By Kit Klarenberg / The Grayzone
During an end-of-year investor call this February, Palantir co-founder and militant Zionist Alex Karp bragged that his company was making a financial killing by enabling mass murder.
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies,” he stated, adding: “And on occasion kill them.”
On this front, Karp claimed Palantir was “crushing it,” and he professed to be “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
Karp went on to predict social “disruption” ahead that would be “very good for Palantir.”
“There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off,” he warned, suggesting that his firm was producing the most vital technology enabling elites to restore control during the coming unrest.
Palantir is already playing a decisive role in the besieged Gaza Strip, where its products assists Israel’s application of a ferocious AI targeting system known as Lavender which directs its ongoing genocide. In the face of public protest, Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza, but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.”
At the start of January, the overtly pro-Israeli firm’s board of directors gathered in Tel Aviv for its first meeting of the new year. Since then, its financial fortunes have improved dramatically.
Throughout May, Palantir’s stock exploded, making it the S&P 500’s top-performing company. On June 2, Palantir’s share price hit an all-time high, a year-on-year jump of 512%, turbocharging the company’s market value to roughly $311 billion. Driving this abrupt burst of investor exuberance was a welter of lucrative deals signed with multiple US government agencies since Donald Trump took office, and the expectation Palantir will ink further contracts in the future.
Palantir’s products expand mass surveillance at home, Pentagon targeting across the globe
On May 30th, the New York Times published a lengthy probe linking these deals to an executive order signed by Trump in March, calling for seamless, mass sharing of data across government agencies through a Palantir application called Foundry.
The paper report did not explain to readers how Palantir emerged as a small startup thanks to sponsorship from the CIA’s venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, which gifted Peter Thiel’s company $2 million in 2004. Instead, the paper leaned in to a partisan angle playing on Democratic fears that Trump could abuse a unified database to target political foes.
Nonetheless, the Times provided valuable insight into Palantir’s penetration of a vast array of US government agencies, by raking in more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office, on top of “additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.” In late May, the company’s existing contract with the Department of Defense was beefed up by $795 million, bringing it to an eye-popping total award of $1.3 billion.
Palantir currently provides the Pentagon with AI targeting software known as Maven, which it uses in battlefields from Syria to Yemen to Ukraine and beyond. The contract will last until at least May 2029. The Trump administration’s fondness for Palantir has placed its data analytics and storage tool Foundry in at least four federal agencies, including the DHS and Health and Human Services Department. Talks are also apparently ongoing with the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service to adopt the resource. This would facilitate merging all these agencies’ datasets.
According to the Times, Palantir was selected to deliver on Trump’s order to enhance intradepartmental data sharing by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members previously worked at the company, while two others have worked at Thiel-funded firms. The outlet cited leaked screenshots indicating DHS officials exchanged emails with DOGE in February about merging citizen records, while quoting nameless Palantir employees worrying “about collecting so much sensitive information in one place,” particularly given the allegedly “sloppy” approach to security of “some DOGE employees”.
While focusing heavily on the risks posed by Trump’s embrace of Palantir technology, the Times acknowledged in passing the company “has long worked” with different branches of the US federal government, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In February 2022, Palantir was enlisted by the Biden administration to manage Covid vaccine distribution. Meanwhile, in April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “removal operations team” gave Palantir $30 million “to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”
Karp, for his part, has infuriated Trump’s base by boasting during an interview in Davos, Switzerland in 2023 that “singlehandedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe” through an application called PG. The following February, he claimed before an audience at the Future Investment Initiative Institute that by supposedly stopping “innumerable terror attacks” across Europe, Palantir prevented the resurgence of fascism.
“I love when I’m getting yelled at in cities in Europe,” Karp declared. “Keep yelling at me… the only reason why someone’s not goose-stepping between me and you is my product,” he laughed.
Palantir penetrates the West as privatized national security state backbone
For years, Palantir has been at the heart of US-led efforts to neutralize Iran’s alleged nuclear program. It has created a predictive analytical tool dubbed Mosaic for the purpose, used by the International Atomic Energy Agency and US officials to visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities. Data harvested and pored over by the resource includes potentially tainted material supposedly stolen from Tehran by Mossad.
Such work mimics the services Palantir has provided for US government agencies such as the CIA, DHS, FBI, and Pentagon. These entities routinely turn over untold quantities of data to the firm to exploit for a variety of applications. For example, Palantir’s Gotham tool has been weaponized by the US military to supposedly predict insurgent attacks. In Afghanistan, it combined maps, intelligence briefings, and incident reports for mission planning, leading Bloomberg to dub Palantir the “secret weapon” of the so-called war on terror.
Meanwhile, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate the US signals intelligence giant and its British counterpart GCHQ have relied heavily on Palantir’s products. A leaked 2011 presentation connected the company’s wares to multiple secret Five Eyes spying operations, and provided glowing personal testimonials from the agencies’ analysts. One crowed: “[Palantir] is the best tool I have ever worked with. It’s intuitive, i.e. idiot-proof, and can do a lot you never even dreamt of doing.”
Local law enforcement agencies are also making use of Gotham. The total number of forces worldwide using the technology is unknown, but leaked Los Angeles Police Department training documents on Gotham, including an ‘Intermediate Course’ and an ‘Advance Course,’ shed significant light on the tool’s internal workings. The sheer volume of data collected on citizens – whether they are law-abiding, are suspected of having committed a crime, or are simply connected to individuals accused of wrongdoing – is staggering.
This includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features. Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, and Gotham subscriptions run to millions of dollars annually. The vast windfall reaped from multiple state entities since Palantir’s inception has made the firm’s founders very wealthy indeed – Karp’s personal worth alone is currently estimated at $12.2 billion – and allowed the company to go public in September 2020.
On top of significant privacy concerns inevitably raised by a highly secretive company being unaccountably granted access to so much citizen data, the practical efficacy of Palantir’s technology has also been subject of much controversy. Such consternation is not restricted to security and intelligence spheres, but also health. Foundry was implanted in Britain’s NHS in December 2020, via a potentially illegal deal, under which Palantir was awarded a non-competitive contract to run the Service’s COVID19 Data Store for two years, for the token sum of £1.
Evidently happy with the results, in November 2023 the NHS awarded Palantir a $447 million contract to build a “Federated Data Platform” combining the medical records of all British citizens. The following year, the British government handed a consultancy firm called KPMG millions to market the platform to local NHS Trusts, which oversee the running of individual hospitals throughout the country, so they would adopt the FDP. Since then, several senior medical officials have cautioned Palantir’s technology would actually hinder the NHS’ work, and is inferior to current systems.
Yet British PM Keir Starmer has only deepened his government’s cooperation with Palantir, stopping at the company’s offices in downtown Washington DC immediately after meeting with Trump this February. Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK, cheered Starmer’s attitude after the visit: “You could see in his eyes that he gets it. The ambition is there – the will is there.”
Palantir’s Mosley happens to be the grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, the World War II-era Nazi sympathizer who led the British Union of Fascists.
While Thiel’s personal affinity for Trump and close relationships with key members of the president’s cabinet may have eased Palantir’s recent entry into sensitive government areas, the company’s current trajectory has been long in the making. Having penetrated the national security state of countries across the West, the company and its messianic CEO can build on their experience in Gaza to consolidate a trans-Atlantic network of control with unprecedented powers.
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Kit Klarenberg
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
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