Palantir’s Rise Under Trump: Surveillance, War Profits, and the Architecture of Power
Palantir Technologies is not a typical tech company. Founded with seed funding from In-Q-Tel—the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency—it has operated since its inception at the intersection of national security, artificial intelligence, and state power. Its origins are deeply embedded in the post-9/11 surveillance infrastructure, and its growth trajectory has been consistently tied to U.S. military and intelligence contracts. Since Donald Trump returned to office, Palantir’s stock price has nearly doubled—from 70.90pershareto70.90pershareto133.17 as of June 3—driven by a surge in government contracts that expand its role in domestic surveillance, immigration enforcement, and battlefield intelligence.
This expansion is not incidental. It reflects a deliberate alignment between Palantir’s capabilities and the priorities of successive U.S. administrations—Republican and Democratic alike—that increasingly rely on private data analytics firms to execute core functions of governance, warfare, and social control. The company’s ascent reveals how institutional power now flows through opaque corporate channels, often bypassing public scrutiny, democratic oversight, and constitutional constraints.
Origins in the Intelligence State
Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. From the start, it was designed to serve the U.S. intelligence community. In-Q-Tel’s early investment—reportedly giving it at least a 10% stake by 2008—established Palantir as an extension of the CIA’s technological ambitions. Journalist Mark Bowden later described Palantir as the “killer app” that realized the vision of John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a post-9/11 Pentagon initiative that sought to collect and analyze all available data on individuals to predict terrorist activity. Though TIA was officially shut down in 2003 due to public backlash over privacy violations, its core logic lived on through Palantir.
The company’s two flagship platforms—Gotham and Foundry—are named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. These systems ingest massive volumes of structured and unstructured data—license plate scans, financial records, satellite imagery, social media posts, biometric identifiers—and use AI to detect patterns, connections, and anomalies invisible to human analysts. Gotham was built for defense and intelligence agencies; Foundry for civilian institutions like health departments and city governments. Both enable what Palantir calls “operationalizing data”—turning information into actionable decisions, often in real time.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palantir became indispensable to U.S. military operations. Its software helped identify insurgent networks, track IED placements, and coordinate drone strikes. By 2013, it was working with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center to build a statewide license plate tracking database. That same year, the New Orleans Police Department launched a predictive policing program with Palantir, which critics argue led to racial profiling by targeting neighborhoods based on historical arrest data rather than actual crime trends.
Political Duality: Karp vs. Thiel
Palantir’s leadership presents a paradox. CEO Alex Karp, a self-described “progressive warrior,” holds a doctorate in neoclassical social theory from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, studied under Jürgen Habermas, and grew up attending political protests with his hippie parents. He has donated heavily to Democratic causes, including $360,000 to Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign before shifting support to Kamala Harris. Harris’s ties to Palantir date back to her tenure as California Attorney General, when her office partnered with the company to build a statewide law enforcement database.
In contrast, co-founder Peter Thiel is a staunch libertarian and one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most influential backers in Silicon Valley. He bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign with over $15 million, introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and helped rehabilitate Vance’s image after his “Never Trump” past. Thiel also played a key role in Facebook’s rise—often called “the CIA’s wet dream” because users voluntarily upload personal data that can be mined for intelligence purposes. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, was reportedly recruited by the CIA at age 16 after being arrested by the FBI for hacking military and corporate systems.
Despite their ideological differences, Karp and Thiel converge on a shared worldview: the belief that Western civilization must be defended through technological superiority and assertive state power. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in December 2023, Karp denounced corporate America for failing to confront what he called “anti-American” forces on elite campuses, framing cultural dissent as a threat to national survival. He praised Israel for “building a nation from a desert”—a statement that erases the 1948 Nakba, during which over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. This rhetoric aligns with a broader narrative of Western exceptionalism that justifies military intervention, surveillance, and the subordination of civil liberties to security imperatives.
Karp has openly stated Palantir’s mission is to “defend the West” and “scare the f-ck out of our enemies.” Such language, coming from a major Democratic donor, underscores how both major U.S. parties now embrace a security state logic once confined to neoconservative circles.
Contracts, Profits, and the Trump Surge
Since Trump’s return to office, Palantir has secured nearly 1 billion in new government contracts. A significant portion comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which awarded the company a 1 billion in new government contracts. A significant portion comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which a warded the company a 30 million deal to build a real-time platform tracking migrant movements across the U.S. border. Simultaneously, the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—staffed with numerous former Palantir employees is using the company’s technology to construct a centralized immigration database aimed at accelerating deportations.
These developments mark a continuation, not a departure, from prior administrations. During Trump’s first term, Palantir won billions in military contracts, including an $800 million Pentagon deal to develop a battlefield-intelligence system. Under Biden, the company managed vaccine distribution for the CDC during the pandemic and held talks with the Social Security Administration and Department of Education about organizing their data systems. Palantir’s reach extends beyond federal agencies: it works with local police departments, state governments, and allied militaries.
The result is staggering financial growth. Palantir’s market valuation has soared from 50billionayearagotonearly50billionayearagotonearly300 billion—surpassing Verizon and Disney, and approaching Bank of America. A company once known only within national security and tech circles is now a dominant force in global finance and geopolitics.
Global Warfare and AI Targeting
Palantir’s software plays a decisive role in active war zones. In Ukraine, it has become a critical enabler of Kyiv’s military strategy. According to Time magazine, Palantir helped Ukraine establish a rapid “find, track, target, and prosecute” cycle by integrating satellite imagery, drone feeds, and ground intelligence into a unified operational picture. CEO Alex Karp visited Kyiv in June 2022 and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov. Karp later boasted that Palantir was responsible for “most of the targeting” in Ukraine—a claim that positions the company not as a passive vendor but as an active participant in combat operations.
Similarly, Palantir’s AI systems are used by the Israeli Air Force to select targets in Gaza. Investigative journalist James Bamford described the company’s technology as “the digital equivalent of weapons of mass destruction,” noting how it processes vast datasets to identify individuals or locations for strike. This involvement places Palantir at the center of ongoing allegations of war crimes and collective punishment in Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble based on algorithmic assessments.
The ethical implications are profound. When private corporations provide the targeting logic for lethal operations, accountability evaporates. There is no public record of how Palantir’s algorithms weigh evidence, what data sources they prioritize, or whether they incorporate safeguards against civilian harm. Yet these systems directly influence who lives and who dies.
Domestic Expansion and the Police State
Inside the United States, Palantir is helping build what investor Paul Graham called “the infrastructure of the police state.” Beyond ICE and DOGE, the company has contracts with multiple law enforcement agencies. Its predictive policing tools, though marketed as neutral and data-driven, replicate and amplify existing biases. In New Orleans, the system disproportionately flagged Black and low-income communities for heightened surveillance, reinforcing cycles of over-policing.
Palantir denies building products that violate constitutional rights, but its business model depends on access to sensitive personal data—often without warrants, transparency, or judicial oversight. When Graham challenged a Palantir executive on X (formerly Twitter) to commit publicly to refusing unconstitutional contracts, the company did not respond.
The hiring of Mike Gallagher in August 2024 signals further militarization. The former Republican congressman from Wisconsin, known for his hawkish stance on China, chaired McCarthy-style hearings promoting alarmism about Beijing. With a Marine Corps intelligence background, Gallagher now leads Palantir’s defense strategy, focusing on expanding its role in the Army’s TITAN program—which links ground units to space-based sensors—and growing its space and AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) portfolios. Gallagher has declared that Palantir is “unapologetic in its defense of the West” and believes “America is a force for good… worth defending against our enemies.”
This language mirrors Karp’s rhetoric, revealing a unified corporate ideology that transcends partisan labels. Whether serving Democratic or Republican administrations, Palantir advances a vision of governance rooted in surveillance, preemption, and technological dominance.
Historical Continuities and Colonial Logic
Palantir’s worldview draws from older imperial traditions. Karp’s praise for Israel “building a nation from a desert” echoes the settler-colonial myth of terra nullius—the false notion that colonized lands were empty and unused. This erasure of Indigenous presence justified displacement in North America, Palestine, and elsewhere. Similarly, Palantir’s framing of AI as a tool to “defend the West” assumes a civilizational hierarchy where non-Western actors are inherently threatening and must be monitored, contained, or eliminated.
This mindset aligns with the era of social Darwinism, formal colonialism, and eugenics—ideologies that claimed scientific legitimacy while enabling mass violence. Today, that logic is repackaged in algorithmic form, making it appear objective and inevitable. But algorithms are not neutral; they reflect the values, assumptions, and incentives of their creators. When those creators believe in Western superiority and view dissent as treason, the resulting systems will enforce conformity through exclusion, punishment, and erasure.
Calls for Accountability
Concerns about Palantir are not new. In 2018, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jesús “Chuy” García wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging an investigation before Palantir went public. They highlighted the lack of transparency around In-Q-Tel’s ownership stake and the company’s history of working with intelligence agencies on classified programs. Their letter warned that Palantir’s business model posed systemic risks to privacy, civil liberties, and democratic accountability.
Former employees have also spoken out. Some express regret over the company’s deepening ties to the Trump administration and its role in lethal operations. One NPR report cited Karp jokingly suggesting that Wall Street analysts who criticized the company should be “sprayed with light fentanyl-laced urine”—a remark that, while flippant, reveals a culture of contempt for external scrutiny.
Internationally, Palantir’s expansion raises alarms. In 2023, CovertAction Magazine exposed its operations in Lithuania, where it supports a right-wing government known for arresting journalists and bloggers critical of its policies. Lithuania sits on the front lines of the Ukraine conflict, making it a strategic node for NATO intelligence sharing—and a testing ground for Palantir’s surveillance tools.
Conclusion: The Unchecked Power of the Data Leviathan
Palantir’s rise under Trump is not an anomaly. It is the logical outcome of decades of policy choices that privatized state functions, normalized mass surveillance, and equated security with control. The company thrives because both major parties accept its premise: that safety requires surrendering privacy, that efficiency demands centralization, and that democracy must yield to expertise—especially when that expertise is cloaked in algorithms and sold as patriotism.
What makes Palantir dangerous is not just its technology, but its position at the nexus of capital, intelligence, and political influence. It answers to shareholders, not citizens. Its contracts are negotiated in secret. Its algorithms operate as black boxes. And its leaders—whether donating to Biden or advising Trump—share a conviction that the West must dominate, by any means necessary.
This is not conspiracy. It is architecture. And unless it is dismantled through legislative action, public pressure, and institutional resistance, it will continue to shape a future where freedom is conditional, dissent is suspect, and truth is whatever the data says it is.
The urgent need now is not just for investigation—but for prohibition. Certain powers should not be outsourced. Certain data should not be collected. Certain weapons—digital or otherwise—should never be built. Palantir has crossed those lines. The question is whether the public will force it back.