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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
My reading of [1] is that Palantir does data fusion. Their software, when installed on an organization's peripheral systems by their FDEs, centralizes all the org's data (within the org - not at palantir), and allows the org's management to do analyses on the pool.
I'm guessing that people are scared that the state will install one big palantir instance on all its systems. So that anything any part of the state learns about you, in any context or interaction, can be effortlessly used against you in every other context (perhaps via parallel construction in a lawsuit).
Basically, the fear would be that palantir makes mass surveillance data actionable, fuses surveillance programs, and incorporates most IT into mass surveillance programs.
The government would become less like a series of seperate agencies, more like a big consciousness that knows things (knows centrally, everything it was told anywhere).
Note this is just my interpretation of the fear.
Its fuzzy. Others may know more about palantir than me and thus have a more precise and grounded concern.
“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?
> 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.
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 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.
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.
You could probably do a series of parody 007 trailers and insert clips of a different Palantir leadership team member saying insane shit in interviews as the Bond villain in each one.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadIf this was a political drama, that would be written out on the basis that it wasn't believable.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Germany's PM was formerly at BlackRock. What exactly do you find so hard to believe?
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.
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).
It’s just the latest implementation of a winning formula.
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'm guessing that people are scared that the state will install one big palantir instance on all its systems. So that anything any part of the state learns about you, in any context or interaction, can be effortlessly used against you in every other context (perhaps via parallel construction in a lawsuit).
Basically, the fear would be that palantir makes mass surveillance data actionable, fuses surveillance programs, and incorporates most IT into mass surveillance programs.
The government would become less like a series of seperate agencies, more like a big consciousness that knows things (knows centrally, everything it was told anywhere).
Note this is just my interpretation of the fear.
Its fuzzy. Others may know more about palantir than me and thus have a more precise and grounded concern.
[1] https://archive.ph/6ljwy#selection-2539.194-2539.400
See also: https://redlib.privadency.com/r/Futurology/comments/4o02p3/o...
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.
Is there any reason to think they would not do something illegal? Or that they would be above exporting secret data?
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.
"Corporation says they aren't doing a bad thing so any assertion to the contrary is crazy."
Corporations actually tend to lie when they are engaged in illegal or repugnant behavior.
> The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure,
The leadership of those corporations aren't publicly supporting the dissolution of democracy to impose neo-feudalism, so that's a big difference.
To quote:
> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
- Peter Thiel
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.
[1] https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-...
This is glossed over and not really mentioned as an issue...