Only a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, Palantir employees began to question their employer’s promises on civil liberties. Last autumn, Palantir appeared to turn into the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration-enforcement apparatus, supplying software that identifies, monitors, and helps deport immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security, and that’s when current and former staff started sounding the alarm.
Around that moment, two former employees reconnected by phone. Just as they answered, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” the other former employee recalls. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”
Palantir was launched—with initial venture capital from the CIA—during a period of national unity after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when confronting terrorism abroad was widely viewed as the country’s most urgent task. The company, cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that functions as a powerful data-aggregation and analysis tool, powering everything from private-sector operations to the US military’s targeting systems.
For the past 20 years, employees accepted intense outside criticism and awkward conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens ties with an administration many workers fear is causing harm at home, employees are finally voicing those concerns internally, as the US’s campaign against immigrants, the war with Iran, and even company-released manifestos have forced them to reconsider the role they play.
“We hire the best and brightest talent to help defend America and its allies and to build and deploy our software to help governments and businesses around the world. Palantir is no monolith of belief, nor should we be,” a Palantir spokesperson said in a statement. “We take pride in a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex areas we work on. That has been true since our founding and remains true today.”
