As Appetite for War and Repression Rise in the New Western (Dis-)Order, Palantir Is Making a Killing

Silicon Valley’s darkest and most secretive unicorn “has finally made it big”. But at what cost to the rest of us?

For almost two years, the British government has been holding an inquiry-cum-whitewash into the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the recent witnesses to that inquiry was Louis Mosley, the executive vice-president of Palantir Technologies UK (and, incidentally, the grandson of the 1930s British fascist Oswald Mosley), who during his testimony saw a rare opportunity to plug his company’s products. It was one he seized upon with relish.

The UK government, he said, should invest in a “common operating system” for its data, encompassing the full gamut of departments and local authorities — a system that Palantir would presumably be more than happy to develop:

“[The government should] deploy this common operating system capability immediately and not wait until the next pandemic or civil challenge on the scale of COVID-19 is already underway. An investment of this kind is already long overdue.”

This comment is very similar to a remark made by Palantir’s Chief Technology Operator Shyam Sankar in 2021 — with regard to the US government:

Turning to government, we continue to advance our mission of becoming the US government’s central operating system as we extend our footprint across defence, healthcare and civilian agencies.

As outlandish as the idea may seem that one company could aspire to exclusively provide and manage a central operating system for the governments of both the US and the UK, there can be no doubting Palantir’s ambitions to expand its influence throughout government on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a company, after all, whose founder, Peter Thiel, has long marketed himself as a libertarian while lauding the benefits of monopoly capitalism and helping build the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state.

As Iain Davis writes in his excellent two-part series on the “Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate”, the “proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Elon Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise”:

Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.

What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.

Silicon Valley’s Darkest Unicorn

Palantir, Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn, is now reaping the rewards of the rising appetite for war and repression in the collective West — including, of course, Israel.

Few US companies have so brazenly aligned themselves with Israel during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, Palantir, together with the US National Security Agency, has furnished Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities. The company has even reportedly developed software to help expedite Israel’s generation of kill lists for the Gaza strip.

In a recent panel discussion, Palantir’s Chairman (and former classmate of Thiel’s) Alex Karp described Gaza anti-genocide protesters as an “infection inside out society.”

Ret. Gen. Mark Milley says the US has committed so many war crimes over the years, it has no right to criticize Israel's devastation of Gaza

Palantir CEO Alex Karp chimes in: "The peace activists are actually the war activists, and we're the peace activists."

Karp says of Gaza… pic.twitter.com/Ktc5H4uYJi

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 8, 2024

The company Thiel founded just over 20 years ago, with CIA funding, began life by providing big data and surveillance support to military, intelligence and police agencies. Its main line of work is data fusion — taking a million disparate pieces of information and turning them into something useful.

The company was created to be the privatised version of a post-9/11 surveillance program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), as Whitney Webb has documented over the years. The program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA but it was ostensibly shut down by Congress in 2003.

Today, Palantir Technologies’ client list includes a wide array of government departments, from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to NHS England, as well as banks, other tech firms, insurance providers and Wendy’s. A company that aspires to be “in every missile (or drone)” has found fertile room for growth in both the US’ private healthcare industry and the UK’s publicly owned NHS. While two-thirds of its sales are still US-based, the company is rapidly expanding its overseas operations, particularly to the UK.

The Trump and Starmer governments may differ wildly in terms of style, language and professed ideals, but they have some things in common. Both are looking to transform their respective countries into AI powerhouses while also launching similar full-frontal assaults against basic democratic rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and the right to protest. Both have launched brutal crackdowns on protests against Israel’s genocide of Gaza.

Automating Deportation and Streamlining Tax Collection

To help them achieve these aims, both are turning to Peter Thiel’s Palantir. In the US, for example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build an immigration OS surveillance platform. Once operational, that platform will provide the agency with “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the United States and will also help ICE choose who to deport, according to a contract justification published in a federal register on Thursday.

Palantir is arming ICE with AI tools that integrate federal data to monitor and identify deportation targets in real time pic.twitter.com/wTI3dvcQCA

— HOT SPOT (@HotSpotHotSpot) April 18, 2025

A recent exposé by WIRED, citing IRS sources, suggests that Palantir is also participating in an effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records:

APIs are application programming interfaces, which enable different applications to exchange data and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud and access it there. DOGE has expressed an interest in the API project possibly touching all IRS data, which includes taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment data. The IRS API layer could also allow someone to compare IRS data against interoperable datasets from other agencies.

Should this project move forward to completion, DOGE wants Palantir’s Foundry software to become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and have the ability to possibly alter all IRS data in one place. It’s not currently clear who would have access to this system.
Foundry is a Palantir platform that can organize, build apps, or run AI models on the underlying data. Once the data is organized and structured, Foundry’s “ontology” layer can generate APIs for faster connections and machine learning models. This would allow users to quickly query the software using artificial intelligence to sort through agency data, which would require the AI system to have access to this sensitive information.

In other words, while sources within the Trump Administration, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, were recently claiming that Trump was toying with the idea of eliminating the IRS altogether, presumably to impress his libertarian followers, the stone-cold reality is that DOGE, with Palantir’s help, is looking to expand and streamline the IRS’ data collection and use.

The irony in all this is that while Trump has tasked both Musk (directly) and Thiel (indirectly, through DOGE’s hiring of former Palantir workers) with slashing government spending through DOGE, their own companies are hugely dependent on government contracts. In the case of Palantir, those contracts appear to be growing.

The company has reportedly partnered with the Musk-owned Space X and Anduril Industries, a US-based drones manufacturer that is also part-owned by Thiel, on a bid to help build Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defence shield.

More Conflicts of Interest for the “Prince of Darkness”

It’s a similar story in the UK, where the Starmer government plans to digitise government services as rapidly and, it seems, as recklessly as possible — as The Daily Telegraph reported a couple of days ago, citizens’ personal data has been potentially put at risk by the government’s cyber security failings in its rollout of its One Login digital identity platform. At the same time, the UK government is intensifying its crackdown on all forms of public protest and online discourse, making it an ideal customer for Palantir’s broad suite of AI-powered products.

Indeed, after recently meeting with President Trump at the White House, Starmer’s next stop was to the Washington offices of Palantir. He was accompanied on his tour of the facilities by Palantir Chairman Alex Karp and the UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, Britain’s “prince of darkness”, which immediately sparked accusations of conflicts of interests.

Palantir is a long-standing client of Global Counsel, the lobbying company Mandelson co-founded during his time out of politics. Now that he’s back, Mandelson may have stepped down as chairman of Global Counsel but still retains “significant control,” according to Companies House.

Palantir UK chief executive, Louis Mosley, who was also in attendance, said Starmer “gets” Palantir — hardly a surprise given Starmer’s authoritarian impulses. From Politics Home:

Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK, met Keir Starmer that day. “You could see in his eyes that he gets it,” he tells The House from Palantir’s London office, in his first sit-down interview since joining the tech giant eight years ago. “The ambition is there – the will is there.”

The Prime Minister has described AI as the “defining opportunity” of the age. With economic growth at a standstill, Labour has rested its hopes of becoming an “AI superpower” in Palantir’s hands.

In 2023, the government awarded Palantir a £330m contract to manage NHS data, facing opposition from the British Medical Academy, patient groups and privacy campaigners.

But its rate of adoption since has been startling. Palantir is now being used across the NHS, Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Metropolitan Police…

Around a quarter of Palantir’s global workforce in now based in London, “helping the government to untangle and make sense of large data sets for policing and defence.” The company has big contracts with key government departments and agencies, including, most controversially for a company that specialises in death, NHS England.

In 2024, the company was awarded a £330m contract to manage NHS data despite stiff opposition from the British Medical Academy, patient groups and privacy campaigners. When the contract for the deal was published in December, almost three-quarters of the text had been redacted, including, ironically, almost entire sections relating to data protection and privacy.

Dozens of civil society groups have kicked up a storm about the prospect of so much highly sensitive personal data being handled by one US company, especially one so deeply embedded in the fast-growing mass surveillance industry, and the government already faces a lawsuit challenging the legality of the deal.

While Palantir insists that its expertise will help to unify patient records, reduce inefficiencies, and speed up decision-making, doubts persist about who will own and control the data. Another concern is that the deal will essentially lock the NHS into dependency on Palantir, reports People’s Dispatch.

The company’s systems are designed in a way to make data extraction difficult and integration with industry-standard analytics costly and complicated, so users are compelled to keep using them. “Palantir’s system pushes people to its own proprietary systems; and switching costs [for the NHS] will be very high,” Doctors’ Association and Foxglove warned in a 2023 report…

Palantir takes pride in finding new applications for data, specifically to reinforce Western dominance. Given that the full scope of the FDP remains unclear, there is significant concern that NHS data could also be exploited to boost Palantir’s surveillance tools. These tools are already being deployed in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Palantir’s Influence Network

Yet even as the protests against Palantir’s involvement in managing NHS data grow, the Starmer government is, if anything, intensifying its business relations with Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn. As the FT reports, “Palantir is profiting from a ‘revolving door’ of executives and officials passing between the $264bn data intelligence company and high level positions in Washington and Westminster, creating an influence network who have guided its extraordinary growth.”

The UK is not the only European country expanding its business with the spyware company. Earlier this month, NATO announced that it has decided to adopt Palantir’s Maven Smart System for artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield operations. According to the military alliance, the contract “was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system.”

Ludwig Decamps, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), said the new system will “provide customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance, and empowering our forces with the tools required on the modern battlefield to operate effectively and decisively.” The deal is confirmation, if needed, that Europe will maintain its reliance on US defence contractors even as relations between the EU and the Trump Administration have soured.

Needless to say, all of this government largesse has been good for Palantir’s bottom line. The company’s full-year revenue came in at $2.8 billion last year, up 29% from 2023. About $1.9 billion came from US businesses, of which government work accounted for $1.2 billion. Its shares are up 340% year over year.

On completion of its IPO in September 2020, the company had an implied valuation of $20 billion. Today, its market cap is over ten times that, at $216 billion. The company was even recently added to the S&P 100, an elite grouping of some of the most valuable publicly traded companies. As Fortune notes, “more than two decades since its founding, Palantir has finally made it big,” adding a cautionary note from Gregg Moskowitz, an analyst at investment firm Mizuho:

“[V]aluation cannot and should not be irrelevant, and we find it exceedingly difficult to justify [Palantir’s] multiple that in our view already discounts significant further acceleration and upside.” (As of market close on April 14, Palantir traded at about 491 times its trailing 12-month earnings; the broader Nasdaq 100, in contrast, traded at about 33 times earnings.)

Driving a Revolution

This is not just about the company’s bottom line, however. Thiel and Karp seem to genuinely believe they are in the vanguard of a revolution in both technology and governance — one that will save Western civilisation from external threats while transforming it into something very different.

“We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America,” Karp said during an investors call in February. “[We are] here to disrupt and.. when it’s necessary to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”

Months before Palantir signed its deal with NATO, Karp delivered a warning to Europe in a letter to shareholders, arguing that the old continent is at “risk of ruin”  as companies and governments stay on the sidelines while the US drives the AI revolution to its fruition:

“As America once again forges ahead, our allies and partners in Europe are being left behind. Their private and state institutions stand on the sidelines during this pivotal moment in economic history, while the relentless innovation of US companies disrupts and reshapes global industries. Europe must adapt to the opportunities and challenges of AI, or risk ruin.”

Karp has also recently co-published a book with Nicholas Zamiska titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which has been described by the Wall Street Journal as a “cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.” In it, Karp and Zamiska write: 

“Our entire defense establishment and military procurement complex were built to supply soldiers for a type of war—on grand battlefields and with clashes of masses of humans—that may never again be fought. This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software.”

As the article in Fortune notes, this is, “conveniently enough,… exactly what Palantir makes.” As the AI arms race that began in earnest on the battlefields of Ukraine and the killing fields of Gaza intensifies, Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn is poised to make a killing.