With the intensification of overseas conflicts, the Palo Alto-founded data company Palantir’s work has come under increased scrutiny for its rapidly expanding digital work with the military-industrial complex.
Now based in Denver, the company builds software platforms that analyze large amounts of raw data to detect patterns, trends and anomalies, and is known for its connection to the United States government.
Linda Xia, a former Palantir engineer who worked on the commercial side of operations, said the company’s primary niche is helping clients process information quickly.
“In simple terms, you can think of it as a collection of apps that allow you to do the whole end-to-end process of ingesting data in raw form, doing any transformations, creating objects that you can work with in non-code ways,” Xia said. “And then you can build workflows on top of that. Their overall goal is to make it easier for companies to build workflows off their data and operationalize it.”
Xia said one major misconception is Palantir gathers its own data. On the contrary, Xia said Palantir’s clients provide them with all of their information.
“Palantir has no data of its own,” Xia said. “Anything is what the client brings with them. There are lots of spreadsheets, your Excel files, your CSV and JSON. In the military and other applications, you might have more images and PDFs.”
Xia also said the type of work Palantir does depends on its clients’ needs, pointing to her experience with a solar company as an example.
“I worked with a solar company, and they had a lot of time series data, like is energy flowing through the inverter? And then you might compare that with weather data, like is the sun out? Because if the sun isn’t out, and there’s no energy coming through, we don’t care,” Xia said.
Xia said another unique aspect of Palantir is its collaboration with a broad variety of businesses in diverse industries.
“There’s a huge range of companies that use Palantir, and some famous ones,” Xia said. “PG&E in California uses it for wildfire management. A bunch of hospitals use it for patient processing and screening.”
But Xia said Palantir’s most well-known work revolves around its ties to the United States government.
“Obviously, there are the Department of Defense, ICE and other government agencies,” Xia said.
And it’s Palantir’s links to the government that have garnered the most negative attention, Xia said.
“Palantir doesn’t have the best reputation in the world of people who know about it,” Xia said. “A lot of these companies, especially on the commercial side, think it’s easier to not talk about the partnership.”
Xia said the company’s governmental work can vary, but one aspect is tracing relationships using large sets of data.
“You can build relationship maps between people, and places, and anything else you can think of, using whatever data you have: police reports, cell phone records, et cetera, and use that data to identify associates or suspects,” Xia said. “And there are a lot of ways you can do this badly. Let’s say I’m a known terrorist, and we’re connected because we’re on this call together. There’s also a police report saying I once crashed my car into your bike, and from cell tower data it seems we’re often in the same neighborhood at the same time. Does that make you my accomplice?”
Despite some people’s concerns, junior Arman Aditya Basu said he sees Palantir’s work as a necessary part of national defense.
“I think that we need a strong America with a strong military capable of defending the country,” Basu said. “And I think there needs to be investment and advancement in military tech.”
But Palantir’s partnerships don’t only exist with businesses or the government. Some universities also have links to the company, including Stanford.
According to John, a pseudonym for an undergraduate student at Stanford who requested to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, Palantir’s ties with Stanford have provoked backlash. In January, students and faculty staged a walkout to protest the university’s investment in the company.
John is a member of one of the student activist groups who coordinated the walkout against Palantir and said there are pipelines within the university that target students as potential recruits for defense companies like Palantir.
In fact, he said he was seen as a good candidate.
“A lot of people assume that because of my background that I’m with the program,” John said. “To the extent that last summer, I researched on campus and the (lead researcher) of my lab was close with this guy that managed some part of another big lab. And he introduced me to that guy as like, ‘Hey, this is John. He was in the Army. And the next day that guy took me. I think he wanted me to spiel about how much I love the work they were doing, which was drone research. But I was pretty closed off.”
So why would someone want to work with a company like Palantir? John said patriotism can function as a moral justification, along with the desire for money and professional success.
“There is this cover that patriotism gives you for working at places like this, and obviously the money and wanting to be successful,” John said. “And also a sense of detachment from the killing, which is ironic, because Palantir is now removing those barriers.”
Indeed, Xia also said Palantir has started to publicly embrace its governmental work.
“Microsoft has a crazy number of government contracts,” Xia said. “Google also does it. Every tech company has. It’s just that Palantir has decided to make a brand around that, of being very vocal and obvious about it.”
Xia said Palantir also emphasizes its selective nature to its employees.
“There are people who deeply believe the work they’re doing is life-changing, and they are the only people who can do it, which is, again, part of the culture,” Xia said. “They want you to feel special.”
Basu said he views that employee-driven ethic positively, even while acknowledging the company’s controversies.
“I’ve heard they’re pretty patriotic as a company,” he said. “And I can respect that sentiment. There’s a lot of controversy that Palantir has, but from what I hear about it, it’s not as bad as what people say. And I heard they try to make their employees feel special and like they’re doing important work. I feel like that’s kind of a nice feeling to have, that you’re doing something that’s for the good of the country.”
And while Palantir’s attitude towards its workers has shifted, so have attitudes towards working at Palantir.
“More people are openly talking about interning there,” John said. “Last year, when I transferred to Stanford, it was more taboo to talk about it. I overheard someone talking about working for Palantir, and a guy next to them was like, ‘Dude, shut up’. And now, it’s a lot more open than it was even just a year ago.”
Part of that may be due to a more pragmatic, monetary-driven desire to work at companies like Palantir. John said that this desire is especially prevalent at Stanford.
“You come to a school like this, and most people that go into computer science want to make money, and that extends to most engineering,” John said. “But the tech industry is bottoming out right now, while government contracts and defense are always there. People still want to work at Google-style campuses and make a bunch of money, and that’s just at the defense companies now.”
Xia said that Palantir itself also operates on a mindset of making money at any cost.
“Despite all the ideological crap Palantir likes to shovel, it’s a company in a very capitalist country, in a very tech-friendly country, and it’s going to do whatever it needs to do to survive,” Xia said. “So that means cozying up to the Trump administration, firing people, hiring a bunch of new grads, firing all the new grads. At the end of the day, what’s most important is what keeps making them money.”
But despite Palantir’s increasing efforts towards cementing itself as a legitimate fixture in the tech world and on Stanford’s campus, it has encountered some resistance such as the protest, John said.
“There’s a ton of apathy on campus,” John said. “That’s the issue with school: People rotate out. Every year you have a new batch of people desensitized to stuff like this. The protests worked, but we have to keep doing them to show the new admits here the reputation these companies deserve.”
Some people may even justify joining Palantir to try to change them from within, a notion John said is naive.
“Another thing people tell themselves is that to change the system, you have to work within the bounds of the system,” John said. “So if they want to change these defense companies, they have to get hired, get promoted and then start instituting changes. It’s like you don’t realize how much of a machine these companies are and how much they can operate without you. It’s just another tech company.”
Palantir did not respond to requests for an interview.
