Palantir Technologies

Palantir was founded in 2003. Thiel named the startup after the "seeing stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. Likewise, Palantir's office locations have names from Tolkien: The Shire (Palo Alto, California), Rivendell (McLean, Virginia), and Grey Havens (London, U.K.). In 2013, Thiel said Palantir was a "mission-oriented company" that could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties". In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. The same year, he hired Alex Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law School, as chief executive officer.

There are at least four versions of the story of Palantir's founding, but they all say that Thiel and Karp produced software that others found applications for.

According to The Wall Street Journal, when Palantir launched in 2004, there were three investors other than Thiel and Karp but little interest from venture capital firms, so Thiel and his venture fund largely bankrolled the initial $30 million cost. CIA-affiliated venture capital firm In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million. According to Techcrunch, Oakhouse Partners led Palantir's $7.5 million Series A (June 2006) and REV led its $10.5 million Series B (November 2006). In its early years, Palantir maintained founder control by declining to offer board seats to investors, including In-Q-Tel. This practice continued through subsequent funding rounds.

The New Republic called Karp's formation of Palantir an embrace of techno-militarism to advance American global supremacy through hard power and targeted violence. The Wall Street Journal said Palantir had a "pro-America ethos" from its inception, highlighting a 2025 fellowship where fellows received a four-week seminar on Western civilization and whether it was worth defending.

According to the Journal, for two years the company continuously revised its technology based on the demands of analysts from the intelligence agencies, introduced to them by In-Q-Tel. A 2009 VentureBeat article said that most of the intelligence community knew about the company by word of mouth. …

Released in 2008, Palantir Gotham is Palantir's defense and intelligence software. It is an evolution of Palantir's longstanding work in the United States Intelligence Community, and is used by intelligence and defense agencies. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis, and prediction. Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military. Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, which has elicited some controversy over racism in their AI analytics.

Palantir Foundry is a software platform offered for use in commercial and civil government sectors. Foundry gained prominence in healthcare through deployment in the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a federated network of electronic health records. Research using this platform generated extensive peer-reviewed publications and won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks Grand Prize. NHS England also used Foundry in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the operation of the vaccination program.

As of 2022, Foundry was also used for the administration of the UK Homes for Ukraine program to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Home Office. In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a seven-year contract valued at £330 million to design and operate a Federated Data Platform connecting patient data across England's healthcare system. The contract was immediately criticized by the British Medical Association, The Doctors' Association UK, and cybersecurity professionals, citing concerns about patient data privacy, procurement transparency, and Palantir's commercial contracts with the Israel Defense Forces. NHS England originally published the contract in December 2023 with more than 70% of its pages redacted, prompting legal action that resulted in its republication with partial disclosure. In 2024, medical professionals picketed outside NHS England HQ, demanding the deal's cancellation. As of May 2025, four US federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, used Foundry.

The company has been involved in a number of business and consumer products, designing in part or in whole. …

Founded as a defense contractor, Palantir has since expanded to the private sector. These activities now provide a large proportion of the company's revenue. Palantir had 55% year-over-year growth in the U.S. commercial market in Q2 2024; it also serves foreign customers. Applications include telecommunications and infrastructure planning. Palantir Metropolis was used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms. Palantir Foundry clients include Merck KGaA, Airbus, and Ferrari. Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network.

NATO acquired the Palantir Maven Smart System NATO on March 25, 2025. The system reached full technical operational capability on June 22, 2026. The initial report issued by NATO on June 30, 2026, said that it is compatible with any AI system such as the U.S.' Meta Platforms and France's Mistral AI, with integration of other systems planned. NATO commanders have reacted to the discussion on sovereignty in the EU member countries. In May 2026, Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO's supreme allied commander transformation, said that currently there is no competitor for Palantir, and if European countries want alternatives, these alternatives should prove themselves in a few months or years, and not a decade. He advised countries to focus on control over processed data in the short term and development of infrastructure (like cloud and chips) in the long term, and not to mix these problems with dependence on single suppliers, which can be dealt with by pushing suppliers toward interoperable systems. Kai Rohrschneider [de], commander of Allied Joint Support and Enabling Command, criticized the distrust towards the United States and praised the Palantir software's "enormous value", noting that if member countries want to use different systems on the national level, connectivity between such systems and the programs of the NATO commands must be established.

Palantir's software was used by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to detect and investigate fraud and abuse in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Specifically, the Recovery Operations Center (ROC) used Palantir to integrate transactional data with open-source and private data sets to better screen the entities receiving stimulus funds. …

Palantir's partnership with Anduril Industries extends to many areas. In later 2024, there were reportedly building and leading a consortium with another dozen contractors, including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Saronic, to challenge the domination of the traditional "primes". They also partner with EVTOL company Archer Aviation. Alongside 8VC and General Catalyst, Palantir also helped create and is a member of the New American Industrial Alliance. The other members are other defense contractors and hardtech companies, such as Anduril, Andreessen Horowitz, Hadrian, Oklo Inc., Narya Capital, Booz Allen, Joby Aviation, Regent Craft, Atomic Industries, Impulse Space, and Dirac, which hope to reduce government regulations.

Palantir, TWG Global, and xAI have a joint venture. Palantir collaborates with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services to provide Anthropic's Claude AI models to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. It also partners with the traditional defense "primes": Boeing (specifically its defense and space unit), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman (TITAN system), and General Dynamics (through General Dynamics Land System).

Palantir is known to disrupt the traditional consulting business model. It also partners with traditional companies (and rivals in government contract) such as Deloitte, Booz Allen, and Accenture. On February 8, 2021, Palantir and IBM announced a partnership that would use IBM's hybrid cloud data platform alongside Palantir's operations platform for building applications. The product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, was expected to simplify the process of building and deploying AI-integrated applications with IBM Watson. On March 5, 2021, Palantir announced its partnership with Amazon AWS. Palantir's ERP Suite was optimized to run on Amazon Web Services. BP used the ERP suite. On August 8, 2024, Palantir and Microsoft announced a partnership whereby Palantir will deploy its suite of products on Microsoft Azure Government clouds.

In Korea, Palantir has strategic relationships with HD Hyundai and KT. It has a data alliance with HD Hyundai and partners with HD Hyundai and Siemens to automate shipbuilding for both Korea and the U.S. KT cooperates with Palantir to scale Foundry and AIP across Korean industries. …

Palantir has been criticized for its role in expanding government surveillance using artificial intelligence and facial recognition software. Some former employees and outside observers have also criticized the company's contracts under the second Trump Administration, which enable deportations and the aggregation of sensitive data on Americans across administrative agencies.

Wired wrote that some people think Palantir "maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients", which is untrue. The company's work does not affect how each organization collects its data but helps organizations "integrate and analyze data without needing to fix the underlying architecture", effectively functioning like "a technical band-aid". Palantir's customers "need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir itself does not provide any". Citing a former Palantir employee, Wired reported that the government can rely on Gotham to "centralize everything an agency knows about a person in one place".

Others observe that Palantir does not collect or store data, but only helps analyze data that customers have already collected and provides services and platforms where customers retain the rights; still, it is generally accepted that abuses by governments and data management failures can happen. Michael Steinberger told Politico, "they [Palantir] do not collect data, they do not store data, and they definitely don't sell data." But the end users, such as companies and governments, can determine "how rigorously or not to use safety controls built into the platform", and this creates risks.

The researchers Andrew Iliadis and Amelia Acker wrote, "lines of critique concerning hypothetical data sourcing can be defended", but Palantir "remains open to the critique of potentially being an accessory to acts of deportation, imprisonment, and racism through its contracts". …