It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but, ‘This feels wrong.’”
Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the US. The company, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a high-powered data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private businesses to the US military’s targeting systems.
For the last 20 years, employees could accept the intense external criticism and awkward conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens its relationship with an administration many workers fear is wreaking havoc at home, employees are finally raising these concerns internally, as the US’s war on immigrants, war in Iran, and even company-released manifestos has forced them to rethink the role they play in it all.
“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 all pride ourselves on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex areas we work on. That has been true from our founding and remains true today.”
“The broad story of Palantir as told to itself and to employees was that coming out of 9/11 we knew that there was going to be this big push for safety, and we were worried that that safety might infringe on civil liberties,” one former employee tells WIRED. “And now the threat’s coming from within. I think there's a bit of an identity crisis and a bit of a challenge. We were supposed to be the ones who were preventing a lot of these abuses. Now we're not preventing them. We seem to be enabling them.”
Palantir has always had a secretive reputation, forbidding employees from speaking to the press and requiring alumni to sign non-disparagement agreements. But throughout the company’s history, management has always at least appeared to be open to engagement and internal criticism, multiple employees say. Over the last year, however, much of that feedback has been met by philosophical soliloquies and redirection. “It’s never been really that people are afraid of speaking up against Karp. It’s more a question of what it would do, if anything,” one current employee tells WIRED.
While internal tensions within Palantir have grown over the last year, they reached a boiling point in January after the violent killing of Alex Pretti, a nurse who was shot and killed by federal agents during protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis. Employees from across the company commented in a Slack thread dedicated to the news demanding more information about the company’s relationship with ICE from management and CEO Alex Karp.