to live it down. It always comes up. And it makes them seem, in a way, careless.
Ackshually the Palantir were made by the Elves of Valinor, and weren't made as a tool for evil.
In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.
If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.
You're talking about it. Right now along with a solid dozen other people as the only comments on this thread.
People barely understand what the company does, but boy do they want to tell you all about the name.
It's marketing gold. Because rather then "who was that? Some firm named something corp" instead you're spending 5 minutes reinforcing how bad the name is..just building a ton of word association games for a name derived from a well known fiction work and really building up the message that the company is named Palantir and they sell products to the government.
It's a great name if your target customer base is people who want to be evil by surveilling everything. Behold my next company, "Eye of Sauron LLC"
Nah - that customer base would much rather a mean-nothing name like "Salesforce". The real evil people don't revel so much in their evilness they're much more in the "ends justify the means" camp where they can try and hide their evilness from their conscience. Nobody wants to wear a pin saying "I am, in fact, a terrible person that the world would be better without."
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Invent The Torment Nexus.
Fascism puts a heavy emphasis on aesthetics
They're better at selling ideas than having fleshed out ideas. One could say they sell before they build.
Italian fascists did have fashion forward uniforms.
So did the German Nazis back then now I think about it.
Maybe there is something with cult-like thinking, fascist or not, where the aesthetics seduces more people into wanting to be a part of it all?
No doubt the smart uniforms, the rallies, the flags, the songs etc were a factor in many young men joining the SS.
There's a bit of writing in that direction if you're curious. I like Benjamin quite a but and have gotten a lot out of his thinking. Here's the wiki-level entry to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticization_of_politics
Oh, it was 100% marketing.
It's not just fascists, either; totalitarian regimes _in general_ tend to be very keen on this sort of thing.
They like purity. Purity of the body (fitness and lifestyle) and purity of society (regimentation, conformity, single race, single ideology, single sexuality, standardized architecture).
It's neurological. They feel emotional disgust if the regimentation isn't there.
We're not a serious country anymore. We build very little. We control very little. Three years ago the war in Ukraine broke out causing the energy price crisis and the short term solution was the government paying a portion of everyone's bills. Three years later we're in the same situation again thanks to the US and Israel's warmongering. Are we prepared? No. What's the solution? Freezing the price caps and paying a portion of peoples bills.
The history of Palantir:
Christine Maxwell and Alan Wade found Chiliad, a database surveillance application that was used in the FBI. Then Alan Wade became CIO at the CIA. Then In-Q-Tel (CIA) co-founded Palantir with Thiel.
Karp, who was at Haverford college with Epstein's neighbor Lutnick, became the philosophical ideologue for Palantir.
With these overt and easily verifiable connections it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir. The governments do not even work any better with all that surveillance software, they work worse than 20 years ago. So even the "we need it" argument is a fallacy.
"it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir".
Germany's PM was formerly at BlackRock. What exactly do you find so hard to believe?
I see the UK government hasn't been on a good run lately. Google recently released the Cloud Threat Horizons H1 2026 report. A vulnerability in the OIDC trust policy can be exploited to gain admin access to AWS. The UK Government Digital Service was one of the affected organizations. Datadog found their IAM role misconfigured the same way.
The fact Alex Karp has any security clearance at all boggles the mind.
Isnt this required anyway for everybody doing military & gov contracts?
Not for Jared Kushner and I expect he's not the only one.
Honestly it's really weird that it was ever allowed to get this stage. Their leadership has been pretty "mask off" for a good while now.
That's what you get when decisions are made by people who don't understand anything about the stuff they vote on.
...but understand and appreciate bribes very well
Just ask Wes Streeting and Peter Mandelson.
You only need to buy one or two to get it on the agenda, then everybody votes along party lines, on stuff they don't understand. It's not even that expensive.
Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.
Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics, Palantir is a great UI for ontological expert systems. Technically you could do everything without it but organizations and especially government typically don’t cultivate that level of expertise in their staff.
In my view expert systems typically failed because the organizations would degrade bureaucratically faster than any expert system could accommodate. With AI there isn’t a pre-requisite need for organizational expertise so the tooling will still work in largely dysfunctional orgs which is a property that did not previously exist. With the help of AI people who don’t understand ontologies can still successfully build one.
Separately it is my opinion that Palantir is a CIA cut-out for the Peter Thiel faction. So paying Palantir is like paying tribute to that particular faction. Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.
> Similar to how other large military purchases are less about the military hardware and more of a client state subscription to ‘align interests’ such that the US is more likely to act in the donor countries interest.
I have a feeling this is no longer a viable model. If "subscribers" get threatened every other day, they will be looking for alternatives.
So long as not subscribing is worse than subscribing countries will still do it. Even if it not in the interest of the country the decision makers can and do still get kickbacks / speaking engagements.
It’s interesting to read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had, though I think that speaks more to the relative cost effectiveness of tributes versus blackmail. These states don’t have the security apparatus to both blackmail US politicians and prevent others from blackmailing those same politicians. This second part is essential as it is what maintains the relative advantage.
I do think they will be less enthusiastic subscribers in the future, and perhaps even shop around for more cost effective approaches. Modi in India is intentionally creating an Indian diaspora as one example and I believe he is bribing politicians to help make this happen.
> read of the ineffectiveness of influence the gulf states thought they had
The primary players in the Gulf - Saudi and the UAE - have been aligned with the ongoing Iran strikes.
KSA's Mohammad Bin Salman has been lobbying Trump to strike Iran [0], just like his predecessor King Abdullah was doing [1]. Similarly, the UAE has an ongoing land dispute with Iran [2].
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-ira...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/cut-off-he...
[2] - https://www.uae-embassy.org/foreign-policy/occupied-uae-isla...
So is it your stated position that the reason the US has decided to go to war with Iran is because of Saudi Arabia and the UAE?
Nope. And that is quite a leap in logic.
The larger Gulf States are aligned with the US in striking Iran. And we have an incentive also to prevent another nuclear breakout from happening.
Edit: can't reply
> I do note that a similar reason was given for North Korea which did end up rather peacefully acquiring nuclear weapons
Because we were in Iraq and Afghanistan when North Korea's nuclear breakout happened in the early 2000s.
> the primary reason?
There is no primary reason (there never is), but there are clearly a multiple interests that aligned with striking Iran
1. Iran's eventual nuclear breakout (already mentioned)
2. The operationalization of the Iran-Central Asia-China railway in 2025 [0], which allows China to bypass Malacca
3. Iran's relative weakness following the collapse of the Assad regime, the death of much od Hezbollah's leadership, and the Houthis comparative weakness
4. Continued anger amongst policymakers in the Gulf, Israel, and the US that Iran-backed Hamas launched the 10/7 attack barely 3 weeks after the US+EU launched the IMEC project and were about to loop Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords [1]
[0] - https://caspianpost.com/iran/china-kyrgyz-iran-rail-link-cut...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/09/g20-eu-and-us-...
I was hoping to hear the case made as to why Israel was not the primary reason but instead you seem to have chosen to elide it altogether. It seems to be a conspicuous omission especially when both the US and Israeli admin have repeatedly made the case that Israel was the primary reason.
I felt giving a primary reason would add clarity, which is why I asked. So is “prevent another nuclear breakout from happening” the primary reason?
I do note that a similar reason was given for North Korea which did end up rather peacefully acquiring nuclear weapons.
Edit: so to confirm that is your stated primary reason? Any other reasons you can think of?
Primary reason is because Israel and American zionists (mostly evangelical christians) lobby for it. The KSA and friends also lobbying for it is just icing on the cake for American politicians.
> they will be looking for alternatives.
Who do "they" as in Europe go to?
China also views the EU as a junior partner [0], is running an ongoing disinfo campaign against the industrial exports of an EU member state [1], and has doubled down on it's support for Russia [2] in Ukraine in return for Russia backing China's claim on Taiwan [3].
And the EU is uninterested in building domestic capacity for most critical technologies.
Heck, last week [4] the EU excluded AI, Quantum, Semiconductors, and other technologies from the Industrial Accelerator Act (aka the "Made in EU" act) in order to concentrate on automotive and "net-zero" technologies.
Given that Chinese technology imports are already under the radar in the EU due to the Ukraine war, this is basically the EU creating a carveout for the US.
Even the major European Telecom and Space companies like Eutelsat, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefónica bluntly stated that they view the EU's digital sovereignity strategy as dead in the water [5] in it's current form.
Edit: can't reply
> They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you
But as I clearly showed, the EU is doing otherwise.
And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.
All the rhetoric about digital sovereignity and domestic capacity has been just that - rhetoric.
[0] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
[1] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
[2] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russias-shoigu-chinas-wa...
[4] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/eu-axes-ai-chips-and-quantum...
[5] - https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/europes-digital-sovereignty-...
> And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports.
I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)).
I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.
> that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA
It is for the EU.
The EU dislikes the current deprioritization of the Ukraine Conflict by the US, but also recognizes that the PRC is directly providing material support and subsidizing Russia's military industrial complex [0]. That is the red line for much of the EU.
Similarly, for the PRC it's continued support of Russia in their war in Ukraine is also a non-negotiatable [1], and the CCP's foreign mouthpieces continue to reiterate that "the mainstay of EU foreign policy — supporting Ukraine in a conflict to defeat Russia — has turned into a quagmire of sunk costs with little hope of success" [2].
> I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone
We know. And we don't care.
As long as the EU views Ukraine's territorial integrity as non-negotiable and a large portion of EU states view Russia as the primary national security threat, the US will remain the less bad option than the PRC or Russia.
Both the US and China are aligned in that we view the EU as a junior party that can be pressured [3].
If the EU views Russia as a threat, it will have to accept American vassalage becuase the PRC will continue to back Russia [1].
If the EU views America as a threat, it will have to accept Chinese vassalage, give up Ukraine, and accept Russia as the primary European military power.
Based on the carveouts within the Industrial Acceleration Act, the EU has chosen American vassalage.
[0] - https://ecfr.eu/article/funding-war-courting-crisis-why-chin...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
[2] - https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202603/16/WS69b7f2e2a310d...
[3] - https://www.economist.com/china/2025/11/17/europe-sees-china...
Very bold words. I am not even convinced the USA will stay relevant on the world stage, in the long run. Cutting ties hurts, but the process is underway. Also, "vassalage" is a bold word, if the US cannot make the EU give up Greenland or come running to help them in the Strait of Hormuz (there are also other examples). It is almost as if European politicians are playing it smart.
And my question is - are you fine sacrificing Ukraine in return for a Russian and Chinese military umbrella? This is the hard requirement for China to engage with the EU [0].
The answer in Poland, the Baltics, Czechia, and Finland is NO and that Russia is worse and that Ukraine must be supported, and will back the US no matter how transactional we become.
The answer in Hungary, Slovakia, and Belgium [1] is YES and that sacrificing Ukraine for Russia is acceptable.
[0] - https://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/china-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/4ce01938-a671-4433-83a7-dada2b3ba...
They/we will go to domestic producers as much as possible, then China, then US, then rest of the world in that order. At least that would make a rational approach since (for now) unique things like f-35 can become an expensive paperweight on a whim of a lonely sick man. You can't build any sort of defense strategy on that, can you.
The UK NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world. It absolutely could choose to hire and cultivate that level of expertise but then how would senior management retire into Palantir sinecures?
(It actually has quite a few expert staff who are not delighted with the tools they have been given but they don't have the lobbying power of Palantir and the cluster of consulting firms around it)
Sounds emblematic of a degraded bureaucracy to me, lots of wasted potential.
Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money).
If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.
It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.
This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.
A good design is valuable, and this applies to business processes as well.
How would you design the user experience of constructing a submarine?
Good design IS technological superiority.
> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.
The people making purchasing decisions at this level aren't the ones using it and don't care one whit about UX.
That isn't to say that it isn't valuable, but it's basically a non-factor. The technology itself is a non-factor. Everything is about connections, buzz words and pretty slide decks.
They literally do, since the people making purchasing decisions are usually the ones that ranked up through a system they used and know the intricacies of, including all the pain points.
Randos don't become general managers.
People who actually care about the day to day pain points of jira also do not become general managers
> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.
Have you ever used jira? They are very much not selling that thing on the basis of UX.
Sometime back, someone described in a way that was interesting to read. So, I bookmarked it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896367
Reproducing it verbatim;
“Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”
They’re also missing the tidbit that, like any other consultancy, they provide a means for laundering a conclusion that middle management has already come to, confirmation bias be damned. Unsurprising that they’re also useful for parallel construction for LEOs.
This is a somewhat misleading description.
The first half is true. They bring in their FDEs to clean and organize your data.
But the difference in what they leave behind is what separates them from classic consultancies and pure tech companies.
They don't leave behind "insights." They leave behind a suite of operational (ie have write capabilities not just dashboards) applications that are "custom" built to actually solve those insights. I put custom in quotes because while the applications are usually bespoke to your company, they are built in Palantir's app-building product Workshop, which significantly lowers the cost of building these custom apps.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview
So in the end, your company's processes are improved because your employees are using the apps that the FDE's built.
This is distinct from traditional consultancies because those will only leave behind the insights. Also distinct from most SaaS because those have a one-size-fits all approach, so you wind up having to change your company to fit the design of the application, where as Palantir builds its applications to fit your company.
So they are data brokers with data analysis combined.
Why don't we ban data brokers in the first place?
https://www.palantir.com/palantir-is-still-not-a-data-compan...
> Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company. We do not sell personal data of any kind. We don’t provide data-mining as a service.
Why would you ban data brokers?
At this point the question should be: why not?
There is a fairly recent demo of Maven Smart System, which is the military product offering on top of Gotham (their government product)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrtDgoqWmgM
The commercial product, Foundry, is very well documented and an extensive Data Platform that allows to build data pipelines (similar to Databricks) and build low code / no code applications on top. If you master it, its incredibly powerful but complex
> Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD
It's not rocket science. Those particular database schemas, together with those particular CRUD layers, do something useful, and neither building nor maintaining those applications is part of the core business for most companies, so buying prebuilt from somebody else, and letting them maintain it for you, makes perfect business sense.
Companies need databases lol.
I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.
To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.
And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.
It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.
Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.
It's true, literally no b2b sales companies existed before Salesforce. We must all continue to pay for Salesforce and support its workflows for now until the endless future, lest b2b sales vanish again.
Because it's hard for the government[1] to build computer systems.
Government salaries are pretty low compared to dev salaries. If the government wants to hire devs and pay them as much as private industry does, they'd have to pay them much more than what their superriors (and their superriors' superriors) make, which would destroy workplace morale. They could raise everyone's salaries, but that's deeply unpopular, as a large part of the population view all high-level government functionaries as crooks by definition.
The way you get around that is by using contractors. Contractors let you hide the cost of software development. Instead of paying $150k to a software developer (which is probably more than the director makes), you pay $10m to a company, not unusual when you also hire companies to build you planes and bridges. How that company allocates that 10m and how much they pay their engineers is no longer your concern, and no longer an embarrassment to your hierarchy and salaries.
However, writing contracts for software is hard, for the same reason waterfall is hard. You just don't really know what the requirements are before the project starts, and in a traditional RFP process, you can't accurately model what requirements are the costliest and should perhaps be reconsidered. This means contracted government projects usually turn into an exercise in checkbox-checking and terrible, unusable UIs which technically fulfill the acceptance criteria, and therefore have to be accepted.
Palantir has somehow managed to actually collaborate with the government, sending forward-deployed engineers to figure out what their actual needs are, and then writing software which fulfills exactly those needs, bringing techniques which modern tech companies have learned along the way. I don't actually know how they managed to circumvent the RFP process well enough to do this.
[1] "The government" here can apply to any government you like, not necessarily the US government.
Palantir’s product is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.
Seems unlikely. I've seen teams at GDS + teams based on the GDS way of working in other UK gov departments solve some really knarly problems.
Counter to that I’ve seen a £37m contract for a form on gov uk with absolutely no change in process, just going from a letter received to a online form
GDS is amazing. However, unless we double/triple the GDS salary grades, it'll inevitably be hollowed out. From what I heard, that might've already happened.
Look for yourself, GDS is hiring a "Lead Technical Architect" for £67,126–£91,453 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/jobs/ . FAANG (and Palantir) pays up to triple that. How can GDS compete for talent?
They most definitely won't spend time on military bases though, whereas Palantir devs will essentially live there.
iOS is light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever, and in my opinion can ever, deliver. They’re not even in the same league.
I hope you can see why that's a nonsensical statement. Palantir is a private intelligence company.
They've reworked some planning and a reduced the waiting list, slightly. Not exactly worth the money (and letting them have ALL of our data).
> light years ahead of anything any government IT project has ever,
But specifically in terms of what?
Horseshit, mate ... basically just pumped up database software aided and abetted by "consultants" parachuted into the client org ... like the industry has been doing since the 80's ...
Edit: I found the following on Glassdoor and, while I don't know the poster personally, it pretty much sums it up:
"If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors."
Somebody needs to wrap up open source AI/ML and sell it to governments / defense, and do the integration... (e.g. open source Python face recognition libraries, openCV, YOLO object detection, etc. and more recently LLMs.)
'Do the integration' is where all the fun and money is.
And the work.
It's 100% laziness on the side of procurement, aided by some good marketing and a complete lack of guardrails. Exactly the same mindset that has led to every European government now being tied to US big tech.
Why does Palantir specifically need to exist? To funnel those juicy government budgets into shareholders' pockets.
Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)
Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."
If Palantir wasn’t highly effective at aggregating data no one would care about the. They are considered a threat to privacy and freedom because they are a good product
That's part of it, but not the whole story. If Palantir were a book, explaining how to implement data aggregation systems effectively, people wouldn't be so wary of it. (Critics would still criticise that data aggregation was performed in the first place, of course, but there wouldn't be the additional "and it's Palantir".)
They have magic consultant power mode.
In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.
Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.
At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.
Their reason for existing is: they provide a source for consultants willing to work with cops and surveillance agencies.
The software exists because it's now convenient and easier to build their own than depend on a contractor.
Note that "UK Security" and "safety of people in the UK" are very distinct things. But - exposure to whatever Palantir does is very likely bad for the second regardless of whether or not it's bad for the first.
> Note that "UK Security" and "safety of people in the UK" are very distinct things.
"Everything in the name of man, everything for the good of man!" — The 3rd Program of the CPSU, 1961. As the joke went, "and if you get to visit the Party Congress in Moscow, you will even get to see that very man!"
TIL that the head of Palantir's UK arm is the grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
Sins of the father are not sins of the (grand)son.
Of course, but this lineage should indeed encourage some scrutiny.
Especially as multiple people in his family have had fascist sympathies.
Given his ancestry wearing a black shirt for a TV interview was pretty bad judgement.
If it quacks like a duck...?
To an extent, but with caution and charity. A lot of exceptionally good people have come from bad families - one of the Borgias was a saint, for example. A lot of exceptionally nasty people seem to have perfectly nice families.
Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
You'd be surprised how often the beliefs of the father/grandfather are those of the son/grandson, not to mention how often they feel the need to avenge for the perceived injustices or slights done to their parents
Given the history of his family, one would expect them to avoid risqué associations and activities. I think it deserves some scrutiny.
Of course not, the grandson is hard at work on his own sins.
My point exactly.
Apples don't usually fall that far from the tree.
... I'm sorry, what?
If this was a political drama, that would be written out on the basis that it wasn't believable.
He's in good company.
MI6 head is Blaise Metreweli whose grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, the Nazis' chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.
It is a complete no-brainer that Thiel and his minions shouldn't be let anywhere near anything health or security related.
Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
It says a lot about the breakdown of current US society and democracy that Palantir's leadership feels free to speak in the way that they do. People will not forget, because we all suspected that they were like this, but when given a tiny bit of power by electing a transient and weak president, they pulled their masks off fully.
Seems like a crucial miscalculation on their part, as they lose all international revenue and will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
It seems clear that the assumptions they are working off is that they will not be restored.
Not just an assumption, but a goal. If some semblance of democratic society returns they know they’ll be held accountable, so they’ll fight with every means available to prevent that from happening.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because shedding the sheepskin is the point. It's performative. A display of power.
It doesn't matter that Karp has destroyed his brain with cocaine, nor that he's a massive bigot. It's a signal. "We have won. You can't stop us".
> will likely lose all US revenue as soon as democratic check and balances are restored.
The gamble and taunt being that they're stating that this will not happen. Thiel has won. US democracy is dead. The moment Trump croaks they try to seize the fed entirely.
The actual miscalculation is deeper. They may seize the US government. It won't save them, they'll only drag it down with them.
Globalism is not some evil ploy by which [we all know exactly who they're accusing] try to subvert the US. It is the foundational mechanism of the US' imperialism. And in trying to unmake globalism, they're unmaking the American Empire.
Similarly with democracy. Democracy is not some weakness forced upon the west. It is the winning system of government after all others have collapsed. Even the smartest god-king is useless if all his advisors are coked out nutjobs. Thiel's idea of disposing of democracy will doom not only the US, but himself personally as well.
> Whenever I see Alex Karp speak I wonder why they can't even pretend to put on sheep's clothing.
Because he's speaking to his investors aiming to keep the stock price up. He's not selling his products or himself to the world. His investors are rewarding him for the way he talks and acts.
Frankly the other cofounders are just as bad as Thiel but don't draw the headlines quite as much.
"Yesterday, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale agreed with an X post suggesting communists in the Western hemisphere should be blown up. “Exactly,” he wrote. “What did you think founding Palantir was supposed to be about?”" - https://responsiblestatecraft.org/defense-companies-maduro/
"“We support warfare and we are proud of it,” Karp stated bluntly during the conversation with German media outlet Heise.de." - https://zetbit.tech/news/209/pentagon-backing-palantir-ceo-k...
"In a CNBC interview Thursday, Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp opined that AI will undermine the influence of “highly educated, often female voters” and empower working class men instead. And anyone who doesn’t realize this political reality, he added, belongs in an “insane asylum.”" - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ceo-palantir-ai...
They're all certifiable.
In Germany we have a term for entities headed by people who publicly say things Thiel and his gang say. It's verfassungsfeindliche Organisation. I really don't understand how they can still be considered government suppliers to purchase from. Just because they are on the stock exchange and not some secret conspiracy? (they are not on the stock exchange)
It's simple - nobody actually cares about the constitution.
The UK doesn't have a constitution.
Germany does, and that's what verfassungsfeindlich refers to. Germany also uses Palantir.
The UK doesn’t have a written constitution, it does have one though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
Right but if you read that page you quickly come to the quote "Parliament can make or unmake any law". Technically there is judicial review now, so there is some restrictions, but not like in a USA style constitution.
Same is true in the US though? Surely that’s what all those amendments are
... if the goal is to have good health and security.
https://www.ft.com/content/fc1e7e9a-9d5d-4217-b9b2-38069eb11...
> US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on a collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff.
This sort of stuff might go down well with fundamentalists in america, but it has no place in the advanced world.
How is this not shut down in any form? This is actual insanity.
This sort of thing has been widespread in US fundamentalist Christian circles for a long time. He probably goes (or went) to a church surrounded by people who also believe that.
Normalization of deviance. They've shifted what is considered normal so far out of bounds that they can now pretend this is just fine. So no more fig-leafs. It brought down the Space Shuttle, and it will bring down society if left unchecked.
Why is it any of our business what this guy says in his free time if it's not advocating for violence?
Calling people "harbingers of the antichrist" is tantamount to advocating violence, not to mention slander.
If this guy was some raving lunatic on a corner I wouldn't care. But he's got a country sized megaphone thanks to money and has also bought the government. So it does unfortunately matter that he's an insane christian cretin that wants to see the current form of government destroyed.
Because he made it our business by deliberately making it public.
Also, LBC exclusive about £250 million contact that came about because of Mandelson breaking today.
I mean if it wasn't obvious from the get go they're, well, dubious, given the grandson of Owsald Mosley is the UK CEO.
Always interesting when you criticise Palantir on here you get downvoted, almost as if they have an "outreach department"
No the downvote is from smearing an individual for the political activities of his grandfather.
It is insanity that any country would give an iota of data, much less any sort of control, to an org like Palantir. Any government representative for countries outside of the US or Israel that recommends such a vile trojan horse needs to be outed as the traitorous plant that they are. Every element of their personal life needs to be scrutinized, because the only scenario where they would come to such a recommendation is corruption.
Quite aside from that fact that Palantir is basically an arm of the US government -- which has proven to be an enemy to the West and a thoroughly busted idiocracy -- just look at the sociopaths that lead that company. Alex Karp's public appearances are dystopian, and the guy comes across as a vile, self-involved crackhead that has no comprehension how reprehensible he is to 99% of the planet. Thiel is utterly deranged, and that goblin shouldn't come within a parsec of any influence or power.
“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”
Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?
The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure, but nobody does because they would quite rightly be called out as conspiracy theorists.
> Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?
Is there any reason to think they would not do something illegal? Or that they would be above exporting secret data?
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a very profitable company that has spent 20-ish years working with intelligence agencies from a bunch of different countries, I find it hard to believe they'd just casually commit some incredibly serious crime without evidence beyond "well, they theoretically could".
> has spent 20-ish years working with intelligence agencies from a bunch of different countries
This is supposed to count towards their integrity? There is no way your posts aren't satire, actually great job you almost convinced me lmao
> very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems
They're hosted by the US. It would be illegal for them not to comply with orders to hand data over to US security services. This has been a concern since the Microsoft "safe harbour" GDPR case. It's now the same thing with much higher stakes.
Since this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr... , no US tech company can give a meaningful guarantee that they won't just turn off critical UK defence systems if ordered to by Trump. Such as if we tried to carry out actions against the invasion of Greenland. I admit that was a couple of months ago, so it now seems like ancient history, but the US picks a new invasion target every month.
They are _not_ hosting UK government data in the US. They offer on-premise and self-managed cloud offerings, which are often used where data sovereignty is important. Additionally, customers often manage access control - including for Palantir employees - themselves, so it would not be a simple "pull the power plug" if the US/UK relationship went awry.